I love reading books about people who work the land for a living -- particularly those who have forsaken city life for a "taste of the way life used to be." I'm not sure why I have the fascination as I'm pretty sure this type of life wouldn't suit me at all! Yes, I love raising my chickens, but my basil plants are already dead this year due to lack of attention, and I don't even pretend to plant a garden any more.

This book is an enjoyable little romp through farm life, with quite a bit of depth and honesty about what happens in a relationship when one person's life-long dream is at odds with his or her partner's.
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Enjoyed the book quite a bit. Story of 2 lesbians who leave the city for a sheep farm. One of the ladies would rather read and write than have anything to do with sheep and this is a dream come true for the other. Aside from some very funny bits that are hugely entertaining, the story is also very interesting when it details how this farm has changed their relationship, their individual health, their careers, etc. It certainly isn't a topic you see everyday, and that's part of what made this book enjoyable. ( )

Tore through this. Farming bootcamp is no joke. But choosing to go through it results in many funny stories. I don't want a flock of sheep but I would like a llama to guard them. ( )

Eh. It was good? And it grabbed me because of the short chapters, even though one of the things I didn't like were the short chapters. ( )

Catherine Friend was a decently successful children's book author with two books and a handful of magazine articles published, when her longtime partner Melissa announced that she wanted to use the money she'd inherited from her namesake to buy a farm. The two women, then in their late thirties, bought a 53-acre parcel with erosion problems and no structures, built a house, planted a one-acre vineyard, and populated the remainder with two goats, a handful of laying hens, a chicken tractor full of broilers, fifty sheep, and a guard llama.

Over the course of the next rocky four years Catherine and Melissa would learn the hard way what their books and classes had omitted about farming – lambing complications, tractor accidents, coyotes, livestock stubbornness, veterinary medicine overdoses, the realities of breeding, and the difficulty of taking your first homegrown animals to slaughter – all while dealing with Catherine's anxiety and Melissa's undiagnosed chemical imbalance.

They have to learn what all livestock farmers have to learn: the zen-like concept that all the little lives you have under your care are transitory; that you must make their lives happy and carefree even though they may be short, and that you must fully appreciate them even though you will be responsible for their death as much as their birth. But they also have to learn how to live with each other while caring for all these other lives – how to maintain or modify their pre-farm roles without Catherine losing her writing career or Melissa working herself to death.

I tore through this book in a day. It has what you really want from a farming memoir (or any memoir, really): ups and downs both poignant and hilarious featuring people with whom you can easily identify and, best of all, a happy ending (the farm and the couple are still holding up ten years later). And it didn't put me off the idea of having my own sheep someday. ( )