Barbara Richardson's Reviews > A Bushel's Worth: An Ecobiography

Kayann Short tells the volunteers picking (and eating) radishes on her ten-acre CSA farm, "Fresh is a flavor. This is what fresh tastes like." "A Bushel's Worth," her ecobiography of life at Stonebridge Farm, seems particularly poignant now, as floods and mud have destroyed the town of Lyons just a few miles east. But a 1,000-year Colorado flood can't erase community. And Stonebridge is all about community—community seeding, weeding, harvesting and celebrating. I have no doubt the author's CSA members will pull together to survive this flood. To quote Short, farming is "the work that generates life."

Short reminds us that "desecration leads to resurrection. All matter is reshaped into another form." And, also of comfort to the flood-drenched people of Colorado, "the earth has its own sense of time, one measured by rotations rather than devices."

Turn off your devices. Forget about speed. Relax, settle in, and pick up "A Bushel's Worth." The sanity of the earth turns the pages. You'll meet time-honored farming techniques, learn the lay of the land, recall the logic of the seasons, and even peruse a few family recipes. Tradition fuels the book. "More than a decade after my grandparents' deaths, the porch still smelled like milk." Striking. Touching. The mud porch where her grandfather had separated the cream from his milking, all those years.

The work that generates life, is that the work you choose to do? Short shows many challenging, beautiful instances of just that. Her book is a call to remember and revere the earth that sustains and creates us.