In 1990, we heard the wilderness call to us, and, God help us, we answered. Of course, we had no business trying to run a full-time ranch with no experience. People tried to tell us that The Simple Life wasn't so simple, but we weren t listening. If you're over 50, or in a job rut, or looking for adventure and you yearn for a tranquil country hideaway, please read this cautionary tale first.

Hang on for the ride: with characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it.

Like Anne Lamott, O'Reilley happens to be a hysterically funny storyteller who understands the importance of humility when writing spiritual autobiography. Whether she's talking about grief over dying lambs, the plague of Monkey Mind, flipping sheep, or a barnyard fashion crisis, O'Reilley keeps her metaphors down to earth and her epiphanies humble.

When Diane Josephy met Idaho state senator and rancher John Peavey in 1980, she hardly suspected that her urban existence would end when she married this third-generation rancher and lived in blissful isolation at the end of a 24-mile dirt road. This is a collection of short essays revealing humorous, heartwarming, and heartbreaking moments from her life on Flat Top Sheep Ranch.

When her 30 year marriage broke up, Sue Hubbell found herself alone and broke on a small Ozarks farm. Keeping bees, she found solace in the natural world. She began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things that she cared about. The result is one of the best-loved books ever written about life on the land, about a woman finding her way in middle age.

This is a poetic, noble, and often funny (see her discussion on the foreign concept of tofu) tribute to Dakota, including its Native Americans, Benedictine monks, ministers and churchgoers, wind-weathered farmers, and all its plain folks who live such complicated and simple lives.

Iris MacFarlane, a tea planter's wife, lived on a tea estate in Assam, India, for 20 years, and in the first chapter of this informative story of tea, she gives a moving account of her futile attempts to better the lives of the Assamese laborers, whom the British looked down upon as "irremediably inferior" to themselves.

For anyone who has ever grown herbs on their windowsill, tomatoes on their fire escape, or obsessed over the offerings at the local farmers’ market, Carpenter’s story will capture your heart.

In the sequel to Here and Nowhere Else, Brox ponders the recent death of her father, and reflects on her Lebanese and Italian heritage and the people who developed the farm in the Merrimack Valley of New England that she must now manage on her own.

Book 3. Tickle, PW's contributing editor in religion, finishes her Stories from the Farm in Lucy trilogy with grace, wit and keen spiritual observations. Following previous volumes on the sacred days of Advent and Lent, this one addresses the liturgical season after Pentecost, which the Christian church has traditionally given the modest label "ordinary time.

Farming had never been Friend's dream. But when her partner, Melissa, talks her into buying a 53 acre worn out farm she is suddenly in the sheep business. Two women raising sheep, chickens, goats and grapevines make a lively memoir.

This memoir by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and her brother paints a clear picture of the Southwest during the early to mid 20th century. Family life and the colorful characters who helped run the Lazy B ranch greatly influenced their lives. Growing up on the Gila River during the 1930-1940s, the children quickly learned about the desert's abundant and dangerous creatures and plants.

Kalish's memoir of her Iowa childhood, set against the backdrop of the Depression, captures a vanished way of traditional living and a specific moment in American history in a story both illuminating and memorable.

In 1945, Ruth Bigelow shared her private recipe tea with a friend. The friend in turn served it to a group of women who raved about it, and an American tea icon was born. Today, Bigelow Tea has expanded its product line far beyond its flagship Constant Comment Tea to include black teas, traditional teas, flavored teas, herbal teas, decaffeinated teas and organic teas.

In eight enjoyable anecdotal essays, Young offers a glimpse of the challenges and rewards of 20th-century pioneering life in North Dakota. In 1904, her Norwegian-born mother, Carrine Gafkjen, age 25, set out alone from Minnesota and staked a 160-acre claim; in those early days she walked five miles to a creek to wash her clothes and fetch drinking water.

Jordan grew up on a ranch in the Iron Mountain area of southeastern Wyoming. She presents a family album of memories about grandparents, parents, brothers, aunts, friends, and hired hands who had an influence on her life. The result is a no-holds-barred description of the joys and sorrows of ranch life, the hard economic times, the injuries and broken bones and the endurance required for survival.

Goldhammer, newly single and several tax brackets poorer, finds a fixer-upper house she can afford on the peninsula bordered by Boston Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean. Its salt pond and its possibilities intrigued her, but not her 12-year-old daughter who had to be bribed with six baby chicks.

A 21 year old NYC magazine intern meets a National Geographic photographer on assignment and wakes up married on a Texas farm in this satisfying and enjoyable story. They decide to grow children and fields of lavender on their limestone-rich land. They began a successful niche-industry, growing and processing lavender into a variety of marketable products.

The lives of a suddenly jobless corporate executive, a teacher navigating a difficult relationship with her daughter and a young lavender farmer intertwine in Cook's novel. The women begin taking daily walks and soon Rosemary "Rosie" Stockton, who owns her family's lavender farm, joins in. Despite their very different-yet all very prickly-personalities, the three women soon form a tight bond.

Book 2. Tickle pens a thoughtful, memoir-like second installment in her three-book "Stories from The Farm in Lucy" series based on the liturgical year. In these 14 Easter season essays, Tickle skillfully illustrates that the rhythm of the land and of the natural world are mirrored in Christian liturgy: "the intertwining of physical and spiritual seasons is virtually inevitable.