A Time to Plant

In his moving debut book, America columnist Kyle Kramer recounts the sometimes-gritty story of how he came to experience the joys of real community through a journey of honest reckoning with his own ambitions. For Kramer, this story involves lots of dirt.

In the summer of 1999, Kramer, an earnest and high-achieving private school teacher in Atlanta, decided to forego a promising academic career. Instead, he heeded the voices of the unlikely prophets in his life and purchased a block of hardscrabble land in southern Indiana in order to start a small farm. Tending it back to health--one difficult lesson at a time--Kramer founded Genesis Organic Farm, built a self-sustaining and environmentally friendly home, and began to fully embrace the Benedictine traditions of physical labor, prayer, and hospitality. A Time to Plant is a deeply human story of one man's attempt to make simple living a reality as a spiritual discipline for himself, as a model for his children, and for the good of creation.