Wedge shoppers often talk about that moment while eating organic broccoli, sweet corn or kale when they are struck by how incredibly delicious the vegetable tastes. It is as if they are tasting it for the first time. In Atina Diffley's new book, Turn Here Sweet Corn, we learn what it takes to produce such a vegetable: hard work, love of the land, a capacity for taking risks and the joys (and pains) of a farm family.

Read from one perspective, the book is a chronicle of Atina's life so far. It is a portrait of a farm girl with a fierce independent streak, who longs to get away but also longs to farm. As an adventurous young woman, she leaves home, pursues music, marries unhappily, has a child, divorces, gets introduced to the world of food co-ops, falls in love and begins an interesting, challenging life raising organic food with her husband, Martin Diffley. Throughout, she draws on the strength of her roots, and nurturing those roots becomes a metaphor that sustains her story.

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