Real Dirt is the true story of a sea-change, the life that led there, and what you have to go through to get where you want to be.

It took James Woodford a while to realise that the greasy pole of big-city ambition was not for him. To rediscover the environmentalist he'd aspired to be when he was young, and to get his family out of the city.

But eventually they made it: to the wildly beautiful south coast of New South Wales and a sustainable, self-sufficient, solar-powered lifestyle on 120 acres. No house? They'd build one. Land grazed down and eroding into the lake? Fix it up with some love and hard work...coax it to yield home-grown vegies...plant orchards, raise chooks...a humungous worm farm...How hard could it be?

'Tree changers might be a growing breed, but you'll be hard pressed to find one who describes in more poetic terms the first time he set eyes on what would become his very own patch of rural paradise...a candid and enlightening account.' Notebook