Growing Good Food
Growing Good Food
This beginner’s guide to growing your own herbs, fruits, and vegetables is for home gardeners who want to raise food on their own patch of soil—all while cultivating a microbe-rich, carbon-sucking, regenerative food scape.
To help us get started, Acadia Tucker, a regenerative gardener and climate activist, drafts plans for gardeners who have a little ground or a lot of it. She offers advice on:
How to prep and clear land without herbicides
Cultivate healthy soil
Plant food from seeds and starts
Fend off pests and disease organically
Grow 21 popular perennials and annuals, including fruit trees, herbs, strawberries, peppers, tomatoes, cabbage, carrots, garlic, beans, peas, and potatoes.
Tucker also describes the climate changes taking place in our own backyards, and the various steps we can take to boost a garden’s resilience. She invites us to think of gardening as civic action. By building organically-rich soil, even in a backyard, we can capture greenhouse gases in the very place we’re growing nutritious food.
Growing Good Food includes calls to action and insights from leaders in the regenerative growing movement, including David Montgomery, Anne Biklé, Gabe Brown, Wendell Berry and Mary Berry, and Tim LaSalle. By the end of this book, you'll know how to grow some really good food, and build a healthier world, too.
ISBN: 9780998862330 (paperback); Pages: 168; Size: 6 x 9
PRAISE & PRESS
“Acadia Tucker's books are both beautiful and practical. With the approachable but extensive blueprint that she provides, you can't help but be immediately empowered and inspired to join the carbon gardening movement.”
— Annie Martin, KISS THE GROUND
I love this book. Growing Good Food is great for beginner gardeners who care about the climate.
—Lucy Biggers, Now This Media
Acadia's books are wonderful, timely, and elucidate the simple and the complex beautifully. I especially love the call to action of the climate victory garden.
We are at a time in human history where we all must get involved to reclaim our food supply and halt climate chaos, and these guides are an inviting how-to. Brava!
— Ave Lambert, Director of Education, CUESA
Acadia Tucker’s new book shows what it takes for beginners to throw themselves into regenerative agriculture.
- Lindsay Campbell, Modern Farmer
Growing Good Food is both a narrative about our challenging climate change and a plant by plant reference guide to make your own garden a backyard carbon farm.
I've been inspired to start sheet mulching my entire yard and now think about ways to help keep carbon in the ground longer.
— Scott Vanderlip, Slow Food
Our books featured as raffle prizes at Slow Food Chicago’s annual meeting.
The book is easy to follow, entertaining, and informative. It offers hope and solutions for our climate crisis. It’s perfect for anyone with a backyard who cares about our environment.
—Cheryl Spencer, Simply Smart Gardening
Listen to I Eat Green radio host and food activist, Bhavani Jaroff, talk to Acadia about her start in regenerative agriculture, the science behind carbon farming, and how individuals can make collective change by cultivating our own patches of soil.
Working as a farmer from Washington State to New Hampshire, Tucker has seen radical, unpredicted shifts in climate that decimated sensitive annual crops but spared perennials. She has also seen the difference it makes to those crops when soil contains an abundance of organic material vs traditionally farmed soil which doesn’t. It’s fascinating to read.
— Todd Heft, Big Blog of Gardening
This is a great choice for eco-conscious gardeners looking for some inspiration. The book views regenerative gardening as a form of civic action to combat climate change. Get planning for next season with the book’s guides on soil, compost, and growing 21 different crops.
—The Modern Farmer’s gift guide
In this well-informed and educational call to action, Acadia Tucker set out to simplify regenerative gardening so that anyone can do it. She succeeds!
— Jes Walton, Food Campaigns Manager, Green America
This book is an introduction to the larger conversation of how to make a difference on this planet with one’s own land. I recommend it to every gardener.
—Peggy Riccio, Making a difference: climate victory gardens
Acadia’s farm dog, Nimbus, is also passionate about regenerative food production!
Growing Good Food is about working where we are, on a small scale, to improve the health of the land. Acadia Tucker tells us that what we do matters and if we have access to any piece of ground we can start addressing climate change. My father, Wendell Berry, says that this kind of work is radical now, when public attention is focused on global solutions. This work is what people are for.
— Mary Berry, Executive Director, The Berry Center, New Castle, Kentucky
A nuts and bolts guide about how to start regenerative food growing practices. It clearly explains the science behind how soil stores carbon and how to do it in your own backyard. An important read for any backyard grower who wants to make a positive impact on the climate in their own patch of dirt.
— Robyn Rosenfeldt, Founding Editor, Pip Permaculture Magazine
I’m obsessed with this book already, I might sell everything and buy a farm.
—Brittany Yu, Branch on Bowen bookstore
If you ask me, participating in the mystery of the world is a pretty solid reason for getting your hands dirty. But if a philosophical reason like that doesn’t cut it for you, there’s always fresher, healthier and better tasting food, and the opportunity to turn your yard into giant carbon sink. This is the perfect guidebook to help you get started on that task.
— Meribeth Deen, Bowen Island Undercurrent
“All of my books are written with the beginner in mind,” Acadia says. “The goal of these books is to motivate and empower people to be like: ‘You know what? I can do this too, and I want to do this.’”
—Acadia Tucker, from an interview with Joe the Gardener
A U T H O R & I L L U S T R A T O R
Acadia Tucker is a regenerative grower, climate activist, and author. Her books are a call to action for citizen gardeners everywhere and lay the groundwork for planting an organic, regenerative garden. For her, this is gardening, as if our future depends on it.
Before becoming an author, Acadia started a four-season organic market garden in Washington State inspired by farming pioneers Eliot Coleman and Jean-Martin Fortier. While managing the farm, Acadia grew 200 food crops before returning to school at the University of British Columbia to complete a Master's in Land and Water Systems.
Since moving back to her home State of Maine, Acadia has grown hops to support locally sourced craft beer in New England and cultivated sugar kelp in the cold waters of Frenchman Bay. She works as a Product Review Coordinator for the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI). Acadia is a Rodale Institute Ambassador for regenerative agriculture and has been recognized as the 2023 Emergent Communicator from Garden Communicators International.
In her free time, she grows food in her backyard with the help of her farm dogs, Nimbus and Pico, and a flock of runner ducks. She is also the author of Growing Perennial Foods: A field guide to raising resilient herbs, fruits, & vegetables and Tiny Victory Gardens: Growing food without a backyard.
Joe Wirtheim loves what he does: think, draw, make and do. It's his passion to communicate graphically and put creative ideas into action that drives him. He uses illustration, type, color and layout to excite the viewer's imagination. He turns these graphic ideas into quality goods, which, he’s proud to say, are made in the USA.
Since 2008, Joe Wirtheim has been making illustrations and designs at his Portland, Oregon studio, J. Wirtheim Design. This studio powers the Victory Garden of Tomorrow brand of posters and merchandise.
Design work from Wirtheim has been recognized by The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living Magazine, by Organic Gardening Magazine, by the Portland Art Museum, the Design Museum Boston, NBA's Portland Trail Blazers, among others.
Learn more at WirtheimDesign.com.
