How to PLanT your Own Victory Garden
“Planting a garden is a powerful act. It gives each of us, with access to a little dirt, the power to feed ourselves healthy food and do something about climate change.” - Acadia Tucker
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
“I love this book. Growing Good Food is great for beginner gardeners who care about the climate.”
— Lucy Biggers, Now This Media
“In this well-informed and educational call to action, Acadia Tucker set out to simplify regenerative gardening so that anyone can do it. She succeeded! With step-by-step instructions and chapters dedicated to your favorite veggies, readers will be inspired to grow food and save the planet, all from the comfort of your backyard.”
— Jes Walton, Food Campaigns Manager, Green America
“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
“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
A U T H O R & I L L U S T R A T O R
Acadia Tucker is a regenerative farmer, climate activist, and author. Her books are a call to action to 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 different food crops before heading back to school at the University of British Columbia to complete a Masters in Land and Water Systems.
She lives in Maine and New Hampshire with her farm dog, Nimbus, and grows hops to support locally sourced craft beer in New England, when she isn't raising perennials in her own backyard. 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.