Growing Perennial Foods: A Field Guide to Raising Resilient Herbs, Fruits, and Vegetables by Acadia Tucker

Recipient of the GardenComm Emergent Communicator Award for 2023: Acadia Tucker

Acadia Tucker's long love affair with perennial foods has produced this easy-to-understand guide to growing, harvesting, and eating them.

A regenerative farmer and gardener deeply concerned about global warming, Acadia Tucker believes there may be no better time to plant perennials. Sturdy and deep-rooted, perennials can weather climate extremes more easily than annuals. They can thrive without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. And they don't need as much water, either. These long-lived plants also help build healthy soil, turning the very ground we stand on into a carbon sponge.

In this book, Tucker lays the groundwork for tending an organic, sustainable garden. She includes practical growing guides for 34 popular perennials, among them, basil, blueberries, grapes, strawberries, artichokes, asparagus, garlic, radicchio, spinach, and sweet potatoes, and wraps in a recipe for each of the plants profiled.

Growing Perennial Foods is for gardeners who want more resilient plants. It's for people who want to do something about climate change, and the environment. It's for anyone who has ever wanted to grow food, and is ready to begin.

Acadia Tuckers 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.