To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard

A love-letter to the unexpected delights (and occasional despair) of so-called "first-hand food"--meals we grow, forage, fish, or even hunt from the world around us. To Boldly Grow is "part memoir, part how-to guide and wholly delightful" (Washington Post).

When intrepid eater and self-described "crappy gardener" Tamar Haspel and her husband move from Manhattan to two wooded Cape Cod acres, they decide to adopt a more ac­tive approach to their diet--raising chickens, growing tomatoes, foraging for mushrooms, and hunting their own meat. They have more ambition than practical know-how, but that's not about to stop them.

As she ventures farther into first-hand food, Haspel learns to rely less on experts (after all, they can make anything grow) and more on her own ingenuity and creativity. Filled with practical tips and hard-won wisdom, To Boldly Grow brings us along with Haspel as she goes from cluelessness to competence, learning what foods the landscape has to offer and discovering that a direct connec­tion to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about our diet--and ourselves.

Author: Tamar Haspel
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 05/06/2025
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.68lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.50w x 0.62d
ISBN13: 9780593419557
ISBN10: 0593419553
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Memoirs
- Social Science | Agriculture & Food (see also Political Science | Public Poli
- Gardening | Techniques

About the Author
Tamar Haspel writes the James Beard Award-winning Washington Post column Unearthed, which tackles food from every angle: agriculture, nutrition, obesity, the food environment, and DIY. She's also written for Discover, National Geographic's The Plate, Vox, Slate, Eater, Fortune, and Edible Cape Cod.