Lo fi Life

What is this newsletter about? Good question.

The word ‘Lo fi’ isn’t really to do with living at all.

It describes a genre of music in which the recording imperfections are a feature, not a bug. It’s deliberately unpolished, not too clean, rough-and-ready. An English analog of the Japanese term wabi sabi - the idea that a rare kind of beauty lurks in things that are imperfect, impermanent or incomplete. Transient, un-fancy, unpretentious beauty. 

This newsletter is about embracing that beauty. Relishing it.

Whether it be in your garden, in your kitchen or in your life, I hope Lo fi Life will help encourage you to give up on the fantasy of perfection, let your yard grow wild and free, cook things you like with ingredients that are fresh, embrace aphids, befriend caterpillars and put a truly obnoxious amount of garlic in your dinner. 

What you can expect as a subscriber

Free subscribers can preview portions of my paid newsletters, and will get the occasional full newsletter, including gardening inspiration, anecdotes, grow guides and the occasional recipe.

Paid subscribers get full access to all of my writing. Usually these newsletters take a deep dive into a range of gardening topics, with specific plants to grow, instructions for helpful gardening methods and sneak peeks at recipes from my cookbooks.

Whichever kind of membership you’d like, sign up below to grow a garden that is wild, edible and beautiful, and to find easy, plant-filled recipes that will make cooking feel fun and exciting again.

A bit more about me

I’m Casey. I’m a writer, gardener and cookbook author and I live in Perth, Western Australia. I have a PhD in psychology and write a weekly column for The Sunday Times celebrating West Australian gardens (Gardens of WA).

Over the last ten years, my partner and I have transformed our garden from an empty patch of dry couch grass into a wild and organic food forest, filled with fruit trees, flowers, vegetables and herbs. As our garden grew, so did my knowledge and my confidence in what I was doing. I realised so much of the gardening advice out there is dry, dull and overly prescriptive. It diminishes our experience of gardening by making it formulaic, confusing, stressful and full of rules.

I want to change that - to bring the joy back into gardening.

Gardening should be fun goddamn it!! Life should be fun.

I am passionate about demystifying the process of growing a garden (it’s really not that hard!), and helping others find the confidence and inspiration to grow gardens that are wild, exuberant and full of insects, birds and life.

I also love to cook with what I grow. My new cookbook, Seasoned, is a celebration of all the homegrown-veggie-packed dishes I’ve cooked from my garden. You can grab a copy here.

Thanks for following along. I really hope I can help you uncover (or rediscover!) the pleasures of grubby nails, of new buds blooming, bees buzzing and meals made with food freshly plucked from the earth.

xx Casey