Goodbye (for now)

A little holiday for me and some exciting new changes!

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It’s spring. There are mulberries falling off our tree with soft thuds every few minutes. Our little boy has taken to demanding them each morning. He doesn’t eat them - he cups them in his small hands and carries them around the place, guarding them like tiny, precious jewels. The ranunculi are flowering amid masses of salvias, the mustard greens have done their obnoxious thing, taking over half the garden and bursting raucously into a yellow explosion of flowers. The sweet peas on the front fence are blooming and stressing me the fuck out because I keep forgetting to pick them before their seed pods start forming. Must go and do that again soon, actually.

And just a few days ago I had one of the nicest days ever. And it wasn’t noteworthy, and almost nothing really happened. It was a weekend. The sun was out. Our son played in his sandpit, we filled up his kiddy pool, at some point we went to the beach, came home, drank coffees perched on stumps of wood in the garden. I sat in a sunny patch of morning light. We took apart an old bee hotel and I started turning it into a miniature dolls house. It was such a glorious, unremarkable day, and it left me searching for the secret ingredient that made it so blissfully, simply happy.

Turns out I wasn’t working. And I wasn’t on my phone.

I’m really bad at remembering to save time in my life for days like those. I’m really bad at moving slowly, taking my time. I get a giddy, euphoric rush from feeling like I’ve been productive, got shit done, made progress. But progress on what? What exactly (I wondered from the sunlit kitchen floor) am I striving - exhaustedly - towards?

I love writing, I love talking about gardening. It is genuinely the best feeling when someone tells me that they have had success in their garden following some of my advice. But I’ve realised recently that the business I’ve created for myself over the last few years is one that - whoops - I forgot to factor any actual holidays into.

I write two newsletters each week, I have a weekly deadline for my gardening newspaper column, I take workshops, and I know that probably doesn’t sound like that much, but I have been doing it for going nearly 3 years without a proper break. And I sort of had a 6 week ‘holiday’ when our son was born. But anyone who’s had a baby knows that nothing about those first 6 weeks (or the 12 months that follow) can really be described as a holiday.

I need a little holiday.

So I’ve decided to change things up this spring. Drawing inspiration from one of my favourite writers on Substack,

Brooke McAlary

, I’ve decided to set my writing schedule by the school year, and to take breaks during the school holidays.

What’s more, I know that many of you are parents, and if you have school aged kids, I suspect that finding time to do much of anything during the school holidays (let alone keeping up with my newsletter) is an added challenge you don’t need. I don’t want my emails to pile up and start to feel burdensome. I’d like them to feel like a little happy treat!

Our garden this spring

I also think just a few weeks off after every term is what I desperately need - to get inspired, to have more creative ideas, to come back a better writer with more to offer you. Plus time to garden. And to enjoy the sunshine. And my family. And a healthy reminder to ignore the desperate bleating of my damn phone.

It also means I can give each term a new theme! (Let’s be honest this may be the primary motivator for all these changes).

So, even though our son is by no means school aged, I will be taking a break over the next two weeks and will be back in your inbox on October 14th, for the start of term 4, the beginning of summer - of hot, hazy days, of ice cream dripping down sunburnt wrists, sand stuck to sunscreen slicked legs, mangoes, barbecues, zinnias blooming, artichokes softly wilting in the midday sun, sprinklers throwing their arms over soaking lawns, bright mornings and slow evenings. There will be summer recipes for you to cook from your garden, plant lists for things you can grow that will handle the heat, tips to make gardening lazier and more fun, summer projects to try and garden cocktails to shake, and pour over glasses full of ice.

Our summers are hot, our soils are sandy, and so - fittingly - our theme for term 4 is The Desert. It will be sultry. It will be lazy. It will be festive, and bright and blooming and delicious. It will be - just a little bit - slower, warmer and more restful.

And perhaps, this newsletter will, at long last, be deserving of its name: Lo fi life.

See you very soon,

Xx Casey

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