Hello! I’m Casey and this is my newsletter, Lo fi life - an unpretentious, funny (I hope!) guide to turning a barren patch of desert-wasteland into a garden.
This is me, in my ex-desert-wasteland:
First up, I’m going to give you a very quick summary of how to find your way around my substack and what you’ll get as a subscriber. Then I’ll tell you a little bit about myself and my garden.
Finding your way around
Lo fi life is a newsletter to help your garden thrive. It is ideally suited to people growing gardens in Perth, Western Australia, because that’s where I’m based. But wherever you are gardening in the world, you’ll find something to inspire you and help improve your garden.
Community chat
Before you start browsing the full library of guides, head over to our community chat and say hi - it’s a lovely place to meet fellow gardeners and share stories!
Garden guides
You can browse the full archive of garden guides here.
Or you can head to the homepage and browse by topic, including:
Recipe index
If you are looking for inspiration for things to cook out of your garden, take a look at the recipe index here. You can browse all of my seasonal recipes by ingredient, and the library of recipes is always growing.
Subscribing to my newsletter
The best way to enjoy this newsletter is to join as a subscriber. Then you’ll automatically receive every new guide I create, the moment it comes out.
There are three ways to subscribe to Lo fi life
You can join as a free subscriber. You’ll get the odd full guide from me, sent direct to your inbox, and you’ll get a lot of sneak peeks and previews of the guides I send out to paying subscribers. I always make sure there is something helpful or interesting included for my free subscribers in everything I write, but I save the best, juiciest bits for my paying subscribers.
You can join as a paying subscriber, for $15/month or $95/year. You’ll get access to a tonne more of my guides, video tours from my garden and the odd recipe from my cookbook.
You can join as a member of my gardening club, The Wild Garden club, for $290/year. You’ll get access to absolutely everything I create and share about my garden - videos, guides, plant lists, seasonal recipes and our community chat where you can ask me all your gardening questions.
However you’d like to join, I’m so glad to have you here! You can pick your poison and subscribe by clicking the button below.
A bit about me
I’m a gardener, writer and cookbook maker and I live in Perth, Western Australia. If you’re not from ‘round here, you should know that the vast majority of Perth gardens are basically composed of beach sand, we are smashed by 40˚C heatwaves every summer and are currently (hopefully!) emerging from one of the worst droughts we’ve ever had. We also have strict quarantine laws for bringing in exotic or interesting plants, and an invasive ‘shot hole borer’ that has recently arrived from South east Asia and is intent on chewing through - and killing - a helluva lot of our old trees.
To be a gardener in Perth is, admittedly, a little insane.
And yet, I walk my dog through the streets of Perth and all I see are opportunities for beauty, wilderness and - most of all - happiness, in every front yard I spy. I can’t stop myself from imagining a future where we all have tree lined streets, gardens filled with flowers, vegetables and life, and a community of people throughout our state who really understand the value that plants bring to our lives and to our planet.
So, the goal of this newsletter is to bridge that gap. Because I know there are SO many people out there (not just in Perth but all over the world) who would love nothing more than to grow a gorgeous, thriving garden, but something is holding them back. Usually it’s one (or more) of the following:
All the plants you try to grow die
You are tired of waging a constant war against pests and diseases
You have an empty, blank canvas garden and zero idea HOW (or where) to start
You grew a nice garden through spring, then summer arrived and everything died
No matter what you do your crappy sandpit soil repels water
All the info you read about gardening is too basic/overly complicated/boring/trying to sell you stuff/written by people who don’t live in WA and just don’t get what it’s like to garden here
All that stuff, combined, makes gardening feel like boring, confusing, expensive, stress-inducing work. And that’s the worst part of all.
Gardening isn’t WORK. Gardening is wonderful. Everyone’s just been telling us how to do it wrong. Almost everything I read online about gardening somehow manages to take one of the most playful, creative activities and strip the fun out of it.
We could talk about how legitimately, weirdly calming it is to dig in a bed full of healthy, crumbling soil, uncovering earthworms while a willy wagtail keeps you company. But instead we are given “soil improvement schedules” and complicated recipes for ‘foliar feeds’ to spray onto the leaves of our confused plants.
We could talk about all the delicious lazy edible plants that thrive in Perth’s mild winters (hellooooo bananas, mangoes, lemongrass, parsley, wild rocket, and mulberries!), but instead we’re prompted to start veggie patches in the most complex, convoluted ways with the neediest and most hard-to-please veggies (tomatoes! eggplants! corn! broccoli!) that leave us feeling like wanting to grow our own food was a foolish pipe dream.
We could be given pragmatic, evidence-based advice that actually works (like if you have couch grass, the best and only solution is to grit your teeth, block our a full weekend, invest in a carton of cold beer and dig that bastard out by its roots once and for all), but instead we’re sold on stupid gimmicks that ultimately disappoint us and waste our money and time (like weed mat!!! Die!! Die weed mat die!!!).
Worst of all, when we could talk about the fact that every gardener worth their salt kills plants, has failed experiments and is constantly learning, we’re instead told that there is a “right” way to do things and a wrong way. We’re made to feel like failures if things don’t work out, like everyone knows more than we do and like the point to gardening is to ‘succeed’ at a set of arbitrary goals, rather than simply learning to lose ourselves in the truly incredible world that is growing stuff.
The point of gardening, as far as I’m concerned, is to love gardening. Find a way to do that, and the rest sorts itself out on its own.
So I want to help you do that. To make gardening fun, we need to make it simple, straightforward, unpretentious and achievable. To that end, every post you’ll read here aims to do just that.
You can build an incredible garden out of nothing, in barren beach sand - I promise you can, because that’s what I did. It takes time, but with a curious, gentle and optimistic approached, it’ll be some of the best time of your life.
Start here
Ready?! Let’s go! Here are a few good places to start: