Gardening with Casey Joy

Gardening with Casey Joy Helping people grow beautiful, natural & edible gardens with ease, joy and excitement; one step at a time.

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Vegan and vegetarian meals improvised out of my garden! ...And cake :)

06/10/2026

Ok yes I also garden. But I often think the reason I don’t give up on my garden (especially over summer) is because of pottering.

Pottering is low stakes. Zero expectations. Pottering is going outside for a cuppa and suddenly finding yourself deadheading a daisy bush. It’s low pressure gardening because you’re not actually setting out to ‘garden’ - you don’t need to achieve anything. You’re just…pottering.

Sometimes I think these may be some of the most peaceful and pleasurable moments of my life (especially when I can convince my husband and our kids to potter with me!)

If you’re sick of your garden at the moment, if it feels like too much work, too much struggle, may I suggest you give up gardening for a few months, and allow yourself to potter instead.

Here’s how to do it:
1. Make a cup of tea/coffee, pour yourself a b**r or a glass of w**e
2. Head outside.
3. Aimlessly wander. Look for bugs. Breathe. Wait.
4. Wait for it to come to you - the desire to do SOMETHING. It doesn’t matter what it is. Don’t rush it, it will arrive on its own. It ALWAYS does.

Watch the birds flit through the trees, and maybe you’ll find yourself filling up the bird bath.

Smell a rose and you’ll probably blink and find yourself picking a posy

Stare at your pots for long enough and you’ll end up rearranging them, watering them, tending to them.

There are no rules for pottering, and, if your gardening motivation has deserted, I also find it happens to be the quickest, easiest and most pleasurable way to wind up accidentally knee deep in soil, with twigs in my hair, (re)landscaping a garden bed, uprooting a tree and gleefully gardening once more!

If that sounds like your kind of gardening, I’m writing a book on exactly how to do it (and how to succeed in a sandy, dry and rugged place like Perth).

I’m publishing draft excerpts to my Substack newsletter as I go, so you can read along too ☺️ comment SUBSTACK if you’d like to check them out! ❤️

25/09/2026

If you want gardening to feel easy, make sure you’re focusing on the things that actually move the needle!

1. Irrigate your beds

2. Fix your soil (comment SOIL for my guide to do this, over 400 Perth gardeners have used it already - woo!)

3. Plant lots of trees! And focus on perennials (plants that last more than just one season)

4. Edge your beds to stop the lawn creeping in! Biggest waste of your time if you’re always having to pull lawn out if your garden beds!

5. Let the bugs do what they like!

Have I missed any?

I’m very into this essentialism stuff atm, I think the time demands of motherhood make the idea of achieving 80% of my goals with just 20% of my effort SO APPEALING! 🤣🤣

I also wrote a guide which applies this idea to starting a garden - it covers the main, big moves you should make if you’re trying to start a garden from a totally bare backyard and have very little time.

It’s called the Blankslate Garden and I wrote it with other parents of young kids in mind, in the hope that it will help you get started even if you have NO TIME! Comment BLANKSLATE if you’d like to check it out ❤️

Here’s what I’d plantSmall trees:- Olives- Pomegranates- Figs- Citrus (these need plenty of water in summer)- Bay treeOr...
20/09/2026

Here’s what I’d plant

Small trees:
- Olives
- Pomegranates
- Figs
- Citrus (these need plenty of water in summer)
- Bay tree

Or you could check out Zerascapes and go for some cool dragon trees and large cacti! Frangipanis are also super tough and can handle pots, as can ficus trees.

For smaller plants I’d try underplanting my trees with
shallow rooted edibles like lettuces, rocket and allll the Mediterranean herbs (oregano, thyme, a creeping rosemary)

OR flowers like portulaca, sweet alyssum and pig face in summer, vincas and pansies in winter.

There are heaps more options but these are the simple ones I would be trying first in a sunny potted garden

If you’d like me to do a similar post for a SHADY rental, let me know in the comments!

And if you’d like to read my full guide to gardening in a rental, comment SUBSTACK and I’ll send you the link to check out my newsletter, full of tips for growing a garden in Perth (even if you’re renting!)

19/09/2026

Sharing a few of my favourite plants from The Perth Plant Palette because they’re all in flower right now (plus roses, because I love my roses!)

🌷 comment PALETTE if you’d like to grab my guide with the full list, plus advice for layering and combining them to suit your garden ☺️

If you’re sick of fussing over wimpy little plants that never seem to get any bigger, produce barely any flowers, wilt at the first sign of summer and are perpetually under bug attack… you might just be focusing on the wrong plants!

Plants that don’t like the environment they’re growing in never do as well as plants that are predisposed to enjoy our heat and sandy soils. This means that native plants are much easier to grow (I’m enjoying growing my banksias, bottlebrush and correas especially atm), and it ALSO means that plants from the Mediterranean, South Africa, California and other places with similar climates to ours will be much more successful in your garden.

For a curated shortlist of the most bomb proof and beautiful things I like to grow (the plants I would give you cuttings of if you visited my garden) comment PALETTE and I’ll send you the link to grab my guide ❤️

19/09/2026

If you wish you had a garden but have no clue where to start, I can help!

My first suggestion is to choose ONE spot for ONE tree. You can keep one tree alive over summer, you can plant one tree, I promise. And it makes a huge, outsized difference!

If you’d like my help getting over decision paralysis and the fear of making a mistake in your garden, comment BLANKSLATE for my practical, no bu****it guide to starting a garden from nothing, in Perth, with builders rubble and no Retic, when you have no time apart from an hour or so on the weekends, and feel all frozen up with indecision.

My guide breaks down the things you can do now to actually begin a garden, and I have put all my effort into offering advice that is as simple as possible, so that you really can do SOMETHING.

(We have two young kids so I’ve written advice that I think I could actually follow through on myself, if I was starting today)

Everyone should have a garden, I am convinced Perth would be a better place if we all had gardens, and I know that our weather, our soil and the fact that developers seem to hate trees and backyards makes that hard. I still believe we can find solutions, and I’ll keep doing my best to come up with them for you!

Comment BLANKSLATE for the link to my guide (I also have a few new bundles on my website if you want to get my other guides at the same time ☺️), and if you have a particular garden struggle that is keeping you from getting started, pop it in the comments -

I’ll give my best suggestions and ideas to the first ten people to comment with their specific questions/challenges!

18/09/2026

The aphids don’t matter! In fact, they are helping attract ladybirds to your garden! ❤️

P.S. I mentioned that good soil will help your plants recover from the odd flare up of certain bugs, and now is a very good time to improve your soil before summer hits.

Comment SOIL if you’d like to grab my guide to rebuilding Sandy, dry Perth soil until it is healthy, moist and full of earthworms! 🪱

09/09/2026

I keep speaking with people who have gardens full of potential, but they’re putting off starting because they just don’t know what first move they should make.

So I’m starting a series on first steps to start your garden because there are SO many simple ways to get over that initial inertia, and once you do, you’ll see exactly how fun, exciting, rewarding and wonderful gardening can be!

Today’s job: see where the morning sun hits your garden, and make yourself a spot for a morning coffee exactly there.

I say this from experience, because as the photos show, this is what I’ve been doing in my garden for over a decade. Doesn’t have to be fancy.

Breakfast outside - starting your day with even a few minutes of sunshine - won’t just transform your garden, it can fundamentally change how you live the rest of that day, and how you live your days determines how you live your life.

Make sure to follow so you can catch the rest of this series, and comment BLANKSLATE if you’d like the link to my full guide on how to grow a garden when you’re starting with nothing.

07/09/2026

The best thing I’ve discovered about so-called pests in the garden is that they do faaaar less damage if your plants are healthy.

When your plants are healthy they have their own defence mechanisms to deter bugs, AND their pace of growth often outstrips the bugs’ rate of chewing. I have caterpillars on my Echium, slugs in my lettuces, and nothing ever gets truly decimated.

In fact, I didn’t know I had slugs in my lettuces until I did a nighttime torchlit stroll around the garden and spotted them covering it. In the daytime the lettuce looked totally healthy and slug free.

My point is, giving up a few plants to the bugs and accepting a slightly imperfect garden feels like a small price to pay for the bird life, butterflies and flourishing ecosystem you get when you don’t use pesticides.

Also what on earth is the point in growing your own food if you wind up spending half your time spritzing it with sprays anyway!?

The two things that are most effective to avoid total bug decimation are:

1. Having healthy soil - healthy soil = healthy plants which are less susceptible to pests and diseases.

(You can comment SOIL if you’d like to grab the guide I wrote specifically about how to fix Perth sand and turn it into fertile, healthy and earthworm-filled soil ☺️)

2. Accept the bugs! It might get worse before it gets better BECAUSE the bugs in your garden need to reach their own equilibrium, along with all the birds and other wildlife that hang out there. Leave them to it. Take a load off. Make a cocktail. Over the next year or so they will establish more balanced ratios of predators to prey and you’ll get many less plague-level infestations. It is the best, laziest and most environmentally friendly way to grow a healthy garden ❤️

03/09/2026

The best way to make gardening so much easier and more fun is often just to shift your perspective.

We THINK we need to eradicate pests because garden centres are full of bug sprays. But we don’t. That’s a bandaid solution that never lasts and, more importantly, is absolutely no fun.

The real solution that works long term and will make you love your garden a thousand times more is to bring birds in. A garden full of birds is the most beautiful, life affirming thing, and it 100% a ‘build it and they will come’ situation.

Leave the pests alone so there is plenty of food waiting for the birds, grow shrubby trees that make them feel safe, and add bird baths all over the place.

I GUARANTEE YOU you’ll wind up with a bird-filled paradise, and the added bonus is that you’ll never look at a caterpillar the same way again.

When you embrace the entire ecosystem in your garden you stop seeing ‘good bugs’ and ‘bad bugs’ and just see a thriving, fully-alive space that you helped create. Much better.

P.S. because I predict I will get comments saying ‘yesss but what about when the caterpillars eat my ENTIRE broccoli crop?!’ here is the ONE other thing worth doing:

Make your plants as strong as they can be - this means especially vulnerable plants like broccoli can be started in pots and only planted in beds once they’re 15cm tall and a bit more resilient.

It also means making sure your plants have enough sun, enough water and, most important of all that they are growing in rich, fertile soil.

Good soil totally changes the resilience of your plants, leading to fewer pest problems and diseases. And Perth soil kinda sucks if you want to grow veggies and non-natives.

If you’d like to fix your sandy soil this spring, comment SOIL and I’ll send you the link to grab a copy of my guide to turning sandy, dry Perth soil into earthworm-filled, rich, healthy soil, using only 3 products you can source locally ☺️ it’s easy and so worth it!

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Perth, Western
Perth, WA

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