Hello, my name is Roo Williams and this is a journal of a person from the city seeking a deeper connection to nature, and themselves. Well, not strictly from the city. I came from an ex-steelworking town in the South Wales valleys. A town where people worked in factories, supermarkets…

The great thing about producing anything by working with nature is the access it grants you to be a key player in the array of systems that create it. When we aim to produce food in a way that works with nature, one such system is something we humans call…

Now I’ve explained the rationale driving this project I can begin to document and reflect on the process of planning and creating it. The school playing field I’m told gets very wet in the winter. It is a fair size and would almost be square but for the small copse…

Hi again. It’s me. I promised to write regularly and then I didn’t. In fact, I have 4 false started drafts sitting there, all becoming more and more outdated. So, today I’m going to bash out a quick little update. I’ve got so much to say, so many learnings. I…

I got some land, now what? — As mentioned in my post titled Workable Land, we’d planned on taking on a paddock, fortunately right next to our house. We’d had no idea it would be on offer when we went to view the house but immediately it felt exciting — we could actually do something interesting with…

A meat-eating-monster’s deer dilemma — I recently skinned and butchered a roe deer. Well actually, two of them. They were bought directly from the Welsh Government after being shot and killed by rangers as part of an annul cull. We drove to pick them up from a larder, where they’d been had been hung for…

6 Months in to the best job I’d ever had working for Twitter in NYC, I was about to spring some pretty tricky news on them. My then fiancee Lydia had just landed a new job with Nike, for which, we had to move from Brooklyn to Portland, Oregon –…

Self-reliance and undoing domestication — Within the supply systems we are born into we rely on money for value exchange and shops and supermarkets in which we can redeem that money for the things we need. Thanks to Covid-19 panic buying, we were blessed with a glimpse of what happens when those fail. Staple foods…

Rewilding… where do you start? You might start with the land. — Having grown up on a council estate and spending most of my adult life moving within and between cities, land has been a thing I have not had access to. Not that I’ve seen a place for land in my life until fairly recently. While being shown around the house…