Newsletter – Issue 16

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the 16th Leach Press and Oakist Press newsletter, 14th September 2026.

The aim is simple – weekly in spring and summer and fortnightly in autumn and winter, I'll send a short update covering new books, new videos, events, projects and life at Oakwood.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting independent publishing.

The newsletter archive is now live on the website. Each issue also includes a photo appendix from around Oakwood. See: https://www.leach.press/newsletter

New Oakist Press books

Four new books have recently been released through Oakist Press.

All four books are available here:

If you've bought and enjoyed any of these books, a review on Amazon, Goodreads or social media really helps independent authors reach new readers.

New Leach Press books

Two new books have recently been released through The Leach Press.

The books are available here:

New videos this week

Watch all videos here:

Oakwood Rewilding Project

Work continues at Oakwood in Llanbrynmair, although we were away for part of the weekend, camping in the FOD Wagon in Derby where Erika was on a breathwork therapy course. Perhaps that was no bad thing. One of the useful lessons of a rewilding project is that not everything requires constant human interference. Leave the place alone for a few days and Oakwood carries on perfectly happily without us, even if The Popstar and Cliff Richard get a little lonely.

The Woodland Trust project remains the biggest development on the horizon. Our planting proposal has passed Phase 2 and been approved, and we are now waiting for the site visit. That should allow us to move from the broad proposal to the practical questions: what species will work best in the different parts of Oakwood, where they should be planted, how many trees the land can sensibly accommodate and what support will be available.

There is little point second-guessing the final planting plan before the visit, so for the moment this part of the project is largely a matter of waiting. If all goes well, however, this winter could mark the beginning of a substantial new phase in the development of Oakwood.

The cider orchard is also now moving from an idea towards something rather more tangible. Ten traditional apple trees have been ordered on M25 rootstock. They should arrive at around 1.8 m tall, some feathered and some not, and have been selected specifically to provide a mixture suitable for experimenting with dry cider rather than simply producing eating apples.

The orchard will consist of three Breakwell’s Seedling, two Ten Commandments and one each of Arthur Barnes, Grenadier, Ashmead’s Kernel, Blenheim Orange and Green Purnell. The mix gives us bittersharp cider character, acidity, sweetness, body and complexity, with enough variation to experiment with different blends as the trees begin producing useful quantities of fruit.

It will obviously be a few years before the Oakwood orchard is producing enough apples for serious cider making, so in the meantime I will be looking at obtaining apples locally. That should also give us the opportunity to get the equipment and process sorted before our own trees begin cropping properly. Oakwood Cyder is on its way…

Around Pond-da-Rosa, the transformation continues. The pond is now almost full, and the willows planted around it all appear to have taken. Grasses, rushes and wildflowers are growing and flowering around the margins, so what was recently a fairly raw-looking excavation is beginning to look increasingly like a proper pond habitat.

The proposed water supply for Pond-da-Rosa remains an interesting longer-term engineering problem. A fast-running stream lies about 250 m away and below the pond, and I am investigating whether a hydraulic ram pump could use the energy of the flowing water itself to lift a proportion of it uphill. If the available fall, flow and pumping head work out, it could provide a wonderfully simple off-grid system with no electricity, solar panels or fuel required. More measurements are needed before deciding whether it is practical.

Across the rest of Oakwood, autumn is now unmistakably taking hold. More of the summer vegetation is dying back, grasses are beginning to collapse and seed is being dispersed naturally across the field. We are continuing to interfere as little as possible, although fresh dock seed heads are still being removed where we find them. The objective remains control rather than eradication: dock is part of the ecology, but we do not want it dominating the field while greater diversity becomes established.

There is still plenty of life amongst the dying vegetation. Grasshoppers remain abundant, while shield bugs, butterflies, dragonflies, ladybirds and meadow birds continue to work their way through the field. There is also plenty of evidence of small mammals using the increasingly dense mixture of grass, stems and ground cover. Leaving much of the vegetation standing or collapsing naturally should provide both food and shelter as we head towards winter.

The young planted trees have also been checked following the recent high winds and secured to their stakes where necessary. Most have now survived their first summer at Oakwood. The next test is rather different: several months of Welsh rain, wind and saturated ground.

Around the polytunnel, the summer growing season is gradually winding down. The tomatoes have been particularly successful this year. The raised bed outside the polytunnel, constructed from old fencing recovered from Erika’s garden, is now complete. It cost very little and turned material that might otherwise have been thrown away into something that should remain useful for years. Reuse first, buy later remains a useful rule around here.

The fungi are also beginning to appear in greater numbers as autumn approaches. The Oakwood mushroom count has so far included Agaricus species and boletes, with considerably more expected as conditions become cooler and damper. This will be another interesting part of documenting how the site changes through the seasons, particularly as the woodland and grassland habitats develop.

The chicken project continues to edge towards the point where it actually contains chickens. The house is in position and the run framework has been assembled beside the woodland. The next important stage remains taking Elsi to choose the birds. Once occupied, the chicken area should become another small working part of the Oakwood system rather than simply another structure on the land.

Bees remain on the longer-term list too, with Erika and Elsi planning the project and Erika looking into the equipment required. The developing mixture of meadow, woodland edge, bramble, wildflowers and, eventually, fruit blossom should provide a useful range of forage across the site.

The campsite will now almost certainly wait until 2027. We are simply too late in the year for there to be much point trying to launch it properly this season. What is encouraging is that walkers continue to appear in the local pub, particularly people travelling the Glyndŵr’s Way, suggesting there may be a genuine demand for simple, inexpensive camping rather than another heavily developed holiday site. Public liability insurance is already in place and Justyn has agreed to act as general manager when we eventually get things moving.

The Art-a-Van remains another winter project. It has been stripped and cleaned externally and the stand-alone solar system has been planned, but there is now a more immediate job to tackle. Several of the windows are cracked and allowing water in, so replacement windows need to be sourced before spending much time or money improving the interior. There is little point building a clever little solar-powered space if the Welsh weather can simply stroll in through the windows.

There has also been progress on the more mundane infrastructure that makes living at Oakwood work. The horsebox now has a carpet fitted, using an off-cut obtained from a local supplier. Another useful piece of material diverted from the waste stream, and a considerable improvement inside the truck.

With colder weather approaching, fuel preparation is becoming part of the regular routine again. I have started producing kindling from old pallets using the circular saw, giving another useful life to timber that would otherwise be discarded or burnt inefficiently in large pieces. A metal coal bunker has also arrived and is gradually being filled, while another supply of wood has come from a local farm.

None of these jobs is particularly dramatic, but collectively they are what make an off-grid site function through winter. Solar panels and ponds make better photographs, but dry fuel, kindling, sound roofs and weatherproof storage become rather more important when it is dark at five o’clock and horizontal rain is battering Mid-Wales.

The paths around the site continue to be maintained, but elsewhere the approach remains largely hands-off. Pond-da-Rosa is filling, the willows are establishing, summer vegetation is returning its material to the soil, fungi are appearing and the wildlife is adjusting to the changing season. Oakwood is entering its autumn phase, and increasingly the job is to watch what happens rather than continually trying to make something happen.

Appendix 1 contains the September Rewilding Plan, and further photographs documenting the continuing changes around Oakwood have been added to the September appendix.

From N16 onwards, the newsletter will move from weekly to fortnightly. There simply isn't enough genuinely new material every seven days to justify padding out an update for the sake of keeping to a schedule. A fortnight should give projects time to develop and, hopefully, mean that each issue contains rather more worth reporting. Oakwood, after all, works on seasons rather than deadlines.

DJ news

No sets this week due to Derby trip.

The December ska and punk all-dayer in Newtown – celebrating my 60th, along with the birthdays of Erika, Justyn and Gibby from the tip – is now well into the planning stage. Flyer and link below. All welcome.

Facebook event link:

Modelling

Nothing new this week.

Coming soon

Work continues on a number of current and future projects, including:

• Further video episodes of Physics, Consciousness & Reality
• Further video episodes of Living on the Road, Waterways or Off-grid in the UK
• Further video episodes of Crime, Punishment & Justice (although not until one of the above are complete)
• Further videos on off-grid living, continuing on the theme of solar (full solar design example next, hence slight delay)
• New Oakist Press releases:
  • Monique & the Thingies: (Tom Rantula – in final stages of production): follows Monique and Malachi, two rebellious spider monkeys who leave Monkey Island after giants destroy their forest. Seeking the “perfect thingi”, a better way of organising society, they travel through strange animal communities governed by surveillance, religion, authoritarianism, hierarchy, tradition and claims of superiority. Their adventures are comic, dangerous and increasingly political, exposing how power can corrupt even apparently orderly societies. Gradually, they discover that freedom cannot safely be entrusted to rulers or supposedly higher authorities. Their journey ultimately points towards cooperation, mutual aid, collective decision-making and individual responsibility as foundations for a freer society.
  • Resources and the Future: An Anarchist Perspective (Dicky Dread – just incorporating edits and an introduction from Jude Daniels): asks what happens when societies built around endless economic growth encounter the physical limits of a finite planet. Drawing on physics, ecology, history and case studies, it examines energy, food, technology, wildlife, scarcity and social organisation, and explores a resource-based future founded on sufficiency, ecological stewardship, decentralisation, cooperation and mutual aid.
  • Books from Marge Hunter, Saz Denny and Stu Schotnes
  • Education: An Anarchist Perspective (Dicky Dread)

Author's note

A slightly different week at Oakwood, with some time away camping in the FOD Wagon in Derby, but plenty continuing to happen on the land. The Woodland Trust proposal has been approved and we are now waiting for the site visit, the ten-tree cider orchard is ordered, Pond-da-Rosa is almost full and preparations for autumn and winter are under way. As the seasons change, there is increasingly less need to intervene and more reason simply to watch what happens. Oakwood, unsurprisingly, carries on perfectly well when we aren't there.