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About Me


My name is Stephen Watts and I am 26 years old. I have lived most of my life in Sheffield, where I was born.

My interests and passions are all centered around creativity, and specifically working with my hands. I play piano, guitar and sing, and play music with friends, both covers, and our own songs. I write songs, and also enjoy performing. I also carve stone and make abstract sculpture and letter carving. I have been carving stone for as long as i have been able to hold a hammer and chisel; my grandfather was a professional sculptor and my dad also has this skill; it runs in the family.

A major part of my life currently, and i feel into the future, is organic food growing and foraging. I have been growing food on allotments and foraging for the past 8 years, and have started teaching these skills to others. I have a wide knowledge of plants, and i am a seed saver. I am interested in ecology, specifically in the origins of those things that support us, and where they come from. I hope that I can live my life as sustainably as possible for the rest of my life, and I feel that such a life will necessitate living in close community with others, as i feel that we are all interdependent on one another for our survival. Therefore I am also very interested in building positive communities and living in loving, trusting, supportive social networks. I feel that we become more than the sum of our parts when we unite our strengths together, and that making and living such a sustainable life, is not only possible but also favourable and enjoyable for all.

I am passionate about all learning, and have so many other interests, so, while I tend to gravitate between these three key occupations, growing, sculpting and playing music, i really find so much in life nourishing that I can be doing lots of different things over a short period of time. I love life, and as much as this is a rather vague statement, it true! - I find that my passion for creativity is a direct expression of my love of life, without which, my creativity would be quite empty.

I tend to live seasonally; the plants call me out to play in the spring, and in the summer i love camping under the stars, and in the autumn, dreams, and songs, and the urge to store away till next spring inhabit me, and i withdraw into winter song writing and indoor activities. I feel like I am rich inside.

I have worked as an apprentice in organic food growing, learning hands-on experience direct from a very experienced grower, who was my teacher for 5 years, after I finished my A-levels. This experience was a vital part of my learning, and I am very lucky to have had such a good teacher who only asked for help in growing in exchange for the learning, as I wouldn’t have been able to pay for such teaching. Through this close work as an apprentice I absorbed a lot of experiential knowledge directly from living a life close to the seasons, harvesting food and medicinal plants all year round. I get enormous nourishment from the direct experience of working with plants, and the sense of interconnectedness with all the ecological systems of the earth through this way of life.

I played a part in setting up a project called The Abundance Project, which is a project aimed a harvesting unwanted and unpicked fruit and redistributing it in the community on a non profit basis. I started this project with a friend in 2007 in Sheffield, and now the idea has spread around the UK with many groups setting up similar projects across the UK. I am currently working on creating a UK network, and one of my visions is that every county has a local abundance harvesting and distributing group. Its great to see how such a simple idea can catch on. I’m sure that its not a new idea, and I feel that I just happened to be in the right place and time to spark that process of getting back to harvesting local fruit.

My main ambitions and goals in life are simply to live a content life, yet, I am a driven person, and I feel that for me to be truly content in life, I need to explore the boundaries of what I feel is possible for me to experience from what life has to offer. I want to take risks, I want to be able to do those things that I dream I can do, and I want to experience what it truly means to live a free life. I feel a sense of closeness to my kin and family, and I hope that I can help them to be happy and content, as I know that I also need them to help me realise my deepest dreams. I feel that our higher selves greatest interest is also the collective higher selves greater interest. I feel that ultimately I want to live a life where i feel i have given what I can of my self for the better of all who live here on this planet.