Nearly everything I make is designed to be used, whether it’s a chair, spoon, bowl or rake. I especially like it when someone meets me at a show and tells me how they’ve been using something they’ve bought from me. I gave this birch serving spoon to my friends Charlie & Alison at the end of last year and they tell me it’s been in daily use ever since for everything from stirring soup, cooking curries to serving up salad. Woodenware really starts to come alive through use, developing a patina and character that you really can’t achieve any other way and improving all the time.
I’ve been in the Transylvania region of Romania taking part in an International Haymaking Festival. During the week we called in to visit Viktor-bacsi (an honorific for older people translated for us as “Uncle Viktor”) who, despite ill health makes and repairs all the wooden hayrakes for the area – about 50 each winter. Viktor-bacsi uses 3 different species for his rakes: hazel for the stail, mountain maple for the heads and ash for the tines. Everything is cleft and shaped by hand for a combination of strength and lightness. It was wonderful too see him working and the simple but ingenious devices he had made for holding the various parts while shaping them with plane, knife and saw.
Each rake has 19 tines, all laboriously shaped by hand first into a long square taper and then a shouldered tenon is handcarved onto one end and the other end rounded with a knife. I sat with him in his small workshop and carved a few tines with him. The wood is all dried before assembly so the tenon is simply made to a push fit into the head – the shoulder stops it pushing further through and on top of the head Viktor-bacsi leaves 2mm of temon protruding which he peens over like a rivet head to prevent the tine falling out. We were shown how the split stail is fitted to the head and his method for getting the head straight and balanced. A lovely little touch are two bands of unstripped bark left on the stail just below the split as decoration.
During our haymaking, I worked with one of the rakes which has seen 20 summers of work. In that time the stail has been polished smooth by the hands that held it and the tines have been worn away to a quarter of their original length yet only one has broken in that time. A tool like this almost knows how to do the work itself and it was an honour to be using it.
While the rest of the sports media was focussed on the World Athletics Championships in Daegu, South Korea I was making my own debut representing my country on the international sports stage. This was the first Scythe Mowing Competition in Gyimes, Transylvania organised by Attila Sarig as part of the Haymaking Festival. The aim was to draw attention among the local population of our presence in the village and show the work of mowing with a scythe can be more than just hard work.
The local newspapers and a tv cameraman turned out for the competition which included competitors from Romania, England, Scotland, Austria and Norway.
This was a simple sprint race, downhill through a light sward of second-cut grass so times were fast and I was knocked out in my heat by the meadow owner who was kind enough to say he’d never worked so hard.. Representing the two ends of the age spectrum were Norby Antal, aged 13 and ‘Aunt Lizzie’ aged 78 who mowed with ease and style before heading back to the real work of tending her vegetable garden.
In the end the final came down to a clash between Julian Holbrook of Scotland and Szilveszter Oltean, a local farmer who just pipped Julian to the line and took away a new scythe as his prize. We found out later that Szilveszter is also the champion for the local sport of downhill sledging, something we may be returning to Tryansylvania to try our luck at.
Due to a clash with the second round of filming for Anna K, I’ve moved the date of my ‘Improve your peening’ course to Saturday 24th September. Still only £45 to learn the why’s and wherefore’s of hammering your scythe blade to achieve a fine edge.
A week full of mowing this week and all the better for it being different interesting conditions. Yesterday I mowed a garden which I’d previously mown with my scythe at the beginning of July. The grass had just grown back to 4 inches – too long for your standard lawnmower but perfect for the scythe. It was soft and clean to I enjoyed the opportunity to stretch out and mow 3m wide swaths. What a pleasure after the rushes and weeds earlier in the week.
flowers with paths between the beds only about 40cm wide. Some people have taken to using a tiny 40cm blade for this kind of work but I’ve developed a technique so that I could mow the grass using the same 75cm ‘profisense’ blade without damaging the vegetables. This is the kind of thing I am planning for my ‘Scythe Improvers’ course which I’ll be running in Cumbria next year.
During the winter I worked on a friend’s farm planting up some areas with a mix of hardwood trees. This week I’ve had two interesting days of work clearing the vegetation which has had all year to grow up in between them. For this kind of work a strimmer is a pain because the long stems get wrapped around the string case and a scythe is perfect. I used my ‘stoneblade’ (Hahnsense) which is a tough blade with a lot of curve to work over the uneven ground and a stonepoint to protect the edge if I hit a stone.
The weeds had certainly grown, with the nettles standing over a metre tall. The scythe was cutting well but the hard work with this kind of mowing is moving the stuff out of the way as it’s too heavy to windrow directly as with grass. Still, it was very satisfying to clear my way through it and by the end of the day the trees were a lot easier to see and none of the guards were damaged even though I cut right up to them.
In amongst the nettles were a few good-sized hogweed plants as well. When cutting thicker material there’s a tendency among folk to want to hack or to think they need a ‘bush blade’ but actually most blades will cope with this sort of work if it’s sharp and you concentrate on using a slicing motion. These weren’t the giant hogweed variety but I’m sure the scythe would deal with those just as efficiently. Also, since you’re far away from the actual cut and it’s a smooth slicing action I think there’d be less chance of being affected by the sap which can cause the skin to be photosensitive and burn. I’ll talk to some conservation groups about giving it a try.
For the second day I was in a different, wetter field mowing rushes on possibly the wettest day of the year. Again the rushes are very heavy and lie flat over the sward. I found it easier to mow under them and then periodically move them out of the way with my foot rather than use the scythe so as not to risk putting excess pressure on it and to not strain my back and shoulders.
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