Christiane and I are just back from a wonderful week at the Transylvania Haymaking Festival. As well as meeting and working with a great bunch of people from around Europe, we took part in a mowing competition. Christiane and her scythe made the front page of the local news!
See the full article (and enjoy the Google translation) and more scythe competition photos from the newspaper.
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.
My first completed rake, post-fire, a double bow model based on one at MERL. The head is 695mm wide with 12 tines, the bows are made from cleft ash, shaved almost to size and then drawn through a dowel plate. These are much stronger than bows made from small diameter sticks which consist of juvenile wood and can therefore be much more graceful and slender while maintaining strength.
After last year’s success, Charlie Whinney and I again ran an intensive steambending workshop for four furniture makers demonstrating the amazing possibilities in bending solid wood using steam.
The course progressed through an experiment into the bending capacity of different timbers through the use of jigs, formers and freebending to create curves, spirals, fans, twists and even knots in green oak and ash. Sunday again saw us working to create a unique steambent chair with each student. I have enough steambending experience now that, despite the busy atmosphere and speed needed to achieve this, I can keep calm while working to keep everything on course, assist students with their chairs and help them with personalising the basic form into their own sculptural piece of furniture.
I’d been booked to run the mowing course over the whole weekend. This is a real advantage for the students as it gives us more time to practise the technique with the scythe, try mowing in different conditions and have a full session of peening. After setting everyone up we got straight out into the meadow. I always start the practical mowing section of a course with some warm-up and some tai-chi exercises which form the basis of the mowing movement. The grass here was long and tough but motivated by enthusiasm the group quickly got to work and were cutting healthy swaths through the sward.
For beginners, one of the most challenging aspects of using a scythe is sharpening and I’ve been working out the best way to teach this effectively and safely. Kneeling with the tip of the blade on the ground makes the process more stable and also enables the student to see the edge and the relation between it and the stone. For this course I’ve also introduced some kevlar ‘cutproof’ gloves as this is a time when I’ve heard that beginners can cut themselves. I think that with proper instruction and supervision, all aspects of scythe use are safe but the gloves add an extra layer of security. I’m keen to maintain my ‘no accidents’ record.
On the Sunday we arranged to meet at 7:30 for some ‘early morning’ mowing when the grass is still full of it’s own moisture and easier to cut. The weather wasn’t quite so kind to us with a light shower of rain. The extra weight of this on the grass made it difficult for people to appreciate the benefit. We did see the other advantage of the second day which was the improvement in everybody’s mowing technique as 
the advice and instructions fell into place with practice. I gave a demonstration to help bring together and show the various aspects of the ‘tai-chi’ style in unison. Christiane showed how to change grip and use the scythe differently to deal with grass which was lying over in many directions and cut around a tree to automatically mulch it.
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