Mowing a Field as a Team 03/07/2012
Add Comment Here is a vintage gem, filmed prior to 1950, showing how they mowed and made hay with a scythe in Mittelberg, Austria. It was posted on YouTube by feworieser. (If the music is too overwhelming you can click the volume button and mute it, and watch it as the silent film it was probably made to be.) It shows what mowing with an Austrian scythe was like, before Peter Vido invented mowing with a side-shift. It also shows peening with a tall anvil, honing (Austrian style), and some very impressive technique with spreading the cut vegetation with a hayfork at 2:12. It also shows how they brought the hay to the barn with a garden cart, and bundling the hay with rope for carrying on the back from areas to steep for a cart. Most interestingly to me, at 3:34 and at 5:00, it shows how the traditional Austrian hay drying racks are used. This method is described by Peter Vido at http://www.scytheconnection.com/adp/hay/austria.html Traditional Haymaking in the Swiss Alps 07/10/2010
Reed Canary Grass 11/28/2009
 Don't put your scythes away for the season just yet! Now is a great time of year to mow tall dry grasses for use as animal bedding, garden mulch, or dry matter for compost piles. Reed Canary grass is my favorite dry grass. It's easy to mow and yields a tremendous volume of straw. At this time of year, the seeds have all fallen off, and since it's a dominant monoculture, there aren't many other plants mixed in, so it makes a great seed-free mulch. When harvested in dry weather, it requires no further drying, and you can put it directly in a haystack, or pile it high in your barn or chicken coop for winter bedding. The big hollow stems are great for keeping air in a compost pile. So after you use it for bedding, the manure and straw mix is very compostable. It doesn't form a dense anaerobic mass (like hay or leaves do), that takes forever to break down. The video below shows how I mow Reed Canary Grass: This next video shows how we bring the Reed Canary grass straw in from the field. I don't have a real barn here yet, so I store the straw on my Pyramid Haystack frame next to my goose house, and cover it with a tarp. In the winter, it's easy to take off the tarp, and pull off as much straw as I need for bedding at a time for my geese, and then cover the stack back up again. New Scythe Video 10/30/2009
I recently posted this new instructional scythe video on YouTube. The first part of the video shows the cutting action of the blade, and basic mowing form. The second part explains the advanced field mowing form that incorporates an exaggerated side-to-side weight-shift, that turns mowing with a scythe, into quest for perpetual motion. Mowing with a side-shift requires a more closed hafting angle on your scythe blade, than is commonly available. I learned this advanced technique from Peter Vido at the 2006 International Scythe Symposium in Canada. The technique was developed by Peter and it is a MAJOR INNOVATION in the use of the scythe. The Austrians have tradionally mowed in-circle, powering their cutting stroke by moving their arms & shoulders, and twisting their torsos. Some regions even had the tradition of incorporating a squat into the motion! At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Basques traditionally mow by pulling their scythes from right to left in a nearly straight line. Peter Vido studied both these techniques, and combining the two, into an innovative new style of mowing, which he likens to the Cloud Hands Form in Tai Chi. Combining the full half circle mowing technique of the Austrians, with the lateral, side-to-side movement of the Basques, results in a full, half-oval of a scythe stroke, that cuts a swath that's more than 1 1/2 x the height of the mower, ...with ease! Competition mowers had cut swaths this wide before, (with super-long blades and heroic bursts of effort!), but this is really the first mowing technique to quest after a much greater efficiency of mowing sytle. Peter called his new style "Mowing with Ease" and began to develop a new style of snath that would fascilitate this new technique. Although scythe blade design had been greatly improved over the centuries, snath design had remained comparatively pretty basic. This had been further impeded by the modern need to supply scythes by mail-order. Low cost and shipability had become the priority. Some of the results of Peter Vido's ongoing research and development, is now available from Scythe Network retailers, and also myself. The Swiss snaths that I sell were designed with Peter Vido's input.  | Botan Anderson ArchivesMay 2012 CategoriesAll  |
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