In 2009 I had another opportunity to lead a grain harvest/experiment. This time, one of my Spring Scythe Workshop participants had a field of oats that she had had planted on her land as a nurse crop for hay. She wanted to try to harvest some of it with a scythe. So we organized a workshop for it. The nice thing about having a grain harvest workshop with oats, was that we had a much greater window of opportunity in which to harvest the grain, compared to other grains. Oats don't fall off as easily, when ripe. This extended time-frame made it easier to schedule a workshop, and also to work around the weather.

I met Martin at my 2008 Spring Scythe Workshop. Martin had been growing grains in his home garden plots for a number of years, and he wanted to expand to growing and harvesting grains by hand on a larger scale. He had contacted Peter Vido to find out how to harvest grain with a scythe. Peter Vido recommended that he attend one of my scythe workshops. If you can, it's best to learn how to use a scythe at a workshop. It shortens your learning curve considerably. After the workshop, Martin and I hatched a plan to hold a scythe workshop/experiment at his farm, when he had a grain crop ready to harvest. He would get help harvesting his crop, the workshop participants would provide the labor in exchange for the learning opportunity, and I could gain knowledge and sell scythes. A win-win-win situation. What could go wrong?

In 2006 I attended the International Scythe Symposium, hosted by the Vido family on their farm in New Brunswick, Canada. The event was a delight for a photographer. I took a lot of pictures. I had posted some of them in the photo gallery on my farm website before, but in an awkward format. Since it's still winter here, and there's not a whole lot of mowing going on, I thought I'd revisit the Symposium with this blog, and re-post the pictures with the great multimedia features of this Wordpress blog. The slide show above is of the mowing workshops at the Symposium. Hope you enjoy it. Please comment and feel free to ask questions. I will add more text and photos over time.

Here's a video of how I make bio-char in my masonry heater, using two tin cans that fit together nicely to seal out oxygen.

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 the traditional mowing with an Austrian scythe was like, before 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. 

Charcoal is a major ingredient in the super-fertile, man-made, Amazonian soil called Terra Preta. Terra Preta is being intensively studied as a hopeful solution for the impending agricultural and climate crisis. People have now been experimenting with a lot of complicated methods for making charcoal for Terra Preta, in as clean and efficient a manner as possible, involving double chambered barrels, and tubes and chimneys, and such. The quest is to make charcoal with as few greenhouse emissions as possible, while utilizing the heat generated from the fire for something useful. I've become involved with experimenting with some of these methods on a home-scale, and I will let you know how it goes in future articles. In the meantime, I came across a very simple way of making some charcoal, in a substantial enough volume for your garden beds, in a video on YouTube by Greenpower,.

What do you want to accomplish in the next four years? Decide. Commit. Go.