Harvesting wheat with a scythe. A great learning opportunity. A organic, hand-broadcasted wheatfield, ready to harvest soon. We will be harvesting a quarter acre, weather permitting. Details to follow.

Here's a gem. The wheat harvest starts 3:00 minutes in. Good video quality. Watch it full screen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4QYOHV8i8&feature=endscreen&NR=1

I am often told, "but you can't mow a whole field with a scythe."  Well, people used to, and still do in some parts of the world. I'm the only scyther here on my farm, so I just mow small sections at a time. But I am always amazed at how much grass gets cut in a day, when I teach a scythe workshop, with 6-12 mowers. When they all go home at the end of a workshop, and I have to tedd and process all the hay that they cut, all by myself, it can be quite overwhelming. Here is a lovely little documentary showing how large fields can be mowed by hand.

Just saw this very interesting scythe video series on YouTube, posted by Almwirtshaft  Probably more interesting if you speak German, but a lot can be learned from the visuals.

About Almwirtschaft ( I'll translate this later):

"Almwirtschaft in Österreich ist seit jeher stark von Brauchtum und Tradition geprägt. Vieles davon ist mittlerweile aber in Vergessenheit geraten und somit unwiederbringlich verloren gegangen.

Um diesem Wissensverlust Einhalt zu gebieten, wurden traditionelle Handwerkstechniken in der Almwirtschaft in mehreren Kurzfilmen für die Nachwelt dokumentiert und stehen nun via Youtube einem möglichst breiten Kreis zur Verfügung."

Yes, the "One Scythe Revolution" is an allusion, in part, to Masanobu Fukuoka's classic The One-Straw Revolution. Back in 1984, I attended a conference with Frances Moore Lappe, and this documentary was shown there. Up until then, my life's ambition had been to be an artist. After seeing this documentary, I was inspired to take a little detour, and become a Natural Farmer, and then do my art in all my free time, once Nature started doing most of the work. This turned out to be harder than it looks! I'm still working at it, but I think that the scythe could make Natural Farming work here in temperate climates. I hope to be writing more about that in future posts.

The winter grains are thigh high already. Time to finally figure out a homemade grain cradle, of some sort. Here are a couple of ideas, from wildseed01 on YouTube. Thanks Wildseed01 for sharing this good info!

 Below is a simple bow cradle (boyle) with a pricker. See 0:54 for still picture. This one can be completely homemade with some green willow, a thin angle iron, and some good twine.

In The Scythe Book, Tresamer talks about the tremendous diversity of plants that old-time pastures and hay fields used to have, and he also briefly mentions how farmers used to make special herbal hay with their scythes, for the health of their animals, and ultimately themselves. Here in this video below, a mountain farmer from Murau, Austria, explains the optimal stage at which to cut an herbal meadow, for the first cutting of hay, for maximum herbal strength and mineral content. She also talks about the healing properties of some of the herbs, and how much her cows enjoy and benefit from them. Modern fields have much less diversity, which is why she heads up high into the mountain to cut the old hayfields that mechanised farming hadn't adulterated.
As for timing the first cut, conventional wisdom now is that the best time to mow for hay, is before the grass has started to head out, because it has the most protein at this stage. But from what I've read in old German scythe literature, the traditional time to mow the first cutting was "when the meadow is in bloom", as Maria Berger (Women's World Scythe Champion in 2000) is explaining in the video. Usually around St. John's Day, which is close to the summer solstice. Also happens to coincide with the longest day length of the year, for the quickest drying time of this massive volume of hay. To everything there is a season.