Three New Scythe Videos featuring the Falci 100 Scythe Blade

1SR Falci 100, in "Botan Blue", 85cm, 50mm wide, 603g, This blade has a fully-formed belly and rocker, to handle bumpier fields, like my favorite Penn. Dutch Redtenbacher blade. I asked Falci to reproduce my favorite Redtenbacher blade in 85cm, and they said there was no need to. This one is similar, they said, and will probably mow better! So there you go. This blade is awesome. A strong, stiff, well-formed, and balanced blade. The form of the blade is more like a cross between my Gartensense blades and the FUX 2010 or Profisense. It doesn't have as much of a hook in front, as the 2010, making it easier for beginners to use, and requires less twisting of the torso in the full field stroke, which I prefer. I like using a lot of lateral motion in my scythe stroke. Only double peened, but to a thinly tapered bevel that runs easily over the nail, in the thumbnail test. I finally got to really put it through it's paces this fall, and shoot some video of it in action. See the three videos below:

The farmers at New Story Farm called me up, and said they needed a scythe asap, to mow some green feed for their beef cows. Their last pasture was exhausted, and their newly seeded pastures weren't ready to withstand being trampled by the herd yet, but could be mowed. Sounded like fun to me, so I personally delivered their scythe, and showed them how to mow and helped them harvest some green feed. Here I am mowing very dense red clover with turnip greens, and several grass species. The clover was very dense and heavy.

In late fall, mature dry grasses, such as brome and reed canary grass, can be harvested and used as straw, for animal bedding, garden mulch, and for the dry matter in compost. Here I am mowing brome for mulch at the Borner Farm Project in Prescott, WI. They use it to cover their garlic for winter, and for mulch in general, and also as a dense mat to suppress weeds in pathways. In this video I am holding the blade slightly up off the ground, as I am mowing, so that the blade cuts more above the green grass underneath, and mostly mows the dry stems that rise above it. It also helps to tilt the blade slightly back towards it's spine, which raises the cutting edge. The bottom of the blade deflects the green grass down as the edge cuts the dry stems.

Winter scything with a 85cm Falci 100 scythe blade. Normally at this time of year, the brome grass can be easily mowed in a dry state, as in the preceding video, and used directly for garden mulch or animal bedding in the barn. This year, winter came 3 weeks early, so I had to mow in the snow. If your first snow of the season is 7 feet deep, like in Buffalo, NY right now, you are out of luck. But if you only got a few inches of snow like here, you can still mow the upright grass. You can whisk the grass right out of the snow. There are some very informative viewing angles in this video, if you are interested in the finer points of scything technique. The snow makes a great background for visibility of this scythe blade in action.