Here's another use for Reed Canary Grass.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Harvesting Reed Canary Grass for Straw w/ a Scythe 1
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.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
The One Scythe Revolution
A while back, I did a survey of preferred website names for my new website. www.onescytherevolution.com was the 2-to-1 favorite. I got some other good suggestions though, like www.onescythefitsall.com.
So, "The One Scythe Revolution" it is! It's a little long, but I agree, it suits my message the best.
I did a search for green website hosts and was drawn to using iPage.com. They are fantastic! I highly recommend them. They're green, very affordable, and they have a website template/design program that even I can figure out. If you need a website host, check them out, and tell them I sent you.
So check out my new website . It's still under construction, but it has quite a bit of info on it already, and lots of videos. It also comes with its own blog, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this one. Check out my latest blog posting on mowing Reed Canary Grass for straw. Give it some traffic, and make some comments!
So, "The One Scythe Revolution" it is! It's a little long, but I agree, it suits my message the best.
I did a search for green website hosts and was drawn to using iPage.com. They are fantastic! I highly recommend them. They're green, very affordable, and they have a website template/design program that even I can figure out. If you need a website host, check them out, and tell them I sent you.
So check out my new website . It's still under construction, but it has quite a bit of info on it already, and lots of videos. It also comes with its own blog, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this one. Check out my latest blog posting on mowing Reed Canary Grass for straw. Give it some traffic, and make some comments!
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
New Scythe Video
I just posted a new instructional scythe video on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzdjOkLQw1s 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.
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 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 available from Scythe Network retailers, and also myself. The Swiss snaths that I sell were designed with Peter Vido's input.
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 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 available from Scythe Network retailers, and also myself. The Swiss snaths that I sell were designed with Peter Vido's input.
Friday, October 9, 2009
My 14 year old daughter, and her best friend were lamenting about the news that Obama wants to make the school year longer. I told them that Obama wants them to be as educated as possible, to meet the challenges that are coming. "Like what?" they asked. "Like Climate Change and Peak Oil, for example.", I said.
They said that they thought that hydrogen was the solution. I said it might be, if we could figure out a way to produce it that in didn't itself require much energy. That's the trouble with all the alternative energy sources that we have developed so far. The return on the energy expended to create the energy, is much smaller than it has been with the easy to get at oil. Oil has been an amazing gift, in hindsight. Since it's such a finite resource (and one that causes pollution!), it's too bad that we've used up, and squandered so much of it. It's not that the Earth is running out of Oil; it's running out of the oil that takes the least amount of energy to get. Now, the deeper they drill, and the smaller the oil fields, the more energy it's going to take to get it out, and the more expensive it's going to be.
Grain prices tripled between 2006 - 2008. The more expensive Oil becomes, the more expensive, machine grown and distributed, food will become. I told them about what Pfeiffer had written in his article "Eating Fossil Fuels".
They were incredulous. "OMG! You mean, we are all going to die?!"
I said, "No, no. That's just the worse-case scenario. That would only happen if we continue as we have been, and don't change the way we do anything. We're not THAT stupid!"
They said that they thought that hydrogen was the solution. I said it might be, if we could figure out a way to produce it that in didn't itself require much energy. That's the trouble with all the alternative energy sources that we have developed so far. The return on the energy expended to create the energy, is much smaller than it has been with the easy to get at oil. Oil has been an amazing gift, in hindsight. Since it's such a finite resource (and one that causes pollution!), it's too bad that we've used up, and squandered so much of it. It's not that the Earth is running out of Oil; it's running out of the oil that takes the least amount of energy to get. Now, the deeper they drill, and the smaller the oil fields, the more energy it's going to take to get it out, and the more expensive it's going to be.
Grain prices tripled between 2006 - 2008. The more expensive Oil becomes, the more expensive, machine grown and distributed, food will become. I told them about what Pfeiffer had written in his article "Eating Fossil Fuels".
They were incredulous. "OMG! You mean, we are all going to die?!"
I said, "No, no. That's just the worse-case scenario. That would only happen if we continue as we have been, and don't change the way we do anything. We're not THAT stupid!"
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