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Tidy up but leave some edges for wildlife
October Newsletter from Scythe Cymru
Category: Hedges and Fences
The Austrian Scythe – a versatile tool
People buy a scythe for lots of reasons – for managing everything from a smallholding to the edges of a heritage railway line. Looking at our site at this time of year it can appear that our scythe use is restricted to the hay meadow, but this is far from
Electric Fencing to Manage Grassland
Another spring time job is setting up the electric fencing on the spring / early summer grazing. Over the years I have worked with it a lot and come to appreciate its flexibility and usefulness and learnt some useful tricks to counteract some of its disadvantages. So why do we
Tracing the Scent
There is a particular spot on one of the Trust paths that often smells rather, well, unpleasant. I walk by frequently when we have stock in the far field and the source has been puzzling me since the summer. At first I thought it was a dead fox or similar,
Hedge trimming with a scythe
Today was one of the Dyfed Permaculture Farm Trust’s regular workdays. One of the tasks on the agenda was trimming the hedge banks of the access track. The middle section of the track, already rather narrow, was beginning to worry car drivers with it’s luxorious growth of bracken, bramble, fern
Mowing at Midday
We have a grass track running through the Trust. We maintain parts of it with a scythe, usually using the clippings to mulch the vegetable gardens. The edges to the tracks are left to grow longer and bramble tries to creep out from the hedges. Periodically the edges need managing
Winter Wood Work
When it is cold, frosty or even snowy winter tree work is a great way to keep warm. We have been working on restoring and laying the hedge that runs behind our house, all done with hand tools of course. Amazing pink interior of a felled Willow limb Phil began
Hay Making 2014 – nearing the end and welcoming new residents
The last of Cae Mari Jones has been cut. Some of the patches that had a lot of Knapweed in have been used to mulch various areas of perennial plants. We have also made a couple more racks, managing to wilt the hay sufficiently between the showers. The patch of
Things We Do With a Scythe 3 – trimming banks and hedges
I used a Styria 65cm blade on our trimming snath to trim the vegetation on a bank in a neighbour’s garden recently. Before… I was walking by on my way to do another job in their garden and saw that it needed doing. Since I had the scythe in my
Making our own Laburnum fence posts
We are gradually working towards using hedges as the stock proof boundaries of the Trust’s fields, both through an ongoing programme of laying and restoring existing hedges and by planting new ones, as detailed in the previous post. While this work is in progress we need to maintain the fences
Edible Hedgerows
We are in the process of developing Edible Hedgerows along some of the fence lines that are not along existing hedge lines. The hedges will function something like a linear forest garden, allowing us to create a higher yield of edibles than in a standard hedge, whilst also carrying out