On Saturday 5th July Phil and Michelle are leading a tour of the wildflower hay meadows at Dyfed Permaculture Farm.
This is a great chance to ask all your burning questions and see the home of Scythe Cymru.
Tour of the Farm 5th July
Category: Permaculture
OPEN MEADOW MORNING Saturday 22nd June
OPEN MEADOW MORNING
Saturday 22nd June
Dydd Sadwrn Mehefin 22ain
BORE DOL AGORED
A Late Bracken Harvest
What to do if you’re running low on animal bedding? Go out and harvest more! The bracken on our farm needs controlling, but it is also an incredibly useful resource. Amongst other things, we use it for cattle bedding. When the autumn harvest began to run out, Phil and I
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
Peening to Keep Mowing
Whilst mowing this morning both Phil and I were sharpening more frequently than usual to keep our blades mowing well – time for a peen. Here is Phil working on my 75cm Profisense ready for tomorrow morning’s mowing. Permaculture Magazine are featuring an article by us on peening in their
Spring time in the Garden – Mulched Potatoes
For the last few years we have built an outdoor haystack. This serves as an emergency backup for the indoor stacks should we need additional animal feed in a really severe winter. Its primary purpose is to “store” mulch material for use in the garden in the spring, as there
Autumn Harvest – Bracken
In autumn the scythe moves from harvesting grass to bracken, a task to which it is well suited. We harvest the bracken both to control it in the fields and to use it as a resource on the farm and garden. These two posts about the 2014 bracken harvest and
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
Harvesting and Using Bracken
We held our last scythe course of the year on 30th August. As well as cutting grass we cut a large patch of bracken that grows in the Quiet field. The participants got a lot of satisfaction from cutting the bracken. The stems are stiff and widely spaced and so
Apple Tree Grafting Workshop
Yesterday we ran our second Apple Tree Grafting Workshop. The day started off with Phil looking at the reasons we choose to graft apple trees onto different root stocks. He went on to look at the principles of grafting, including sourcing root stock and grafting material, the grafting processes it’s
Establishing Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus minor)
Spring is well underway, the grass is growing and the Yellow Rattle Rhinanthus minor is germinating in the hay meadows. It is also germinating in profusion in many of the areas that we mulched with grass and hay from Cae Mari Jones last summer and autumn. Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus minor)
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