Bracken tends to get a pretty bad press. However, we have found that bracken can make a positive contribution to a habitat, garden or farm system. Read about bracken and how we use and manage it in THIS GUIDE
In Praise of Bracken
Tag: bracken
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
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
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
Harvesting Bracken
Bracken Mowing – cut bracken to the left, uncut to the right I have been using our trimming scythe to harvest bracken in one of the fields at the Trust. Mature bracken stalks are pretty tough, so I used a 65cm Styria blade, which is capable of cutting rougher stuff