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
Last summer, after filling the barn with hay we built an outdoor hay stack. (See here). Here it is when freshly built. We meant to put a tarp or something over it to protect the top and help it shed water, but we somehow never got around to it. Over
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
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)
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
I was cycling home recently when I saw someone trimming a verge with a string-stimmer. It looked like hot, slow and tiring work – the strimmer could only take small bites of the rank grass, it was obviously quite heavy and the user was wearing long sleeves and trousers and