The Scythe

This is Brian again. (Note: so far, all these posts have been from me, but soon, you should start seeing posts from other folks who live at Camp Pleasant...Adam, Berea, Sean, or Melissa...)

I am absolutely obsessed with farming. Farming, to me, is a lifestyle that strives to live in balance with the ecosystems around you, while at the same time recognizing where excess is and how best to distribute that excess and feed people GOOD FOOD. It is a subtle art of balancing biodiversity and fertility with harvest and consumption.
I like to consider that we are humans that live in a specific age. It hasn't always been like this, nor is this current culture one that is likely to stick around for very long. I see our age as one that is entrenched in an industrialization that is eating up its resource base at an astoundingly fast rate, while at the same time, we are awakening to that fact and beginning to call for solutions.
Sadly, many of our solutions are just as harmful as the industrialized models we seek to replace. So we must remain vigilant when we activate. We should definitely steer this ship away from its current course, but not any old direction will do.

Back to farming. What does all this mean when it comes to producing food on a piece of land? It means a lot. Today I want to share some experiences we are having with trying to find alternatives to using fossil fuels to prepare fields for production agriculture.

In the above picture, you can see "hard red winter wheat". It was planted last fall, by the farmer before us, as a cover crop, and now, at the beginning of May, it is beginning to make seeds. It has only just begun, though, and the seed heads are still green and milky.
We want to plant vegetables and grains where this winter wheat is. Conventional thinking would tell us to plow and till it. And we have used some small machinery to prep some areas like this. But today we are trying an alternative: the scythe! In this pic, Adam is sharpening his scythe. He has a really nice scythe. A nice scythe makes ALL the difference.

Here's Sean, helping out. The area we are mowing will get a few different treatments: some will be tilled and planted into corn and sorghum ("conventional route"), some will be mulched and transplanted into (fun, risky alternative), and some areas we will spread seed (buckwheat, dry beans, clover/rye) first, then scythe. We're also leaving some areas so that we can harvest the winter wheat for flour, chicken feed, beer, and, of course, for future seed.

This pic shows the wheat stubble after scything. It is 4-12 inches tall. Again, having a good scythe makes all the difference. Having a few people working together is a good way to go, too. Scything is extremely rewarding and it feels amazing for your arms and back.

This is the beginning of Berea's vegetable patch. Berea is planting watermelons mounds here, as well as transplants of several veggies. We've unrolled a roll bale on top of the stubble, so that the area is covered with 6-12 inches of hay (young hay with few seeds in it, hopefully). We're hoping the hay will kill the wheat stubble and any weeds that are in the field. We'll see...!