Kiss My Grass

My Scythe

This is a shout-out to my friend Nicolai. He whipped up this D-ring for my scythe in the short space of an afternoon. I sent him some photos and measurements of what I wanted, and a few hours later he’d cut, welded and bolted this thing together. And he refuses to bill me for it. Bless him.

I’ve never met Nicolai in person but we’ve messaged regularly over the last 18 months. It began because we realised that we were both scythers, and we are pretty few and far between here in the Philippines.

Scything is a struggle to get into here. To get the blade it’s either a months-long process of ordering from the USA or Europe or asking someone travelling back to carry it in their luggage. It’s difficult to find a freight forwarder willing to transport blades, even though they’re obviously for agricultural use. “What the grim reaper has?” was the usual response. Hoping it gets through customs hassle-free is another worry.

It’s of course much easier to buy a cheap, locally available, probably Chinese-made, grasscutter (or whipper snipper as we call them in Australia). I originally had one of these, in fact, two. The first whipper snipper was great but struggled under the pressure of the thicker grasses here and failed completely when it came to vines and woody weeds. It only came with a nylon string attachment and I spent more time untangling it than cutting grass.

The second one came with a metal blade and was a lot more powerful. Powerful enough to throw heavy, hard coconuts at my knees whenever I didn’t spot them in the grass. I had to wear safety goggles, foam earplugs plus ear muffs, a hat and bandanna over my face, long trousers, long sleeve shirt and gloves. With a bit of consideration for our lovely neighbours, the earliest I’d start was 8am. In summer it was already brutally hot by this time, made so much worse by the amount of safety gear I had on.

I could manage a tank full of grass cutting at a time, this might be about an hour. The few times I tried doing a second tank full I’d wind up on the couch for the rest of the day; probably due to heat exhaustion and fumes. I’d be vomiting and feeling nauseous. The constant vibration of the machine gave me nerve problems in my hands.

So when Monica suggested a scythe after seeing a video of an old pony-tailed guy in America swinging his and not even busting a sweat, there wasn’t a lot of opposition from me.

There’s not a lot of scythe shops around, so I contacted the first one in my search (One Scythe Revolution), and after sending Botan some photos of the various grasses on our property, I placed my order.

Once it arrived on the farm, some six weeks later, it sat for a further month because I was scared to use it. I looked at it lots and set up the handles according to my height and arm length but yeah, it just sat there for a bit more.

Of course it’s impossible to have any one-on-one learning here in the Philippines. It’s just watching a bunch of YouTube videos and reading descriptions of the perfect swing and stance. So when I finally got the courage to give it a try I was fairly hopeless. I’m still probably fairly poor at it now two years later. I’m sure any expert would look at my technique and wince. But I can cut grass.

I start the day early, often about 3:30 to 4:30 and enjoy a cup of coffee and some reading. By the time dawn breaks, I feed the animals, grab my scythe and head to the next section that needs cutting. When I say “section”, I mean a row of grass between rows of trees. I’m trying a type of agroforestry called alley cropping. Often farmers grow grains or corn or some other annual crop between the trees. I’ve tried a bit of this and fairly unsuccessful at it so far. It’s time and energy intensive to grow annuals, especially doing it by hand, so I’m happy with my wild grass and then rotating our animals along the rows. The cut grass is raked along my tree rows, providing mulch and nutrition for the soil microbiology and keeping it alive throughout the dry season.

Starting at dawn is important. The early morning dew helps lubricate the scythe blade, plus the grass is heavy with moisture and softer for cutting. The blade needs regular honing (sharpening) every ten minutes or so with stones I carry with me. Every month or so I peen the blade with a small hammer and anvil, drawing the blade’s steel outwards into a sharp edge.

I have three scythe blades, one is a bush blade, it’s short but strong and good for cutting the thick stems of guinea grass that grows crazy on about a third of our property. The other two are grass blades and lighter. I use these on the thinner grasses, mostly cogon, which dominates the rest of the property. One is longer than the other and so needs a bit more space to get a good swing. The other is my go-to blade, my favourite, a 70cm Falci blade from Italy.

It’s the 70cm blade that has seen the most action and has been beaten up and abused the most. My early days of scything were with the mistaken belief that you need a powerful swing. This meant a lot of hard hits on hidden stumps, the occasional rock, and many coconuts.

So the blade snapped one day and I was suddenly at a loss of what to do. Not snapped all the way through, but enough that it was rendered completely useless. I hated the idea that I might have to go back to using the whipper snipper.

I messaged Oji who designed and built our tank tower, and asked if he could try welding it back together. He’d never seen one before and was quite nervous and apprehensive about making it worse. A couple of days later he returned it, with a nice clean weld along the crack. As soon as I took the first swing it broke again. I explained to Oji that the blade was already ruined by me, and even if he screwed up the blade more with his welding, the blade was still fucked. This time he returned it with a thick piece of rebar welded along the rib of the blade. Crude but strong. Still going strong to this day. It’s lost its tension slightly, there’s a slight kink but function-wise it still cuts grass, and cuts it pretty well. Like it’s meant to. Thank you Oji!

My D-ring, which holds the scythe blade to the snath (the wooden handle) also suffered from my punishing beginner technique. And so I asked Nicolai if he could make me a replacement. Nicolai is one of those people I wish I was, he makes DIY stuff look easy. He’s helped advise me through many projects over the last 18 months because I’m one of those people that struggle with DIY. My attempts at something like welding are messy and held together by pure luck. My dog bed for Bluey has long fallen apart, and Nicolai still occasionally asks me if my under-stair shelves are still holding (they are).

He sent the finished D-ring to me along with a small bottle of smuggled seeds he’d saved from a plant that we’d been struggling to grow, plus fruit tree seeds that we don’t yet have. Plants are the best gifts.

The D-ring fit perfectly, a snug fit and I’ve been using it since. He stamped it with the words “KISS MY GRASS”.

Nicolai also makes his own snaths from guava trees on his own farm, nurtured for years and then harvested when it gets to the right length. By lots of sweet talking his abilities in this post, there’s the possibility I could groom him enough to send me one through the mail next time. He truly is an artisan and master craftsman.

For me, this is a huge reason for embracing a tool like the scythe. Apart from the initial purchase and shipping, it encouraged my conviviality, something I never got from my mechanised grass cutter. I’m a little less tied to mass-produced, designed to fail, oil guzzling machines and instead, a little more resilient, relying instead on the skills of people local to me.