Scythe Sense

:date: 2024-07-30 15:47 :tags:

When I lived in Switzerland I enjoyed some extremely gracious hospitality. However, I did try to make myself useful. One day my host asked if I'd help out with the grass cutting. Sure! No problem. He went into the shed and came out with... a scythe. I was thinking, ok, he must be organizing some rustic Swiss antiques so he can get at the lawnmower or something. But no. He handed it to me, and after an awkward moment asked, "Do you know how to use eine Sense?" We were not talking about a little suburban lawn. This was a big field that had been growing for at least a month. I was taken aback. "You want me to mow this field with this tool?" He smiled. "Ja, ja. This is the best tool. You will like it!"

He showed me how to use it and I got to it. And damn if he wasn't right  —  for cutting grass a scythe is the best tool!

Besides being a great way to keep fit, scythes reward people who like sharpening things. They must be sharpened about every 5 to 10 minutes. If that doesn't sound high performance, you can think of it needing to be sharpened every 10 to 20 thousand cuts. Fortunately it takes only a few seconds.

When we moved into our wilderness house this year, there was an overgrown lawn in our clearing. I have actually always used a reel mower every time I have had a yard, but looking at this one, I could see it was covered in difficult long grass and wildflowers and I knew the right answer was a scythe.

Unfortunately, scythes are weirdly expensive. Nonetheless I ordered a Fux Gartensense (from here). Fux  —  an alternate spelling of Fuchs, meaning "fox"  —  is an Austrian brand that's been making tools, no doubt sycthes in particular, since 1540. Apparently high in the Alps they never got the memo that people don't use scythes any more. Thank goodness!

I love my scythe and I think it does a great job. What I really love most about it is not being part of the problem. What problem is that? Well, there are many to choose from, but my observant nature forces me to focus on a specific one. If you live in Suburbia, USA in the summer you will be tortured by the sound of internal combustion lawn mowers All The Time. From early in the morning to late at night. It never fucking stops. It really wears on me. In Buffalo my neighbor had a badly tuned lawnmower (clogged carbs or air filter, something like that) which would operate with a horrible gasping arrhythmic pulse. That nightmare was only once a week, but every other minute was ruined by someone else's.

When my new neighbor's lawn care professional stopped providing service in our area, they called and asked whom I hire to mow the lawn. I thought it might be fun to go try my scythe out on their yard which has gone without mowing for quite a while now. I went over there and silently knocked down their prairie.

Here's what it looked like before.

And here's what it looked like after.

The main part down to the wood pile took about 90 minutes. I spent another 30 minutes hacking down the worst of the overgrowth down by the lake, but I was getting tired by then so no golf course lawn there. I know it looks like there are a lot of clumps that are not cut. I kept coming back to redo a section only to find it was just piles of grass stalks. The scythe leaves them in neat rows for pretty easy raking  —  but I did not do any raking!

Here is a short time lapse video I made today which gives a rough idea of what using a scythe can look like.