Goats and Scythes

Yesterday the chickens found their way to our new neighbors’ house.  Hopefully they will enjoy their new home and will provide their new owners with delicious eggs.  The chicken tractor will hopefully provide them shelter for now and a good brooder space for their future chicken endeavors. 

Chicken tractor loaded and ready

Here is the goat pen now set up in the top field.

You may notice something missing from the pen – the goats!  We didn’t quite have everything we needed to have a safe and healthy place for the boys.  We have to find/build a mobile shelter for them and because these are bucks with horns, we need something for them to rub their horns on.  We’ll work on that this week with the goal of bringing the boys over later in the week.  Fortunately, our neighbors are very kind to let us work on this as we’re out there.  With a little luck and a little work, we’ll have the goats home by the end of the week.

The scythe’s also arrived yesterday.  We fitted them to ourselves and set the grips and snath’s (the long handle).  We each have a snath fitted to us – the slightly bent one is cut and fit for me and the straight one is cut and fit for Jeremy.  The snath has to be sized so that when you hold it at rest, the blade hovers a couple of inches over the ground.  This makes it so that as you twist to mow, the blade should glide over the ground without digging in or flying up too high.  While I can hold Jeremy’s snath with a blade on it, it’s really a couple of inches too long – the blade touches the ground when my arms are at rest.  Likewise when Jeremy holds my snath, the blade hovers much too high off the ground.  Fortunately, it is an easy thing to switch blades between snaths, so we should each be able to use both blades with no problems.

Proper fit with blade held comfortably just above the ground

Fully assembled scythe

We have 2 different styles of scythe blade also – a ditch blade and a brush blade.  The ditch blade is the all-purpose blade that can cut grass and small weeds easily.  It is very lightweight (weighs about a pound) and is longer to be able to cut more material per stroke.  It will likely be the one we use the most to keep the place tidy.  The brush blade is shorter and stronger so that it can cut through small saplings (up to about ½ inch) and is what we’ll use for clearing out some of the more overgrown parts of the property.  There is a third kind of scythe blade – the grass blade.  It is longer and thinner than the ditch blade (comes in up to a 36” length vs. the 16-22” ditch blade) and is really only good for cutting grass/hay and grains.  Since we have very little pasture that is just grass at this point, we figured we would wait on getting a real haying/harvesting scythe.  The ditch blade should serve for any grass we need to cut right now.  These will get tested out this afternoon hopefully and we’ll let you know how they go!  If you want to learn more about scythes, please check out www.scythesupply.com.  These guys really know their stuff!

Brush blade on the left, ditch blade on the right.  The red is the blade cover - these guys are SHARP!