At the beginning of September a small group of us attended a workshop led by the scything guru Chris Riley (click here to see Chris' website).
The idea had originally come from a meeting with the Friends of the River Frome and Neil from the Avon Invasive Weeds Forum when we were talking about good ways of eradicating the invasive Himalayan Balsam. However, as I am also working on projects on Rodden Meadow and other open spaces in town, I thought that increasing the number of scythers in the town could only be a good thing for our grassland management.
So here are a few snaps of the workshop. It was a brilliant day, luckily the sun shone and we all learnt a lot as well as developing a few blisters on the way. We hope to run more scything events in 2014.
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| Rodden Meadow before we started work |
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| Chris talks us through the techniques |
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| Our tools for the day; beautiful Austrian scythes |
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| Chris talks us through how to look after our scythes |
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| I'm sharpening here while the others are hard at work |
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| And the 'AFTER' shot. Now we just need someone to come and rake up the hay |
If you would like to hear more, or get involved with scything in Frome in the future, please don't hesitate to get in touch on hobbss@frome-tc.gov.uk
