Scythes and Oxen

It's TILLERS TIME!

Every June for several years, I have made my way to Tillers International near the tiny town of Scotts, Michigan for what I call 'Ox Week.'  Tillers is an amazing place to learn to do all the really important stuff you need to know to participate in the lifestyle that brought you to the Broadfork Blog in the first place.

I like to go there for the oxen basics class and I hang around for the MODA Gathering the weekend after that. MODA is the Midwest Ox Drovers Association and the Gathering this year is June 21-23.

This June is going to be extra special to me in that I will be teaching a scythe class for the first time at Tillers. It's called 'Everything About Scythes' and you can find the link here. June 14th and 15th there will be a class in traditional hay rake and pitchfork making and I get to follow that class with my hands-on scythe class the 16th.

Take a look at the Tillers site and sign up for a class or two this year.

Gulland Forge is expanding its line of tools to include the scythe. We are making our own snaths right here in Siler City, NC and we will have them on the market this summer. We'll also be making peening tools, hammers and all the other goodies for the amazing scythe. Keep up with what's happening on our other website, Tooling the Revolution

I hope your summer is going well and that everything is planted and growing.

Snow Forking

     Hopefully, this is the last of the snow for all you folks that are eager to do some broadforking and have been, ahem, held up from doing so. Nature has been cruel to my old neighborhood in Wisconsin and Winter has dragged on and on until you thought it would never end. Good news; it will end.

     It will end and the Earth will again come to life with an explosion of green and blooms and soil yearning to be loved and poked with a broadfork. My friend Terry, in the photo above, posed for this forlorn shot in his garden when I was visiting with his family a few weeks ago. In our minds we knew it was too soon to work the soil, but the heart must try.

     I hope it's getting close to planting time for you up there in the midwest. This ought to be morel season, yet you've been forced to shovel snow again and again as the shy Spring weather has toyed with you once more.

     Be strong, as I know you are. Your suffering will end soon and you'll be reminded of the reason you love it where you are so much.

The Human Pace

It occurred to me many years ago that we are living at too fast a pace.  Just a few human generations ago, the fastest person on Earth rode a horse.

We count our travel time coast to coast in hours now, not months. We 'run to the store' to grab ingredients for dinner and often are able to return in time to add them in just a few minutes, really. If there's no cream for coffee, we can set the brewer to make a pot and by the time it's done, we're back with a carton of half and half.

My wife and I have lived remotely for many years and with $4/gallon fuel, each trip to the store costs $10 extra. There's no way we're going to do that, so we plan ahead and don't make 'quick trips' to the store.

A while back, our friend Kaitlyn gave us this amazing World War 1 vintage waffle iron and we made waffles last weekend with it. Karen dug up her recipe and set out to assemble the ingredients while I heated up and oiled the very well seasoned, heavy cast iron kitchen appliance. We keep a full pantry (very full, actually) so there is no running quickly to the store necessary for us.

Our meals proceed at the human pace and are usually begun by prepping with a good sharp knife, then stirred by wooden spoons and usually cooked in a cast iron vessel of some sort. Old ones. We have an enviable collection of beautiful cast iron skillets, Dutch ovens, cornbread and muffin pans, griddles and this incredible waffle iron.

It takes about 5 minutes to cook a waffle and just a moment to pick it off the perfect non-stick finish, created over decades of use and love. Then the waffle is placed into the oven to stay warm until they're all done and it's time to eat.

One at a time, it would have taken a long time to cook enough waffles for a working family on a cold morning a hundred years ago on a wood heated cook stove. It also took a lot of skill to keep the heat just right and the batter just right so that things wouldn't stick or burn. Folks took the time to learn the skills then because they couldn't just go out and buy a plug in electric teflon waffle iron.

When I am dust, my waffle iron will still work and that feels good to me. I hope the people that end up with it when we're gone appreciate it as much as we have. Would you feel good with a Mickey Mouse waffle iron, really?  I don't think this one would last through 2 World Wars, a couple of Depressions, the Model T and the Moon Landing. It's pace is wrong. In a few of years it'll likely be at Goodwill or the landfill.

When are we going to find out that it's OK to move more slowly? Why can't we take more care of the details as we go along and appreciate the Human Pace of living?

Try to learn to understand and accept the pace of a hand plane, a chisel, a waffle, a broadfork, or a scythe.

Learn to build your soil slowly and carefully and let the worms and cover crops do the work for you as you sleep. Develop the skills of those long gone and find the beautiful rhythm of tool in hand and "The grip on Earth of outspread feet, The life of muscles rocking soft And smooth and moist in vernal heat"*

Good soil to you all.

*from the poem Two Tramps in Mudtime by Robert Frost

The New Gulland Forge

There's a new building going up in Siler City, North Carolina. It's the first building that's been built in downtown since the police station, so I have been told. It's being built right, using century old bricks reclaimed from an old factory that was taken down a block away. These hand made bricks were built of clay dug from the Earth in this county and were actually fired on the building site. It was different then.

In a few days, the walls are getting taller as 2 pairs of hands painstakingly stack brick upon brick, mix mortar, and stack some more. The sun is brilliant today in a Carolina Blue sky. Eric and Victor took on this task and they are true tradesmen, very talented at their craft.

This is the new home for Gulland Forge Broadforks. The last year has been one of great transition as we searched for a place to call home. Moving a blacksmith shop is tough on a good day and a smith  has to be careful when choosing a stopping place. We found this town, or it found us... not sure which, actually. Either way, I'll post more on the adventure as we go along.

The broadforks are being made in a temporary shop right now, thus the low profile I have been keeping  for many months. I'll let you know when I am back in full production with a line of other fine tools that I'll be making in the new shop.

Good soil to you.

Crazy Weather

I took the above photograph in Iowa County, in south central Wisconsin on a perfect day in July of 2008. Today, the Ides of March, 2012, it was the same temperature there. It was the same temperature here at my new home in Pittsboro, North Carolina, as well.

This photo was taken on March 28th, 2008 in Iowa county, Wisconsin. I was taking my old BMW out of the barn to do a preseason tune-up on it and wanted to note the irony of the moment. (it's a 1983 model with 'snowflake' wheels)

The crazy 'winter that never was' could throw us a major curve ball at any moment. The last frost date for my old Wisconsin home is late May. I don't think there was a day in Pittsboro this year that stayed below freezing and the lowest temperature we had here was in the low 20s.

This evening I read in the news that a tornado touched down in Ann Arbor, Michigan earlier today. That's just crazy.

I wonder what's going to happen with gardening this year? Do we wait until it's "time" to plant or do we just go ahead and plant now and risk the possibility of losing the early crops? Do we keep the row covers waiting at the back door just in case we have to run out and cover our spinach? Do you have a plan yet?

One Scythe Revolution

Follow Botan Anderson into the One Scythe Revolution!

The One Scythe Revolution is a peaceful movement, kind of like the Broadfork Revolution. I'm a player in both. This is a picture of Botan with an enormous competition scythe blade.  (He's 6'5" tall, by the way)

I started using a scythe when my beloved 1996 model weed munching Stihl line trimmer died in 2005. At the time, we lived on the prairie of southern Wisconsin and I had to keep an acre of grass surrounding the house cleared for fire protection reasons. I didn't want to have another internal combustion engine in my life, so I opted for the Austrian scythe as a petroleum free alternative.

I immediately fell in love with the tool and soon thereafter met Botan. After spending a day with him mowing, I realized how important it was to have someone teach the basics of the scythe to a beginner. At first, there's something unnatural about swinging the scythe, but by watching an experienced scythesman, the pieces to the puzzle just fall together and the tool becomes a part of the body.

This weekend, I have the pleasure of teaching my first scythe class at the Organic Growers School in Asheville, North Carolina. There, I will find a group of people interested in learning about one of the most amazingly efficient tools ever conceived; the Austrian scythe. It's not the tool you find at flea markets and adorning the walls of Cracker Barrel restaurants across the US. The Austrian scythe is different in a lot of ways.

This tool is like a razor blade on a five foot handle. Nothing can compete with the efficiency of a well peened and honed scythe for taking down tall grass.

The reason I felt I needed to teach this class is the fact that most people have no idea that a scythe is sharpened with a hammer. Well, it is. The hammered edge is then polished with a stone and the blade becomes shaving sharp.

Scythe mowing is best done in the morning when the shadows are still long and the dew is still on the grass. A well peened and honed blade makes the mowing effortless and the experience of the world awakening to the swish of blade on grass in the long slanting light of dawn is priceless.

I became so passionate about the scythe that I sought to teach others the lessons I had learned along the way. There are some skills that we must continue to share if we want to make the most of the troubled times we are facing.

When I am out in the field mowing in the earliest light of the day, I carry on fearlessly, effortlessly; body swaying rhythmically in the tall grass heavy and wet with dew. As I progress a few inches at a time, using a tool perfected 5 centuries ago, I am overcome with hope that we can still do the right thing... like we used to.

Get to know the scythe. Along with the broadfork and a good garden cart, it is among the most important tools you can own.

The scythe and the broadfork were perfected in a time when the human body was the only machine available for powering gardening tools. With half a millennium of field testing, both tools still work just fine, thank you.

If you're a customer of mine, make sure you find me in Asheville this weekend if you're in the neighborhood. When I am not teaching, I'll be at the Earth Tools booth at the trade show/exhibit area.

As always, good soil to you.

Gulland

Food by Committee: Prepackaged Beef Stew

A group of great minds at Tyson declared that there would be enough people that did not own a knife and cutting board to support this really crazy idea.  A task force was created and during a breakout session, the ideation team interfaced with stakeholders to achieve consensus to determine the market viability of said deliverables.

"They may have a knife, but they don't have the skills to sharpen it and they're afraid to use it," stated task force member #11. "They are afraid of getting cut and they don't have time in their schedules for an emergency room visit," interjected an ideation team member.

A stakeholder added, "They'll be afraid of bacterial contamination on their cutting board! Perfect!"

The Suit at the head of the table said to his administrative assistant, "Contact the antibacterial cleanser division and have them saturate the target market for 6 weeks before this one launches! This could be BIG!"

A marketing department committee was formed and they sat at a long boardroom table and ran some numbers back and forth; someone made notes and a barrage of emails got cc'd, forwarded and replied to, tallied and analyzed. After passing it through Legal, by the end of the week, a new marketing concept was launched. I wonder how sales are going.

For 11 bucks, you can open a couple of bags of raw ingredients and drop them into a slow cooker in the morning on your way out the door, then return after work to a nice meal. Look, you don't even have to go to any other aisles in the store. We gotcha onion, ya potatoes, ya carrots and ya meat right here at the end cap. We even enclosed a seasonings bag of pre-measured salt, pepper, guar gum, etc in the package.

Don't get me wrong, I love a slow cooker and I love beef stew. What bothers me about this is the fact that with each passing day, someone falls victim to this corporate marketing ploy and is further disconnecting themselves from their food.

We need to get back in touch with one of the most important elements in our lives. If you found this blog, you understand. Try helping someone start a garden this year. Anything will do; a tomato plant, a window box with spinach planted in it, a container garden or a little raised bed.

Please help to get the word out: We don't want to eat what they are feeding us.

Remind folks that food does not come from the grocery store. Learn how to sharpen your knives and don't fall for the marketing tricks the Corporations throw at you. You found this blog and I trust you to promote healthy and real food choices. Be a good example for those that need one. Some people don't know that there is another way to think about what they eat.

We just relocated our little business to the Piedmont of North Carolina, in Chatham County, just west of Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, an area which is known as the Research Triangle. This area was chosen by us for many good reasons.

Yesterday, we went to our first big farmer's market and came home with a bag of wonderful local fare including some local pecans, which I was surprised to find here.

It's warm enough here in the winter to grow things and that's a big attraction. The fact that so many people are doing it here is really important as well. We like living around those kinds of folks and we wanted to situate our business in an area that was loaded with people like us. We'll start growing again this year after a year away from gardening due to the move. It's OK; we're still eating from our garden of 2010 and honestly, a little is left from '09.

We are at the edge of the small scale agricultural revolution. Young farmers are everywhere now, despite the news lately that farming jobs are in a severe decline. You and I are among the uncountable individuals that are taking matters into our own hands and feeding ourselves from our own yards.

This is nothing new; as a society, we just quit doing it for long enough to get out of the habit of providing some of our most basic needs for ourselves. We got lured into having someone else to take care of the most important things. It doesn't have to be that way.

Get busy and arm yourself with the tools and the skills you need to get some food production happening in your yard, or get with some friends and put together a community garden. Make it fun.

It's getting into our busy season in the broadfork business. I'd like to thank all of you who have bought broadforks from us. I never thought it would be this big; before long, Gulland Broadfork #700 will go out the door and find it's way to someone's garden patch.

We are grateful.

Good soil to you,

Gulland