Scything, Permaculture, & Grass-based Food Systems | A Mini Video Essay

Hello and a very warm welcome to an early May morning at my experimental permaculture growing site, Danneronan, based in Midwest Wales, just a mile up from the sea. The site focuses on a perennial first strategy, utilising grass and wood chips as the primary source of mulch and compost ingredients, which in turn are used for productive annual crop production. For those of you who may not know much about permaculture, it is a design system inspired by natural patterns and processes for resilient and regenerative land use, living and communities. One of the primary principles of permaculture is the idea of stacking functions. This looks beyond the single utility of an element. For example, a polytunnel is not just there to help grow warm weather crops over summer. It helps you start seedlings earlier in the season, acts as a garden office, provides a dry area for storage, enables you to enjoy winter salads, provide shelter from wind, house chickens over winter, isolate crops for seed saving, amongst many other additional functions. Another core principle of permaculture is integrate rather than segregate. In its simplest form, this is understanding how all the individual elements of your garden or farm can be best linked together in a way that reduces as much work as possible. Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle. When you're creating a jigsaw, you look out for the pieces that best fit together, and the more pieces that are placed down, the clearer the picture becomes. When applied to a farm, the clearer how each piece of the system interacts with others, the greater the efficiency. Stacking functions enhances the principle of integrate rather than segregate, and mirrors the permaculture ethos of mimicking natural ecosystems, where everything is interconnected and works towards a dynamic equilibrium. Integrate rather than segregate creates breadth, like a wide web of interaction, and stacking functions create depth. I believe that permaculture design can be distilled down to these two principles, and promote an efficient and productive system. Perhaps the most important tool for the efficiency and productivity of my project site is the scythe. More specifically, the Austrian scythe, a tool that has existed for around 500 years. A scythe is light, it needs no fuel or battery, that's you. It is quiet when it works, you can use it for short intense stints if you need to quickly do some work, or you can take your time and let the momentum of your body move the blade almost effortlessly, allowing the scythe to enter a flow state and work for many hours of a day. Your only responsibility is to look after the blade of that scythe, and if you do that, the scythe will work hard for you whenever you need it. You're currently watching me scythe around some of the 27 fruit trees growing in one of my orchards. In the medium term, half of the orchard will have grass kept low to use as an outdoor learning slash relaxation area, and the other half will be planted up with experimental planting guilds. Whilst this is something I could do now, my site priorities have been getting as many of the keystone perennials in as possible, and then adding the details afterwards. I've been scything for around eight years, and in that time it has provided me with some important realisations around scale, and how the tools we have access to can influence the scale of the land that we work on. You see, my real passion for growing food is in the design and design implementation of edible landscapes. I love growing food in my kitchen garden, but my fascination is about areas of land that can provide nourishment for communities whilst improving soil health and biodiversity and bio-abundance. Whilst I personally am not in the right stage of life to have a, and please take this very loosely, a commercial operation when it comes to producing food, i.e. a small farm, I am using this site to explore and experiment. To be transparent, if I didn't have a YouTube channel and write books, the context of this site would be very different, which would influence a very different land design, even though I'd be working from the exact same set of permaculture design principles. I guess I could say that I'm treating the site a bit like a sketchbook. I'm seeing what works, what doesn't, tinkering with ideas, and most importantly, not taking it too seriously, or at least try and refrain from the pressure of everything having to be a success. By doing this, in theory, I create more mental space to have the clarity to come to conclusions, and one of the conclusions that I've come to is I really believe that the UK completely underestimates just how powerful and important grass is for resilient food systems. Now obviously this statement would need a whole book to explore it, but I'll just give you a micro example. So I've been clearing the grass around the stems of the fruit trees to reduce competition, and then use some of that grass to mulch those very fruit trees in order to improve moisture retention should there be drought-like conditions, to provide fertility to the tree, and to ensure there is a clear stem for good health and hygiene. The excess grass is then collected, and I take this to the chickens. The chickens will eventually help turn this grass into compost, and in the process they feed on the seeds and bugs resulting in eggs, and the compost goes to feeding the annual crops over the long term. In the short term, the eggs feed me, they give me the fuel to operate the scythe, the scythe cuts the grass, and the grass creates compost material for the chickens. There you have a small-scale example of a grass-based food system where I'm stacking the functions of grass, integrating it with other elements such as the chickens, and obtaining multiple harvests. Compost into tomatoes, grass seeds into eggs, and mulch into apples. And that is why a scythe to me is my most important tool for this scale of growing and in this context. I'm experimenting with this new video style and so I'd love to hear your feedback, and stay tuned for more videos exploring the fascinating world of permaculture.