One scythe fits all...

We're slowly drifting into autumn, and the long grass in the home paddock is falling over, heavy with seed. No longer do the tiny red-browed finches need to jump on to a blade, at a strategic point, to bend it down, then step on the seed portion and, holding it to the ground, daintily peck at the minuscule grains.

This is a trick our chickens have never mastered: they have to stretch their necks, giraffe-like, to strip the seeds of the grass off in a slicing motion. Nor have they mastered a simple trick that our brush turkey hen, La Turca. has shown them over and over again: how to hold down a larger piece of edible stuff with one foot while hacking at it with the beak... ah well, the things our primitive ancestors knew, and which we've long forgotten!

This brings me back neatly to my sheep, as the poet hath it: ever since our horse Bobby died last July, I've let the grass grow as it chose - mainly for the benefit of the red-browed finches and other birds, because it is a delight to see them suddenly waft up in a swarm from the grass
when you approach.

Bianca abhorrs the long grass, pretending it hides a black snake or python at every turn, and has long nagged me to finally get a mower.

Now, I abhor petrol-fuming, noisy gadgets in my neighbourhood, let alone on my own patch, so I've resisted her entreaties to date.

Mother Earth knew best

Instead, I've whipped out a long-forgotten utensil that I bought some 30 years ago, in the days of Mother Earth News and Lifestyle! magazines but never actually used.

I had, in an earlier life as a vagabond in Sweden, seen the father of a girlfriend in Nynaeshamn south of Stockholm wield a scythe with apparent ease at his sommerstuga in a 'lawn' strewn with big boulders - surely this implement could be pressed into service here?!

So for the past few days, with increasingly bold strokes, and interrupted by long rests while sharpening the blade, I've started making inroads into our autumn grasses - in between long sessions on the LAN and Internet, still trying to coax cooperation from my new XP Pro machine, which stubbornly refuses to bow to an older Win2K machine as the Internet Connection Sharing host.

In the process I not only honed my skills with the scythe to the point where I now plan to do without a mower 'forever', but also joined myriad forums, corresponded with Microsoft et al and acquired, within days of ordering it from Amazon, a brilliant little tome called Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition.

I also nearly finished a new mailbox based on a beehive, painting it red for better visibility on the newly improved, i.e. excessively widened and tarred main road that leads past our Clod Nine...

This racetrack took more than four month to rebuild, a kilometre or so of roadway that must have cost hundreds of thousands to re-shape. The utility is, at best, marginal: the road was quite serviceable along this stretch before the roadbuilders struck.

What is really needed in our holiday paradise is a safe cycle/walking path along the road - and this could have been built for the money wasted on the road itself.

If that hadn't been sufficient, our local council could have saved the $150,000 it spends each year supporting a commercialised triathlon - instead it looks like caving in to the organisers' demands of even more funds.

Natura abhorrit rationem, a law of nature I discovered as a freshman at a posh German boarding school, when I looked at the old world with eyes sharpened by a four-year-stint in Brazil...

Such is life.

Cheers!