All creatures great and Smallcombe

This was our third effort of mowing the grass at Smallcombe Nuttery, following on from our previous sessions in recent weeks:

• Scything in the Rain (what a wonderful feeling!), and
• Getting in to the swing of things

Today our team was bolstered by three new scythers: Apurva, Cosmo and Sophie.

The route to Smallcombe Vale takes you over the beautiful Kennet and Avon canal, where I'd already encountered a family of swans together with a heron guarding the lock gates, on my way to the task.

With a bigger crowd than ever, we had just enough equipment to go around, with 5 GoodGymers setting about scything, 2 rakers, and our host Keith as a kind of floating instructor/coach/manager/blade sharpener/chatter kind of character - which one suspects is his favourite role.

I overheard all sorts of coaching gems, but a couple which spring to mind are :

• "That's an ambitious scything stroke there, well done."
• "Are you right handed? The safest way to sharpen a scythe is if you're a left-hander.."

Next time, I'm thinking on putting a microphone of Keith, and have him dictate the run report... it'll be much more entertaining than this!

Along the way we found, rescued, and photographed (one of) a couple of tiny little toad friends.

I have a confession to make. In last week's run report for this task, I rather embarrassingly left the job of raking the cuttings up as a kind of footnote paragraph, right at the end of the report ("... and Emily raked up the cuttings").

This week, when I arrived (late) all the scythes were taken, and I joined Emily on raking duty. I have to say, raking is the much harder of the two tasks, and is a highly skilled asset to be prized on this task - it involves: safely and skillfully raking over the entire site, hence much more moving around; having to carefully get in and around active scythe blades to make the scythers' jobs easier; and with the help of a tarpaulin, with Emily's guidance we managed to rake and drag 3 sessions-worth of cuttings into a huge pile on the edge of the site.

Power to the rakers!

Coming up...

Overall, we've probably now tidied about two thirds of the nuttery site. So expect to see at least one more session in the listings. Possibly it'll be this coming Saturday, depending on weather.