Since I left Zürich, I've been living in the countryside in France, in a small place with something like ~50 inhabitants. In a small house with a nice ~200m² backyard, where two rabbits are grazing. But despite their insatiable appetite and undying motivation, when Springs comes, they can't chew all the grass down. And even if they could, they're living in a large pen to shield them from the local foxes, and moving it around is an adventure on its own at best.
My neighbours offered to lend me their lawn mowers, but I despite those: they're unable to leave more than a couple of centimeters of grass in their wake, which isn't great™ for biodiversity, either eat gasoline or have an annoying electric cable serpenting behind them, aren't designed for anything but plain plane square spaces but I have a lawn with some steep parts, bordering a field, a ditch, … and the noise! The noise alone, which like farts, is only bearable at best when coming from your own hardware, is enough to warrant petitioning for the violent and immediate extinction of those infernal machines.
The solution was to simply get more rabbits burn everything to the ground get a goat use a
scythe: It doesn't run on electricity
nor gas, costs around 20€ second-hand, is trivial to upcycle/recycle since it's
basically a blade on top of a stick, the only maintenance it needs is some
whetstone brushes and a
couple of hammer hits from time to time, is able to cut grass of/at any heights and on any terrain,
isn't significantly more physical to use than pushing a lawn mower around,
doesn't care about random bits and pieces laying around and will happy cut
through pretty-much anything, is surprisingly safe to use, doesn't take space
to store since the blade comes off, …
Learning how to wield it reminded me a bit of learning golf: a single movement, oddly satisfying when done right, yet oh-so tedious to learn yet alone master. But even shoddily wrangled, it still gets the job done for my small parcel of grass, and vehement cutting down large nettles, thistles and assorted low-density-yet-above-one-meter plants is excessively pleasing and cathartic.
For those curious, it looks like this:
Cheers to Skia for letting me borrow his scythe, and for spending an afternoon teaching me how to use it; and to pollo to sending Paul Kingsnorth's Dark Ecology article my way.