Serrated Sickle: Reap What You Sow

A sickle, by definition, is simply a curved blade. Arced, sharp and small, it is also the most able, brilliant tool you can carry into the garden. Sickles – serrated and smooth – have been used for centuries in nearly every culture to harvest the world’s most important food crops.

The Caves of Mt. Carmel in Israel have revealed the remains of a culture that the archeologists call Natufian. These Natufians were the earliest people known to have used the sickle, a grooved halft of bone in which short flint teeth were mounted. These sickles are not certain proof that the Natufians, whom we can date somewhere about 6000 bc. actually cultivated grain; they may simply have harvested wild grasses. But it is clear that cultivation soon followed the invention of the sickle and that the spread of agriculture can be traced in part by the diffusion of the sickle (European Economic History: The economic development of Western civilization, p. 10)

You do not need to have a field of grain, however, to make use of a sickle. I keep a 6.5 in, wood-handled, serrated version at my side for harvesting head lettuce, cabbages and fennel. Another use: cutting down patches of weeds that have grown too tall and wild to pull. Basically, anytime you need to make a clean cut through green stem, let the sickle be your guide.

The post Serrated Sickle: Reap What You Sow appeared first on Wilder Quarterly.

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