[MRM]

My family had one or more on the farm I grew up on. we had a lot of hills and valleys where you couldn't mow the weeds. My dad had grown up in the era where people used them to harvest grain, so he wanted to try one on our farm.

It was kind of fun to play around with but it wasn't much good for weed clearing, especially on uneven ground. It's so heavy and with the two handles, it's awkward to maneuver. My impression was that it was suited to cutting grain or hay on a flat field where keeping the stems or stalks in a uniform direction was important. For weed cutting nothing ended up beating an old long-handled weed cutter that was basically a golf club handle with a blade instead of the club head.

There definitely is a learning curve to it. I tried to cut hay with it a few times just for fun. At first the hay is a less risk of getting cut that your own legs. After a while you progress to making a mess of what you're trying to cut, and eventually you get the hang of drawing the blade at the correct angle to cut the stems so they fall where they're cut. It takes a while to figure out how to use the ergonomics of the device so it works for you, not against you, because it's not intuitive.

From what I recall a lot of the trick was to let the scythe do as much of the work as possible. You need to keep it pretty parallel to the ground and low. You pull the scythe toward you, level to the ground, in a slight arch. You can't cut more than a certain length away from your body, even though you feel like you should be able to. A lot of the effort and frustration comes from trying to take too big of a swing.

EDIT: the weed cutter above is what we always used to clear weeds instead of the scythe unless we were just having fun.