Thought you might like to join me on my new flax project this year. I've grown flax before, and it grew well, but my attempts at turning it into yarn weren't too successful (in fact, I failed miserably)! This year is going to be different. This year I plan on trying different techniques to harvest the fibres from the stems and hopefully succeed in producing some useable fibres to spin into linen yarn. I hope to try retting some of them in water, grass retting (although at the time the plants are ready to harvest, our grass is usually non-existent because of drought) and I also may try harvesting the fibres from fresh plants. I've tried it recently with nettles and it seems to work OK, so why not with flax?
The seeds went in on April 20th, and took less than a week to germinate. I'd pre-prepared the soil by digging in some well-rotted compost from my heap in the garden and then sprinkled the seeds in rows in a block of about 1.5 x 1 metre. I kept the cat out of the patch by positioning glass cloches on end all over the site. The birds didn't seem interested, so I have a good crop of seedlings. Three weeks after sowing the seed, this is what they look like :-
You can see the cloches at the outside of the patch - I'd removed the ones from the middle to take the photo.
Plus a little close-up of the plantlets :-
I think I read somewhere that it's best to grow them in a block, rather than a long row - they do seem to hold each other up anyway!
So, I'll keep you posted on how they're growing and hope you'll stay with me until I get to the end - the spinning of the fibres!
The seeds went in on April 20th, and took less than a week to germinate. I'd pre-prepared the soil by digging in some well-rotted compost from my heap in the garden and then sprinkled the seeds in rows in a block of about 1.5 x 1 metre. I kept the cat out of the patch by positioning glass cloches on end all over the site. The birds didn't seem interested, so I have a good crop of seedlings. Three weeks after sowing the seed, this is what they look like :-
You can see the cloches at the outside of the patch - I'd removed the ones from the middle to take the photo.
Plus a little close-up of the plantlets :-
I think I read somewhere that it's best to grow them in a block, rather than a long row - they do seem to hold each other up anyway!
So, I'll keep you posted on how they're growing and hope you'll stay with me until I get to the end - the spinning of the fibres!
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