It’s been a varied and diverse year for us growing. Many other commitments, personal situations and the weather, as well as already having a large amount of the Machynlleth crop of ‘23 still to deal with, meant we’ve not grown so much this year, but have some interesting results and lessons learned.

Today 3 of us pulled the St Fagan’s museum crop. This was 5 varieties of seed mixed up, with only one definite fibre variety. It was planted fairly densely in rows, in the lower part of the field which was stonier and more shaded by the large trees beyond.

It got left to 120 days, so we weren’t expecting much, as we knew a lot of it was short and had flowered in early August. But a pleasant surprise, there it was: a good amount of flax with well developed seed, which was sort of the plan! There was a few little flowers still, some was flat and going back to earth, a lot of low weeds too, but we pulled what was reachable and around 40cm or more, some getting to the more usual fibre 1m. We’ll ripple the longest half to seed save and ret. The shorter varieties we’ll dry and use the seed for some oil extraction/food/tea experiments.

We met a new flax colleague Carolyn who’s a specialist in ancient Egyptian textiles and flints, and wants to try unretted green flax – that’s possibly how it was worked pre-spindle days. It was also likely shorter and finer. Perfect! as that’s what we have this year. So she left with a handful of a little crop from a community garden of good 1m + fibre flax pulled in the morning and a good bundle of the fine St Fagan’s flax freshly pulled herself. We’re excited to see what happens next! Carolyn also showed us her ‘twiddle’ spindle, another beautiful little portable manual process, lovely to watch.

The little Global Gardens crop of ‘Fairy’ Flax from Coed Hills, was pulled last week. Nicely developed seed on a shorter variety, that had the white/pale lilac flower with an intense blue centre – see previous post! That will be used for seed and decoration and maybe fancy hamster food.

A planting in Devon was flattened in absence of being checked – rain, a dangling wind chime, brambles, too much shade. That all likely contributed, and so there was just a handful of really lovely long green with seed and another of almost field retted long stems saved.

This week at the Making n Mending club we worked on our distaffs. We also tested the now properly retted Mach ‘23 flax. Two weeks in the tub and it’s lovely. So it just needed a little more time after all.

If you want to join us growing or using flax, or you want us to help you to do it yourself, please email flax@catlewis.com

We facilitate workshops for all ages and abilities. We can travel or you can visit Global Gardens.