Flax Season is Springing Ahead in 2025, and other news!
But first, I realized that I never put up a blog about the linen flax processing demo at last fall's Harvest Festival at Gale Woods Farm (an educational farm in the Twin Cities Three Rivers Park District). It was a fabulous event! Absolutely packed with visitors. I send out a thank you to all who dropped by my demonstration area to learn how linen flax is mechanically processed from stalk to spinnable fiber. The farm plans to repeat the event this fall, and I'll continue to blog about this year's crop (yes, there will be one—see the end of this blog post) as the season comes nearer.
I was so busy demonstrating that I never had a chance to photograph the activity, but here are images of my demonstration area:
Perennial Flax and the University of Minnesota
Now, I want to catch you up on what has happened over the past few months. Late last year, the University of Minnesota Department of Horticultural Science contracted with me to process some of their experimental perennial flax. The goal was to see how three different varieties might be processed into textile fiber.
Since the work needed to occur during the winter months, I put a large cattle feeder tub in my basement, put an aquarium heater into the tub, filled the tub with water, and placed three groups of experimental perennial stalks into the tub. (It was actually a re-ret of stalks that had been retted for about a week at the U of M but still were not retted enough for mechanical processing.)
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| Cattle feeder tub with an aquarium heater in the center. |
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| The flax stalks were placed into the water to soak. I placed dish tubs filled with water to weigh down the flax stalks so they would be fully submerged in the vat. |
The process took a total of 14 days, with 12 of those at a steady temperature of 88° F. After the first day, the vat started to show a skim of bacterial matter on the water’s surface. Yay! That was a good sign things were happening.
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| The bubbles show bacterial action happening in the vat. The rotting of the stalks has begun! |
Shortly after that, the smell started. Ooh la la! Our basement stunk! But it was all for the cause of science! Having a husband who doesn’t seem to have a sense of smell helped! My dog, on the other hand, thought the vat was really yummy smelling, so I needed to take special measures to keep her from drinking the vat water.
When the stalks showed signs of breaking down, I cooled the vat down for 24 hours, pulled the stalks, rinsed them, and set them out to dry on clothes racks.
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| I kept the groups tied during the entire retting and drying process in order to know which variety was which. I loosened the ties a bit while they were drying to allow air to get around the stalks. |
After about a week of drying, they were ready to break and mechanically process. Perennial flax stalks are known to be much stiffer and harder to break than linen (annual flax) stalks, and that proved to be true. The cellular structure of perennial flax is different than what is found in linen flax. Nevertheless, I was able to break the stalks down and ultimately release fibers. The tops, where the flowers emerge from branches, broke off, even crumbled, into waste matter. That was not surprising since the flowering branches are the weakest part of a perennial flax stalk. And since there are more flowers in the perennial varieties of flax than in linen flax, the branches that carry the flowers create several breaking points in the stalk.
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| The stalks were very firm before breaking them. |
Annual (linen) flax is pulled when harvested, roots and all, but perennial flax is cut at the ground level to allow it to regrow from the root crown, so there were no roots on these perennial stalks. What remained was the main stalk to finish breaking, scutching (scraping off the boon—the woody matter that contains the fibers), and hackling the remaining stalk matter into fine fibers that could be spun.
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| Perennial flax after scutching off the boon with a scutching knife (the knife is the wooden tool hanging off the side of the scutching board). |
Two of the three varieties showed similar qualities in color and fiber length. They were a dark tan color and fairly short—twelve inches or so.
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| I used three hackles—coarse, medium, and fine—to hackle the scutched fibers. This image is of the perennial flax that was the longest and finest of all the varieties. The tow that resulted from the hackling process is in front. There was a LOT of tow! That can be blended with wool for spinning or used in a variety of other ways. Firestarters and paper making are some uses! |
The third variety, shown above, was quite nice as a potential textile fiber. Although it was shorter than a typical linen flax fiber, about 18 inches long, it was lighter in color and fine enough for spinning.
I will continue to test additional perennial varieties this spring and post the results here as the University allows the information to be shared.
Linen Flax at Gale Woods in 2025
Back to the annual variety: linen flax! Another plot of linen flax is being planned for this spring at Gale Woods Farm. I have been invited to champion it again this year, perhaps once more as a volunteer if funding for a contract position doesn't come through. (To potentially not be funded for my time is disappointing, but I am committed to seeing another crop come into bloom and having the opportunity to share this wonderful fiber with our community!)
The first step of the work has begun! A germination test of seeds from last year's stalks was started at the farm by the garden supervisor, Greg. As of April 14th, 110 of 130 seeds from last year’s rippled flax stalks have sprouted in a flat in the farm greenhouse! We are happy with that response.
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| This image was from April 11th, when about 3/4s of the linen flax seeds had germinated. More came up in the following days. |
There are even several stalks coming up under the greenhouse table rack, where the seeds fell into the underlying soil during the rippling process last fall. Since they are “volunteers,” they are growing quickly in the warm greenhouse environment and are already a few inches tall! Unfortunately, many will need to be sacrificed so the farm staff can get the garden crops started in flats on the table rack. I plan to rescue a few of these to put in pots at my house. I am giving up on trying to grow linen flax in the ground around my home since I have too much shade for a successful crop. I can find a sunny place in my driveway for pots, though.
One More Item to Share
Recently, I was asked to write an article about linen flax in Norway for the Norwegian Textile Letter, an international publication based in the Twin Cities. In the article "Linen Flax in Norway: Past, Present, Future,” along with other pertinent Norwegian flax news, I talk about how Norway is taking part in the Grow One Square Meter of Flax movement that is sweeping the world! Enjoy the article! https://norwegiantextileletter.com/article/flax-in-norway/
