And so, the 2026 linen flax season ends with two plots put to bed 

Gale Woods Farm Crop

To conclude the seed-rippling details, we ended up with about six pounds of Avian variety linen flax seeds after winnowing! Since we sowed about 2 pounds, that is a nice increase in seed yield for future use. 

The Gale Woods flax stalks retted in seven days at an ambient greenhouse temperature of about 80 degrees. 

We pulled the stalks out of the tanks, laid them on greenhouse racks, and rinsed them while they lay on the racks. The drying time was longer than last year, probably because the humidity was quite high in the greenhouse since its plastic cover had recently been replaced, but not the rollers that allowed the cover to vent. I was concerned about mildew forming on the stalks, so fans were turned on to circulate the air, and the stalks were turned every day. After a week, the stalks were finally dry! 

A couple of interest groups came by to experience the next steps: mechanically breaking and processing the stalks into fiber. One group was a video team from Greener Pastures, Three Rivers Fibershed, and the Living Lineage: Linen in Scandinavian Folk Art and Modern Innovation artist project, who filmed me demonstrating the mechanical processing. The second group was part of a Three Rivers Park employee development day, where they spent a day learning about the farm’s activities. 

About 20 staff learned how to process the stalks into fiber, and we ended up with a good amount of fiber to use in upcoming park programs! Many hands make the work light! 

Next, we'll use the stalks in demonstrations I will be performing at the park district’s fall festival on the farm on Oct 3 and 4, and at a flax processing workshop I will be leading at Gale Woods Farm on Oct 24th. Consider signing up for that workshop soon! Space is limited!

 

My Crop from Riverbend Farm

My personal Avian variety linen flax crop has also concluded! 

I ended up threshing the seed capsules by stepping on them, which both crushed the capsules and released the seeds. I mainly chose this method because I had nerve pain in one shoulder, and pulling the stalks through a rake or tine hackle just wasn't going to be comfortable for me. It was a fairly efficient way to release the seeds, although I think it left more debris behind that I will need to winnow out. I still need to complete the winnowing process, so the total yield in pounds remains unknown.

I started retting my personal plot flax stalks on August 28^th. 

Because I have smaller cattle tanks, I used a series of four retting vats to complete retting on all stalks. The tanks fit in my driveway—the only space on my property with more direct sunlight. The total retting time was five days, although I thought I pulled these stalks a day too early. However, after drying them, they seemed OK. It is always hard to tell the exact timing on the ret! I suspect that since the weather was warm during this period and my tanks are smaller and made of a black poly material, they retted faster than the tanks at Gale Woods. Or perhaps being out in the open environment, with rainfall and more organic matter falling into the tank, gave the ret bacteria more oomph to break down the stalks? Another factor for the faster ret may be the fact I used garden pots that weren't completely clean as weights to hold down the stalks in the tanks. I have recently read that introducing some organic matter to the retting tanks helps the anaerobic bacteria multiply. Maybe...?

After retting, I rinsed the stalks and used a mash-up of clothes drying racks and a ladder as drying surfaces. The ladder worked very well since it allowed more air circulation around the stalks.

I have since packed up the stalks and stored them indoors and will be taking a few bags for my audience to enjoy at my keynote talk and flax processing demonstration at the upcoming annual Midwest Weavers Federation conference (October 2nd in Alexandria, Minnesota). 

 

To Conclude This Year of Growing

What a crazy busy linen flax growing year this has been! I must admit, I am physically ready for a rest. The quieter days of winter will be a blessing for this exhausted body! I can feel why crop farmers are happy to have a winter break! 

 

I hope to take time during the indoor season to spin and weave more linen, and I will continue to share the results of that here. 

 

Thanks for following me during this 2026 linen flax season! I hope you enjoyed the journey! 

Grow flax! Make linen!

Where Does the Time Go? The Harvest is Done! 

Apparently, time doesn’t go into updating the blog since I have a major catch-up to do here. The past two months have been overwhelmingly packed with activities and some health stuff I’ve been dealing with. The harvest wasn’t going to wait for me to recover, so I broke down my Viking resolve to do it all by myself and accepted help. (Once again, I am finding out that growing flax can become a personal learning journey on many levels!)

Gale Woods Farm Plot

This crop has been an odd one. The flowering continued way beyond the expected timeline. 

Harvesting is typically expected at 90 to 100 days post-emergence and 30 days after the final massive flower bloom, but with flowers still coming and the stalks still relatively green, I pushed the harvest to 105 days. In the end, this later harvest may affect stalk quality. They may be coarser when processed and perhaps ret faster than expected. My assumptions are based on research I’ve read on harvest timing, but the reality of the crop quality remains to be seen. 

We harvested a total of 158 bundles, with July 29^th as the final day of pulling the stalks. We hung them upside down on the garden fence (seed capsules facing down, which helps the seeds mature more fully) and left them to dry until August 12^th, when we took them down, 

moved them to the greenhouse, and removed the seed capsules (rippled the seeds). 

Summer garden staff, Kaela and Adrik, were my main garden helpers through this entire Gale Woods Farm journey. (A shout-out to Greg, the farm manager, and Hema, a summer intern, too!) Here, Kaela and Adrik are rippling the seed capsules off the stalks.

The final seed weight was 5.5 pounds, with many mature seeds, so it looks like we will have a healthy number of seeds for next year’s crop!

A week later, on August 20^th, we began the retting process. 

The ret tanks are filled with plain well water, and anaerobic bacteria will eventually start rotting away the woody stems.

The entire crop fit into two stock tanks! I will monitor the tanks throughout the next week and test the stalks periodically to determine when they have retted enough to release the fibers when processed, but not so much that they destroy the fiber line. It’s a skill learned and relearned each year, and it always feels like a guessing game!

My Personal Plot at Riverbend Farm

This crop seemed to be more “normal” in that the stalks did not have the same extended flowering that the Gale Woods plot had. Yes, some stalks were still flowering when the harvest date arrived, July 24^th, but overall, the stalk appearance was more in line with what is normally seen: about ¼ of the stalk yellowing and stalks holding a majority of brown seed capsules with seeds rattling around inside.

I had such a wonderful group of helpers at Riverbend, 11 in total, all thanks to Greg and Mary and their dedicated gardening friends who were excited to learn about this unique textile plant!  

An empty plot!

We harvested the crop in two hours! The harvest size was similar to Gale Woods, although these stalks were longer overall. I attribute that to a different soil type (more sandy/loamy than at Gale Woods) and the old “who knows” factor!

The entire crop filled my 17-year-old Rav4 (I love this car!). 

After hauling the stalks home, some of my family and I hung them on our backyard fence to dry. 

On August 14^th, we moved the stalks into our garage to ripple later, when I have more time to devote to the task—probably sometime in the next one to two weeks. 

Flax stalks can be stored indefinitely, either before or after rippling the seed capsules. It is best to remove the capsules fairly soon, though, to avoid critters finding the delicious seeds before you can gather and store them for next year’s crop! (The seeds are viable for about 5 years with careful storage, although they lose some viability each year.)

Come back here later to see the next steps: the continued flax retting at Gale Woods Farm and my personal capsule rippling adventure!

A Final Update! 

2025 Gale Woods Farm Linen Flax Crop

A month sure passes quickly! To update you on the goings on of the past month… 

About two weeks after the harvest, the flax stalks were removed from the fence where they had been hanging to dry. The periodic rains we were receiving were stunting the dry time, so it made more sense to put the stalks under cover in the farm greenhouse to further dry. 

The stalks were finally dry by September 23rd, so on the 24th, I used a garden rake to ripple (remove) the seed capsules from the stalks. 

There were fewer seeds in each capsule than we had from last year's crop. We are pondering why this is the case. There are a few possible reasons. My strongest leaning is that the late sowing forced the stalks to grow too rapidly in the heat of the summer, and that stunted the seed production in the capsules. Linen flax likes to be sown no later than the middle of the spring, since the timing of flowering at midsummer is what the plant seeks, and this year, due to the late sowing at the end of May, the timespan from sowing to flowering was condensed. And perhaps the seemingly endless rain was also a factor. That could have stressed the stalks. The end result is that we will have fewer seeds to sow next year from this year's crop. Fortunately, the farm has been storing a few pounds of seeds from last year's crop, so we can dip into that for next spring. Those seeds will probably not be as viable, as seeds lose about 5–10% of their viability each year that passes. Still, we will have something to sow next spring, even if it may be another challenging crop!

I immediately placed the rippled stalks in their retting vats on the same day I removed the seed capsules. They filled two tanks.

The next step was to fill the tanks with water and weigh down the stalks with large rocks. 

During the ret setup, I was closely supervised by the calf staff!

Then the daily monitoring of the tanks took place. The past week, from September 24– October 2, has been unusually warm, so the tanks maintained an average temperature in the low to mid-seventies Fahrenheit. 

The first full day of the ret shows the beginning of the bacterial action to come.

The subsequent days showed much more bacterial action!

Every day, I pulled stalks from the ret to dry test and confirm their retting state. You want to avoid both under-retting the stalks and definitely avoid over-retting them! If you under-ret the stalks, you can re-ret them later. But there is no turning back from over-retted stalks. 

After four days, I drained and refilled a portion of the water to encourage more bacterial action. You can see the extent of the anaerobic bacteria in the foaming of the water!

On October 2, the 8th day of retting, the stalks were showing the release of fibers in my dry tests, so I pulled the stalks, rinsed them… 

…and they are currently drying once more in the farm greenhouse. They should be sufficiently dry in time for the public Fall Fest event at the farm, where I will be demonstrating the mechanical processing of the stalks into fiber and the spinning of the fiber into yarn! 

Come see the resulting fiber from this year's crop!

Gale Woods Fall Fest, October 11 & 12, 10 AM to 4 PM, 7210 County Road 110 West, Minnetrista, Minnesota, 55364. This is a free event! More info can be found here: https://www.threeriversparks.org/fallfest

Gale Woods Farm Flax Harvest Day – September 3, 2025!

And so, the growing year has come to a close. The Gale Woods Farm linen flax crop has been pulled from the field! 

The harvesting crew consisted of three of us: the Gale Woods Farm manager, one of his crew, and me. We harvested the entire 125 x 4-foot plot in four hours on September 3rd. It was a rush harvest since the flax had approached maximum maturity at 100 days, and there was no time to waste! Besides, it was finally a beautiful day! A rarity this year—a day with no rain and comfortable temperatures! 

Our bundle count was 198. That is almost a quarter more than the number of bundles from last year. Considering the plot length and width were about the same as last year’s plot, the practice of sowing the flax in rows seems to be effective from a yield perspective. 

Some flowers were still blooming on a few stalks!

Of course, this year’s crop had its issues, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. The reasons for some of the quality issues may be found as I ret and mechanically process the stalks. 

The primary issue was that there were many zones in the plot that contained stalks that were fully brown (as you can see in the image above), and they might be mixed with stalks that were still fairly green. Fortunately, more stalks were in the proper partial yellowing state, which means they are ready for harvesting. Because we’ve had such a wet and odd summer weather-wise, I had considered that the brown stalks possibly got hit with a fungus, although I don’t see any typical signs of that in the stalks. There also wasn’t a variation in the germination timing to explain the variation in maturity between the stalks, since they were grain-drilled into the rows at a constant depth, and all of the stalks emerged at roughly the same time. So why did some stalks mature so rapidly? What else happened to cause the browning? Perhaps further research, involving the processing of the stalks, will provide answers to these questions. I am also going to do some testing of the fully brown stalks to see if they actually retted in the field while standing, since some seem to be breaking down into fiber already.

The weeds we couldn’t control weren’t too much of a problem. The stalks were easy to pull, and the weeds were pretty easy to dismiss as the stalks were pulled, as you can see in the photo above.

The farm manager plans to plant a cover crop of peas and grain in the pulled space (see above), a good practice for replenishing the soil. Flax takes a lot of nutrients out of the soil. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Flax should not be planted in the same plot for at least 5–7 years. That has something to do with not only replenishing the soil but also avoiding disease in subsequent flax crops.

Plan a visit to the drying flax bundles! 

Go to Gale Woods Farm (7210 County Rd 110 W, Minnetrista, Minnesota) and look toward the farm fence along the right-hand side of the entry road, and you will see the stalks hanging there until, probably, September 15th or so, weather-willing (no more rain!). 

The next step to complete the crop is to ripple the seeds (remove the seed capsules from the stalks) and ret the bundles by submerging them in water-filled stock tanks. For retting, warm weather is appreciated! The retting will probably happen in the greenhouse behind the barn in order to increase the temperature of the tank water, so that's another location to check out if you miss the stalks on the fence. If all goes well, the stalks may be rippled, retted, drying, or dry by the time of the Fall Fest, a public event at the farm on October 11 & 12. I will be giving ongoing demonstrations of mechanically processing the stalks into fiber at that free event. Check the Gale Woods Farm website for more info: https://www.threeriversparks.org/location/gale-woods-farm

Minnesota State Fair & Weavers Guild of Minnesota (WGM) Presentations

A view of my Flax to Fiber presentation display at the new WGM stage in the Creative Activities building at the Minnesota State Fair.

Thanks to all who attended this year’s Minnesota State Fair and stopped by the new, HUGE, WGM presentation stage! I had a blast speaking and demonstrating the steps involved with turning flax stalks into linen fiber! It really was fun to share the process and answer questions from the public. Other plant fiber presenters during the 12-day fair were Matt Holen of the University of Minnesota Horticulture Department, who spoke on his perennial flax-to-fiber studies (a project I was heavily involved with this summer), and Tom Michaels, a professor and hemp researcher at the University of Minnesota Horticulture Department, who spoke about hemp fiber and that growing industry. Tom even brought huge hemp plants to show where the fiber is extracted from! (I understand that their transport onto the fairgrounds was "interesting.”) Hemp fiber extraction is so similar in many ways to flax fiber extraction! (And no, there is no THC content to speak of in the plants—that aspect is closely regulated.)

Coming to the End of Summer – Gale Woods Farm Flax and the Minnesota State Fair

My visit to the Gale Woods Farm flax plot yesterday revealed the end of the flowering and a moth (butterfly?) continuing to gather pollen from the few flowers that are left. (See the peach-colored visitor on the flower in the center of the image. It was hard to get her in focus!)

Are the stalks even in there? It is hard to see the flax stalks because of the number of tall grasses and other wild plants that have popped up between the rows in the past couple of weeks. This is not how I would like to see the crop, but still, the stalks are healthy, and some have even grown taller!

When you take a closer look at the flax in the rows, you can see that the "weeds" are not among the stalks but between the rows. It's a healthy environment for the flax, even if it looks awfully messy! As Greg, the farm's garden manager says, we will be reverse-weeding the crop when harvest time comes, by pulling the stalks from around the weeds. The situation would certainly be worse if the crop weren't in rows!

In anticipation of the Minnesota State Fair (see below) and my presentation/demonstration there, I have been spinning and weaving last year's processed flax fiber from Gale Woods Farm. 

Here's some of the yarn I spun…

And the weaving in progress…

Come to the State Fair on August 22nd, and you will see the final woven fabric that I created, and the process of going from stalk to fiber. See ** below!

Bast plant fibers highlighted at the Minnesota State Fair!

This year, the Weavers Guild of Minnesota (WGM) has a new stage area in the Creative Activities building at the Minnesota State Fair, and to kick off the new stage, the Guild has arranged many intriguing fiber-related talks and demonstrations. Four of these focus on bast fibers, and I am thrilled to be one of the presenters (see August 22nd below)! Presentations are repeating three times during the day, at 10 AM, Noon, and 1:30 PM. (To find the new area, when you enter the main entrance of the Creative Activities building, immediately turn right and walk that side aisle for about 100 feet. You will see the WGM stage on your left.)

Here's the list of presenters by day and subject (note the ones in bold blue as they are related to bast fibers):

Thursday, August 21

Regenerating Regional Fiber Systems

Presented by Maddy Bartsch, Three Rivers Fibershed

**Friday, August 22

Flax as a Textile Fiber

Presented by Wendy Johnson, Saga Hill Studio

Saturday, August 23

Handcrafting the State Fair Fiber Arts Awards

Presented by Keith Piece, Alla Hale, and Barb Yarusso, Weavers Guild of Minnesota

Sunday, August 24

Adventures in Natural Dyeing

Presented by Natalie Reece, Weavers Guild of Minnesota

Monday, August 25

Cultivating Perennial Flax for Textiles

Presented by Matthew Holen, Department of Horticultural Science, University of Minnesota

(Matt is showing some of the results of the project I was contracted to work on this summer.)

Tuesday, August 26

The Ancient Art of Sprang

Presented by Sharon Wichman, Duluth Fiber Arts Guild

Wednesday, August 27

Nordic Weaving in Minnesota

Presented by Lisa-Anne Bauch, Weavers Guild of Minnesota

Thursday, August 28

Spotlight on Heart of the Lakes Weavers

Presented by Elizabeth Bayer, Annandale Art & Textile Center

Friday, August 29

Hemp as a Textile Fiber in Minnesota

Presented by Tom Michaels, Department of Horticultural Science, University of Minnesota

Saturday, August 30

Hmong Weaving and Fiber Arts in Minnesota

Presented by KaYing Yang, RedGreen Rivers & Mai Vang Huizel, Hmong Museum 

Sunday, August 31

The Art of Basketmaking

Presented by Debbie Johnson, Twin Cities Basket Weavers

Monday, September 1

From Fiber to Yarn in Minnesota

The Bloom is Nearly Off the Stalks

My visit to the Gale Woods Farm flax this morning revealed fewer flowers and more seed capsules that are turning brown. We remain on track for harvesting at the end of August!

The harvest this year is going to be interesting. Because of my tight schedule this summer and the continuously rainy, hot, humid, smoky weather, I haven't been able to tend the plot as it should have been tended. The actual flax stalk rows aren't too nasty with weeds, although the plot edges are buried in grasses, thistles, etc. It is even hard to see how the stalks are maturing, let alone get close to them! 

While trying to pull a few of the more massive grasses, I accidentally pulled a stalk. 

It is the length of much of the crop—32 inches—but branching has started halfway up the stalk, so the useful fiber will only be about 16 inches when it's processed. (Branching is preferred in the top 1/5 of the stalk for the best long fiber extraction.) Plus, the stalks appear to be thicker in circumference this year. I feared this would happen with the wider spacing between the rows. (See my earlier post about how the seeds were sown this year.) Of course, it may not be just the spacing issue that has caused this. Other factors, such as late sowing and the weather conditions, could have played a part. When I visit the flax next week, I will reach into the tighter rows to see if they have more favorable stalks. It was so miserably hot and humid in the field today, I didn't hang around for very long!

An Opportunity to Learn More About Bast Fibers at the Minnesota State Fair!

If you're in Minnesota on Friday, August 22nd, come to the Minnesota State Fair, Creative Activities Building. I will be presenting Flax as a Textile Fiber and demonstrating the mechanical breaking process that gleans the fiber from the stalk. My presentation/demonstration will be on the Weavers Guild of Minnesota's (WGM) new stage. It will be repeated three times, at 10 AM, Noon, and 1:30 PM. 

If you can't make it on the 22nd, there are two other days highlighting bast fibers on the new WGM stage: On Monday, August 25th, Matt Holen, a researcher in the Horticultural Science Department of the University of Minnesota, will be presenting Cultivating Perennial Flax for Textiles. (His project is the one that has kept me busy for most of the summer.) And, on Friday, August 29th, Tom Michaels, also from the University of Minnesota, Department of Horticultural Science, will be presenting Hemp as a Textile Fiber in Minnesota. We are certainly loving the bast fibers this summer!

Sowing the 2025 Summer of Flax 

from research activities to getting hands dirty

The past couple of months have been busy here at Saga Hill! As usual, keeping up with the blog is a back-burner activity. But it's time to share what is happening!

Between preparing and teaching fiber classes (primarily knitting). . .

My linen cloth knitting workshop at the American Swedish Institute

. . . and giving presentations about flax history, growing, and processing this spring, I have been contracted by the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute (AURI) to process a huge amount of perennial flax for study by the Horticultural Science Department of the University of Minnesota. They are looking at the fiber viability of different cultivars of perennial flax, which typically have a very short stalk and lots of flower branching that breaks up the stalk into shorter pieces. (Flax that is typically used for fiber, aka linen, is derived from the annual flax plant, which is taller, has less flower branching, and is more biologically suited for long fiber extraction.) 

The promise of finding a good perennial flax for fiber use is exciting since perennial flax is more suited to growing in the upper Midwest and is harvested by cutting the stalk at the root crown, which might allow the plant to have more than one harvest in a year. It is also easier to harvest with common farm equipment. Plus, finding a suitable perennial flax for fiber use would open an even broader scope of applications, not just for linen but for bio-industrial use. 

The flowers from my home perennial flax plants have already started blooming.

It is very exciting to be part of this research venture! However, the project’s completion timeline is very tight due to a funding deadline. I have over 40 laundry-sized bags and bundles of perennial flax to process by hand into fibers by the end of July, and our weather, so far, has not been especially cooperative for the first step—the retting (rotting) of the stalks to release the fibers found in the bast material. 

I am using cattle stock tanks to ret the perennial flax cultivars.

As you can see above, I am using stock tanks to ret the fibers, which would normally be a great method for retting if the weather were warm. But this year, it’s a challenge to keep the tank temperatures in a good range for retting. It’s been quite cold and rainy for the past few weeks. And, with not enough electrical outlets, I don’t have the option of plugging in heaters for all five tanks. Fortunately, the tanks are black and absorb ambient heat rather well. I also found black covers for the tanks that hold the water at a surprisingly steady temperature, even if it is cooler than I’d like to see due to ambient temperature fluctuations. All-in-all, the next two months will be a time of discovery in the wider world of linum usitatissimum! However, please note that I won’t be able to share my findings, as this is a research project. But perhaps when the study report is released, I will have an opportunity to tell you more.

Gale Woods Farm—a new annual flax crop has begun for the summer of 2025

Due to the uncooperative weather this spring, the planned crop at Gale Woods Farm has had a slow start but has now suddenly taken on literal growth! 

We were coming to the end of the flax sowing season at the end of May, and, due to the weather and other farm issues, the seeds had not been sown yet, so the farm’s garden manager decided to use a grain drill to plant the crop this year. It was the quickest method of sowing the seeds during such rainy weather, and an efficient means of finally getting the seeds into the ground before it’s too late for the sowing of linen flax. (Early spring is the best time to sow annual flax—early April is best for our region.) 

Grain drills sow the seeds in rows, and the grain drill that the farm used is really set for perennial seed flax sowing, not annual flax. That means the seeds were sown in rows that are somewhat far apart, ranging from 2 inches to 6 inches apart. But when annual flax is sown in rows, the usual goal is to sow it in rows with little space between them so the stalks will grow with less branching and support each other. It will be interesting to see how the stalks mature this summer between the wider-spaced rows and the narrower ones. Will some branch out too much to achieve good fiber for linen? Time will tell!

The Gale Woods Farm annual flax plot for 2025.

About 100 lineal feet of seeds were sown on May 27^th, and the seedlings emerged around June 4^th. This year’s seeds came from last year’s farm crop of Avian linen flax that we rippled from the stalks at the end of last summer. The farm garden manager conducted a seed test in early spring to assess seed viability. There was an approximate 90 percent germination rate, so we knew the seeds would be good for this year’s crop. 

The test seeds were sown in a greenhouse flat.

Since it feels like murder to me to toss any baby seedlings, I planted the flax seedlings from the seed test into pots at my home/studio. I’ve planted annual flax in pots in the past, but have found that they grow to a certain height and then lodge and die off. This year, I used soil with no added nitrogen (extra nitrogen can cause lodging). I’ve also learned that even though the roots of the annual flax plant appear to be very short—actually only a few inches long—there are finer, hairy roots that go much deeper. So, I planted the seedlings in deeper pots than I have in the past (in pots with a 9-inch soil depth) in hopes of getting these stalks to make it to maturity.

 

The test flax seeds have grown into tall potted plants!

I might find that I need even deeper pots, as the stalks are now 24 inches tall and seem to be slowing down in growth. Since they have been growing for 60 days (from when they were sown in the greenhouse flat), they are due to flower soon, so perhaps they are putting their energy into developing the flower capsules, or they are stunted by a pot that is too shallow for their full growth. If they are nearing the end of their growth and about to put out seed capsules, the stalks will be shorter than last year’s crop, which averaged around 40+ inches. But I suspect the height difference is due to growing in a pot that is still too shallow for their full maturity. After 60 days of growth, the flowers should be starting to appear, and they are not. As a comparison, it will be interesting to see how tall the flax from the same seed supply grows in the field this summer, where the ground depth is unlimited.

The Annual Flax Crop at the Farm Today

This morning, I went out to Gale Woods to see if the seedling rows needed weeding. A benefit to growing them in rows is that the weed situation is easier to manage. Plus, due to closer management of the seedbed, there were very few weeds to pull. 

The plants are already about 1–2 inches tall after one week of emergence. They like the current cool, rainy weather, so that is a good aspect of this fickle June. 

Come out to Gale Woods Farm to visit the crop (7210 County Rd 110 W, Minnetrista, MN 55364)! You will find it in the field located on the right, just after you enter the gates of the farm. Look to the far back end of the cultivated area. The flax rows are at the far right-hand end of the field, running south to north. Since annual flax (linen flax), when grown in a field, typically takes 60 days to flower, be sure to schedule a visit around the middle to the last week of July. But come anytime to see the stalks grow taller and taller! 

A view of baby flax sprouts at ground level – Gale Woods Farm, June 10, 2025.