The growing Flax
Galician flax - 29.04.2015
Galician flax - 11.05.2015
Galician flax - 13.05.2015
Galician flax - 19.05.2015
Galician flax - 29.04.2015
Galician flax - 11.05.2015
Galician flax - 13.05.2015
Galician flax - 19.05.2015
A week after sowing and it seems none of the catastrophes I feared occurred. The birds didn’t flood in to eat the seeds, we didn’t bury them too deep for them to sprout, and we didn’t kill them from lack of water. But instead, we did have very hot weather for this season, and just like I saw mentioned everywhere, the flax grew a little faster than it should. Nothing we could stop, obviously.
In the day the first sprouts appeared, I thought we were going to get a patchy looking crop, especially in the parts we line sowed, but as they grew, they ended up evening out.
Even so, and looking at the grown flax one month after, the conclusion is that flax sowing for fiber purposes should be done by broadcasting the seed and, preferably, crossing the field twice in both ways, crossing the distribution so that it becomes even more uniform.
It was in the broadcasted area that the distribution was better, which made the stem thickness more uniform, and the weeds had a lot more trouble growing in the little free space there was.
A flax crop for fiber purpose is suppose to be dense, because this is what controls the thickness of the plant stems and, by consequence, the thickness of the fiber we will obtain. However, if the crop is too dense, the plants have the tendency to lie down, which does not make up for a very pretty field.
Those who have decades of experience on this have their hand trained to spread the right amount of seed with no hesitation. In our case, although the field is perfectly good, I can spot some places were the flax fell a little bit and the first lines I sowed ended up a little bare (just because I wasn’t very sure about the amount of seed to use, although I did gather the right information, so I was a little scrimpy at first…)
Carlota kept an eye on the crop, which is a way of saying she was actually the main responsible for keeping them alive and not letting the weeds take over. The weeding was done by hand not just because the crop was small, but also for a matter of principles - chemical herbicides are not welcome in Serralves’s farm.
By now we know that if we had the field ready a couple of months before, and if the sowing had been done more evenly, we would have had less trouble with weeding that we had this year.
But I’m being a perfectionist here, because I really do think that, for first time flax farmers, we ended up with a very nice crop!
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[29.04.2015 - 19.05.2015 / This post refers to the investigation and activities developed during the Saber Fazer em Serralves program]
