Learning to grow flax - the beginning

It was beautiful, last saturday, spending the morning with more than 20 people eager to learn how to grow their own flax and process it into linen.
This day was the beginning of our flax production course, that will last until mid July, and that I'm coordenating thanks to the support of Vila Nova de Famalicão city, through the Museum of the Textile Industry and the Parque da Devesa.
In this course, more than learning through the experience of growing your own flax, we'll learn from the experience and knowledge of those that have been doing this for many years.

Our flax will grow side by side with Famalicão's urban gardens, which gives the right message about the importance of owning our own means of production for textile fibers, as well as for food.

To open the course, I invited Eng. António Silva to come and teach us about what he worked on for decades. We talked about flax, commercial and regional varieties, the sowing and a lot more.
The seed that we used, for a portuguese regional variety of flax called Linho Galego, descends from the seed gathered by Eng.Silva himself back in 1987-89 and deposited in our national seed bank. This just shows the importance of this kind of work.

Being that we started too close to the right time for the sowing, Eng.Marisa, who is responsible for managing the urban gardens among other things, prepared the soil for us beforehand. One important detail is that we're growing flax in organic agriculture, so Marisa had to adapt the technical knowledge from conventional flax growing to meet the organic agriculture standards, especially when it comes to soil preparation, fertilization and fighting diseases and pests. I think this adds another layer of relevancy to what's being done here.

It was a challenge having so many people sowing at the same time. Usually, in a smaller crop as our own, only one person broadcasts the seed (usually the one that has a better trained hand to get the sowing density right), but there's no better way of learning than by doing it ourselves. So, let's wait for the plants to show up and see what we got.