Growing and Processing Flax

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Two-week-old seedlings thrive in what will become a dense flax patch. Photo By Rita Buchanan

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

The species of flax grown for fiber and seed production is an annual called Linum usitatissimum; that’s Latin for “the most useful kind of flax”. Flax is almost always grown like a grain crop, in plots of many plants crowded close together. Each individual plant makes one or more slender erect stems about 3 feet tall, scattered with narrow, pale green leaves about 1 inch long. The stems branch near the top to bear blue or white round, 1/2-inch-wide flowers with five petals. A single flower lasts less than a day—the petals unfold in the morning and drop off in late afternoon—but each plant makes dozens of flowers over a period of three to four weeks, and when a plot of flax is in full bloom, it looks like a reflection of the sky. Then spherical seedpods swell to the size of a pea and turn from green to gold as the seeds inside ripen, and the plants dry out and die.

Different cultivars of flax have been selected for maximum yield and quality of either fiber or oil. Farmers who raise flax by the acre specialize in one product or the other, choose cultivars accordingly, and take slightly different approaches to growing and harvesting their crops. On a backyard scale, it isn’t necessary to specialize. From a single flax patch about 4 feet square, you can harvest enough fiber to make a basket or wreath and enough seeds for a batch of bread or crackers. To get started, order a packet of flax seeds from a mail-order supplier or buy some from a health-food store.

Flax tolerates a range of soils and climates and can be grown in almost any part of the United States. Choose a site in full sun, with deep, fertile, well-drained soil, and prepare it as you would for growing vegetables or flowers. Flax grows best in cool weather, so you should sow it outdoors as soon as you can work the soil in spring, at the same time that you would sow peas, lettuce, or other cool-weather crops. This can be as early as January or February or as late as May, depending on where you live. Light late frosts won’t damage the seedlings.

Rake the surface of the soil to prepare a smooth, even, fine-textured seedbed. Measure your planned flax plot and determine its area, and plan to sow about one tablespoon of flax seeds per 10 square feet. Dust the small brown seeds with flour before sowing them so that you can see where they land on the soil, and do your best to scatter them evenly across the surface of the plot. Then use a rake to draw the seeds down into the soil, covering them 1/4 to 1/2 inch deep. Water the flax patch gently if the soil starts to dry out at any time before germination, which takes about 10 days.

Seedling flax plants quickly develop a good root system and need watering only if the weather is unusually warm, dry, or windy. Pull out any weeds that appear before the seedlings have grown a few inches tall; after that, if all or most of the seeds sprouted, the flax plants will grow so close together that they will crowd or shade out any weeds. Rabbits and rodents sometimes nibble flax, but it has few insect or disease problems. The only common, serious crisis in growing flax is that the tender stalks sometimes get knocked flat by hail or heavy rainstorms. If that happens, use the tines of a garden fork to gently lift the stalks. They may straighten up again, or at least recover partway.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print