In which I am excited about tiny leaveses

I went to the allotment yesterday to check up on the flax and do some weeding.  There were a few horses' tails/ mares' tails/ bastards (whatever you call them) but the main weed culprit was grass.

My flax is starting to peep through the earth!  There were patches of little green leaves, little pairs of leaves, all over the place!  They didn't seem to have been munched on, so fingers crossed the Fort Knox arrangements around the bed are helping.  Here are my babies!

In which I am, once again, wildly over-ambitious

Not content with all the crafty stuff I’m already doing this year, I’ve also decided to grow some flax to make linen.

I bought a spinning wheel last year, and discovered it would have been originally used to spin flax – the wheel is much smaller than a normal wool-spinning wheel apparently.  So I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely to grow my own flax, spin it into linen, and then weave it!  What could go wrong?! 

 

Mr P and I have an allotment – this is only our second year with it, so we’re still learning a lot and developing the plot.  I decided to set aside a bit of the plot about 4m by 1.5m at the side of the path to grow flax.  I got my seeds at the end of last year from WildFibres and I dug the bed over on Sunday.

It was pretty easy digging, if I’m honest – it had been used before for potatoes, I think, but there were some nasty brambles and the stumps of some bushes I’d cut down in the winter, including some Japanese roses which cut my hands to shreds.  I’d worked up a sweat over it though, and I’m still stiff today! 

So here my flax bed is – waiting to be re-weeded and edged next week, and then I’ll sow my flax.  So excited!