Harvesting flax, retting it, and a little history, Saturday 18 July 2026

At the beginning of July, I harvested the flax, I had grown in the small raised bed, when all the flowers had gone and the stalks were turning yellow. This may have been too early as the seeds weren’t ripe. I left the flax in a stook to dry, in the hope there was sufficient moisture in the stalks for the seeds to ripen.

When I was a child, I recall a teacher in PE, saying, stop standing around like stooks at harvest time. Before combine harvesters, wheat, once cut, was left in the fields; sheaves of it were piled against each other to make stooks before thrashing (releasing the seed). These redundant terms I am sure would be puzzling to youngsters. As are the terms used in making linen from flax like retting, breaking, scrutching and hackling.

After a week as a stook, the flax seeds in the seed heads had turned brown, and I reckoned that was as good as I could expect, and hoped they were mature enough, so they could be sown next spring. I stripped the seed heads off the plant into a bucket. They are now in a plastic box in my fridge at home.

The next stage is retting. The flax stalks are soaked for a number of days. I am doing this in a water barrel. The stalks must be totally covered in water. The bundle of stalks are longer than the barrel so I am using wooden pieces to hold them under water. Retting takes four to seven days, depending on the temperature.

Over a couple of days, the water turned green and is now smelly and attractive to flies. No one has complained yet. Retting breaks down the pectin sticking the fibres to the inner wood, called boon, perhaps derived from the word bone, suggestive of a skeleton.

There is an optimum time for retting. Too long will result in short, breakable flax fibres. At day three I tested some stalks to see if retting was complete. It wasn’t, and I did the same today. To test, I took some stalks out of the barrel, left them to dry for about four hours, and tested the flax once more. To do this, I took a stalk and cracked it along its length with my finger nails. This cracks the inner wood without affecting the flax fibres. Although improved, the wood is still sticking to the fibres. So I shall leave the flax in the barrel for a few days more.

There are quite a few steps yet before I get to woven flax, and I am not confident I will get there.

There’s specialised equipment which I don’t have. I am hoping I can improvise, seeing I have so much less than a full crop.

To find out how to process flax, I watched videos on YouTube. One I watched showed volunteers growing and processing flax on George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate in America, in the same manner as was done in Washington’s day. He grew flax to clothe his slaves. Or rather his slaves grew and processed it to make their shirts, trousers and dresses, between their other work in the fields or in his house. 

‘let the better sort of Linnen [sic] be given to the grown people, and the most deserving; whilst the more indifferent sort is served to the younger ones and worthless.’         George Washington 1795

With so many steps to go from flax to linen it is amazing that anyone discovered it could be done. Flax is used as animal feed, so perhaps a bundle got very wet, and was left a while. An accidental retting, and the fibres were discovered. Perhaps by an ancient Egyptian as they are credited with perfecting the techniques of going from flax to woven linen. I am doing it much the same as was done 4000 years ago, which is a little humbling. Linen was highly valued in those days, and used for everyday clothing by the better off, for ceremonial wear and for mummy bandages.

Following retting comes breaking, scrutching, and hackling. These stages are about freeing the fibre from the inner wood (the boon), before we finally get to spinning and weaving. I shall blog on these stages when and if I achieve them.