Foxtail and Flax

My name is Alex, and I live in a small town in Wisconsin. I work and live on an organic vegetable CSA farm and for the past two seasons, I have grown flax (Linum usitatissimum) to hand process and spin into linen yarn. Flax isn’t the first thing to come to mind when someone says they are growing their own fiber. Raising sheep or even alpaca would probably be the layman’s first guess. So how did I get here? Well buckle up my friends because we are going on a journey!

Beautiful June blossoms on my 2024 crop of flax

I decided to move back home from my college town in 2019, just shy of being 2 years graduated with an Environmental Science degree. I had gotten myself a big girl job in the Twin Cities after graduation and quickly realized that I was very unhappy. My college friends had scattered to the winds, I had a long commute on days even on days without inclement weather, and I had rescued a fixer upper dog who, apart from work, was the only thing my world revolved around. I decided I needed to make some changes: I wanted to move home to be closer to family and I wanted to find a job that I really wanted to do. Something I was passionate about and found really fulfilling.

That job came in the form of a family owned 10-acre vegetable CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm 15 minutes from where I grew up. I had always said when I was a teenager that I when I retired, I was going to sell vegetables at the farmers market. I mean, nobody makes money at farming so I had to wait until I was done working a real job first. At least that’s what everyone said. But when I looked at the sad, sorry little life I had stumbled into, I realized that I was young, unburdened by dependents and free enough to rather be poor and figure it out than unhappy and financially stable.

I decided why wait until I retire to be happy? Why listen to the people who said you can’t make money farming? Why not just do it? Just go for it.

Ok, ok. Stop trying to be inspiring… when are we getting to the flax?!

I’m getting there I promise.

Some images of our farm’s market display this year

Let’s skip ahead to 2022.

Seriously?! We’re still two years out from present day!

By my fourth season farming I was deep into burnout. Like throw in the towel and get a desk job kind of burnout. The burnout wasn’t directly caused by my farming career; but it exacerbated the hell out of it. It started back in college, working as many hours as possible at multiple jobs over the years to pay the bills. Then at my after-graduation job, taking extra hours, volunteering for special projects, taking on extra responsibilities to prove my value. And finally farming. A physically and mentally taxing job already, I took on after work projects to help pay my bills and let’s be honest here, because I like being in charge of my own enterprise. I raised laying hens and quickly added broilers to my offerings because it just made sense. Anyways, all my pushing and hustling bioaccumulated in my system to a boiling point by my fourth season, and something major needed to change before I did something drastic; like get a desk job.

One of my many solutions was to get myself a hobby. It had to be unrelated to farming and something frivolous I had wanted to learn for many years. That hobby was weaving. And it just so happened that my employer’s mom is a long time fiber enthusiast and she was overjoyed to teach me to weave and enable me into a habit. It wasn’t long before I was buying looms (yes plural), learning to spin and attending fiber festivals, where I purchased raw wool to wash and prepare myself.

It was early Spring in 2023 when I attended an educational talk hosted by my local Fibershed (check out the link if you want to learn more about what a fibershed is), that I learned about a recently formed organization called Wisconsin Linen Revival.

Wisconsin Linen Revival is an organization focused on creating access to locally grown and processed flax and linen, and let me tell you I was fascinated by the idea. I love ideas that have the possibility to help farmers diversify their farms. Both financial diversity and plant diversity. They were looking for volunteers to grow small plots of flax around the state that year to help establish that flax could even grow in our climate. I was in. They sent me some seeds which I received in May 2023 (only just in time to get in the ground before things got too hot) and I was off to the races! I didn’t do much research that year. Just the basics and only just before I really needed to know the information. Nothing like flying by the seat of your pants right? But it worked out, and I finished my final skeins of yarn in the Spring 2024.

Left: June 2023, baby flax plants in my first ever flax planting. Right: Final product after retting, breaking, scutching, hackling, spinning, scouring and bleaching.

I spent last winter hand processing my flax, using tools generously made for me by my Dad. He also found my flax project an interesting one, and quickly volunteered his superb woodworking skills to the cause, although I have a feeling he was more interested in the tools used to process the flax and how to make them than the actual growing part. Fine by me! As I processed the flax, my arms growing first exhausted and then stronger, I felt connected to generations of people from all over the world who didn’t have a choice but to complete this task if they wanted to clothe themselves, their families and their homes. I felt grateful at how easy it is to replace a worn out shirt and I felt a little horrified that clothes nowadays are produced with such quantity and wild abandon that mountains of discarded clothing exists in countries far away from my own. It was a reflective time, as Winter should be.

I also reflected on how to do the whole process better the next time around. And boy howdy did I do a better job this past season. I was better prepared thanks to the process of actually planning for something (imagine that…). I knew where the highest energy and time inputs would be (unsurprisingly planting + weeding and harvesting) and I tried some new techniques and equipment. I had some wins and I had some fails and I took waaay better notes. I will be sharing about all of these topics from this season in future posts so stick around if you are interested in learning more about my 2024 flax season!

Thanks for taking the time to read my very first blog post! My intention for this blog is to be educational and entertaining. It will cover more topics than just flax and flax processing, but should hover around fiber, fiber working, agriculture and maybe even dip into the fast fashion industry as that has a range of topics to cover. I hope that you find it as interesting and informative to you as I envision it being.

Thanks 🙂