My flax crop this year has been sorely neglected due to a pinched nerve in my upper back that had me out of commission for about 6 weeks in June and July. However, despite the weeds and lack of TLC, the flax started to bloom on the first of July. Here are some buds getting ready to flower:
Here’s the whole bed on July 1st. The main weeds are campion and lambsquarters, with lesser amounts of plantain and dock.
By July 10th the flax was in full bloom. Here are a couple photos of the flax flowers against the sky. It was a beautiful morning, and the flax flowers were gorgeous. The type I am growing this year is called Electra, and as you can see it is a blue-flowering type:
The flax plants are not really gigantically tall! I knelt down so I could frame them against the sky. Trying to photograph the flax flowers amidst all the other plants didn’t work very well. Looking at the flowers against the sky really captures their luminous beauty.
Here are two others views of the plot on July 10th. The campion is the white-flowering plant. Despite the fact that I wish there wasn’t so much of it, it is beautiful in its own right. The mix of lambsquarters and campion with the Electra blue is actually very pretty:
An interesting phenomenon that I observed in the plot is that there were fewer weeds on the eastern end, which is shaded by trees until late morning. I don’t know if this was due to something Ryan did with his cultivation last year, or if the additional shade discouraged the weeds. Without the other plants, you get a better sense of the low germination rate I got with the Electra. In the area where you can see bare ground, the only plants growing are the flax plants:
The low germination rate is due to the age of the seed. It’s from 2012. Jeff Silberman at FIT, who gave me this Electra, is growing from the same stock this year, and I gather he has had a similar rate of germination. I guess we now know the limit of viability for storing flax seed at ambient temperatures. In retrospect, when I replanted I should have put in more like thirty pounds. Live and learn!