From flax to linen. Experiments with flax - Ribe VikingeCenter

early part of the season. This changed quite suddenly in August when heavy rains damaged the
crop, and made harvest difficult. Grain production in Denmark was the lowest since 1994. Flax is
found to be susceptible to water stress during the growth season, and soil water content should be
ample. Excessive rainfall in the late part of the growing season, as actually happened in 2010, can
lead to a flush of tillers and leaves, causing an unwanted effect for fibre flax, and uneven ripening
(Diepenbrock & Iwersen 1989). We did not observe significant tilling in the flax grown in 2010,
though.
Sowing and weeding
To obtain the necessary density of the flax plants, sowing must be done close to the ground.
Sowing was done on the 6 th May 2010 - a relatively windy day, which did not make this work any
easier. A Danish saying describes that “Flax must be sown at a crawl, while buckwheat must be
sown in a run” (Skougaard & Hansen 1983: 20). The meaning is that flax must be sown very
densely, while buckwheat benefits from a low seeding rate. With the strong wind on that day, our
flax was indeed sown at a crawl (Figure 21).
Figure 21. Sowing the field.
1650 grams of seeds were used, giving a relatively dense rate of 293 kg/ha. Modern
recommendations for fibre flax is typically around 110-120 kg/ha (Pallesen 2009). Sowing the
field took around half an hour.
During the early part of the growth season, the field needs weeding. This was done by the
Viking Centre staff as part of the daily work at the site, and not supervised by University staff or
students. Therefore the time for this part had to be estimated from information given by the staff
working the fields. The fields have been weeded four times, each time approximately 6 hours of
effective work. In all an estimated 24 man-hours were therefore invested in the weeding. This is a
substantial part of the entire process (Figure 22).
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