An appreciation for petrol

This is the first time we have grown flax in a farm setting as opposed to a large garden. It has provided much awe for previous generations who farmed without fossil fuel help, given how much easier petrol powered machines make the process. A huge digger removed the grass layer and revealed some lovely soil, Zoe then roped in her teenage son to help cultivate this using a rotavator. No-till farmers may cringe at this but flax requires a ‘fine tilth’ and makes up for the ploughing by leaving its roots in the ground afterwards - hugely helpful to the next crop and mycorrhizal in the soil.

Sophie and her family joined in the following weekend and we used our bare armed strength to rake and used our hand held Polish seed drill to sow 4 different varieties of flax seed. One of the beds is a little stoney and the other a bit rooty and slightly damper. It will be interesting to see how the different varieties grow, how they compare to the variety we grew last year and the resulting fineness of the fibre.

Seed sowing and ‘science’

There are many variables that affect flax fibre outcomes and so we are starting to keep detailed spreadsheets - trying to do ‘science’ as Ruth, one of the wonderful growers we are working with, dryly stated. Ruth of Fresh and Green Vegetables CSA prepped her grade 1 soil beautifully with lots of power harrowing. We wish to find out how various varieties grow on her East Devon farm. Ruth captured us scratching our heads ‘doing maths’- working out the seeding rate using different seeding plates.

(Note for farm and seed geeks: we found that the beets/chard plate with 3 holes closed off seemed to work for the Earthway seeder. Ross at the Apricot Centre Dartington, used the fancier Jang and found that using the R-12 roller with the gearing 14 on the front wheel and 9 on the back provided the highest output).

We also created a flax sowing dance based on a ‘high knees’ marching around the field tradition from Sweden. We skipped with high hands and knees singing Satish Kumar’s ‘Beautiful” song to encourage the flax to grow tall. We are sure this new tradition will evolve and any input is very welcome!

The dances worked and the flax has germinated, yay! thankfully watered in by the rain goddess. Normally VERY wet Devon has been VERY dry this month so we may need to set up irrigation for the baby flax. Once it’s bigger it can manage very well without much water.

Indigo babies

Indigo babies are underway. 4 varieties of hundreds of tiny plants are repotted and happy in the warm and wet greenhouse. They will be planted out in early June and we have lots more ‘science’ planned to learn how flax and indigo grow together, exploring potential synergies in growing and processing. More on this soon.

Sophie and Zoe spent a day with Babs Behan in a beautiful setting on Dartmoor learning about the joys of indigo, its magical ways and how many plants you actually need to grow to make a vat (guess what - it’s a very big number!).

Production Progress

In mid May we are building our breaking machine. Nick finalised the breaker wheels and collected the poles from a Totnes welder. There is a massive pile of parts accumulating in Zoe’s living room ready to be taken to the farm to assemble.

Health & Safety Update

Big news: we bought a fire extinguisher, fire blanket and wall mountable first aid kit, this makes us truly ready to go. None of this is chemical free and breaks our avoidance of plastic immediately but this will be the first of many pragmatic compromises. We’ve also added a tick removing tool, apparently very important for landworkers. Lymes disease recently struck one of our fellow flaxers and warnings are being shared about infectious ticks that don’t cause the tell tale rings around a bite.

A top tip heard on whatsapp: if you remove a tick, stick it on a calendar the next day and then if any symptoms develop or you have any concerns you have the creature to be tested.

What we’re enjoying:

Zoe read “On the Eighth Day, God created allotments’ - a brief history of the allotments movement by David Boyle. It explains where the term ‘3 acres and a cow’ came from and provides a lot of context around access to land in the UK.

https://david-boyle.co.uk/history/eighth-day

Zoe repotted the indigo listening to ‘My Albion’ a series by folk commentator Zakia Sewell for the BBC broadcast in 2020 but feels very relevant today. Intense and intelligent thinking around Britishness that feels even more charged 6 years on.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000pffy

Sophie has been reading Babs Behan book on ‘Botanical Dyes’ and exploring naturally occurring substantive dyes that don’t need a mordant and grow in Devon. She is inspired by the most beautiful pinks, yellows and olives coming from hawthorn bark, blossom, leaves and berries.

https://www.botanicalinks.com/books

Nick has been reading Brian Merchant’s book on the Luddites, Blood in the Machine. He will share more about what the Luddites can teach us about our relationship with technology in an upcoming post (spoiler alert: you can be a machine building Luddite!)

Blood in the Machine

One year of Blood in the Machine (the book)

Hello friends…

Read more

2 years ago · 49 likes · 12 comments · Brian Merchant

Nick especially enjoyed this episode of Downstream about the supply chains that produce Lithium-Ion batteries and how China has come to dominate their production so completely. The discussion covers neo-colonial mining behaviour in Congo, but also the culture of engineering and manufacturing that the global North has so distanced itself from in recent years. Another surprising insight was that the margins on production are so small, that even at scale the industry is unattractive to a typical investor and would not have gotten off the ground without Chinese state support (yet more evidence of how markets fail us).

We are looking forward to the warmer weather on its way but hope it’s not so warm that the baby flax suffers.

Till next time.

Zoe, Sophie, Nick xxx

Ps. we plan to send monthly light hearted updates with longer form, thoughtful articles peppered throughout the year. Thank you for reading.

So who are we?

We are Sophie Scanlon, Nick Evans and Zoe Gilbertson and together we make up Common Cloth Works, a new form of enterprise growing seed into cloth in our local bioregion. These linen letters will provide short monthly updates of the development and progress of our newly developing Flax to Linen Fibre Production Hub near Totnes in Devon.

We are a small cooperative, a collective commons. Three people with distinct talents, skills and personalities with a shared intention to make wonderful things from flax. We will make products that require a market, price or exchange value but we will do this with care and consideration.

What are we doing?

We are practicing textile agroecology in partnership with our local landscape. We will demonstrate that small-scale growing and production of flax and linen is possible within a tiny radius of our farm. We will not extract from other people or places, we will grow and make everything right here where we live.

Our vertically-integrated, holistic-approach integrates ecological flax growing, careful energy and water use to enable hyper-local, decentralised small-batch fibre and linen production. This goes against current economic logic but in a highly illogical and uncertain world we believe our approach will build resilience over the long term.

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Why are we different?

We are a social and ecological enterprise. Our name Common Cloth Works contains layers of meaning, referencing common flora, commoning and the common good. We are referencing a time where industrial ‘works’ provided a range of useful goods and services to local people and consumerism was less extreme.

We are willing to trade some ‘efficiencies’ of production - prioritised in capitalist systems - for better quality goods full of character, beauty and utility with wide ranging ecological and social benefits.

Establishing a micro manufacturing facility, a maker studio, a farm, a community, a new way of being is no small undertaking. We have been researching and practising aspects of this ‘thing’ we are about to do for a long time and it’s all coming together.

Our machinery and processes are experimental and unique and we will document our journey and what unfolds in real time. Our governance and processes will also reflect our values and support our administrative needs.

How should we communicate?

One of our big questions is how to communicate what we are doing in a way that aligns with our values. Substack is sliding ever closer to replicating social media reliant on videos, algorithms and cynical hooks but for now it is convenient as a form of digital letter. We plan to avoid Instagram (we hope!), we won’t knowingly use ai. Like most things in life, a compromise must be found between practicality and radicality and to balance this we hope to rely on word of mouth, printing, paper and postcards as our main form of communication.

We are using our physical bodies to form physical goods made from materials grown in our local environment.

We will use our own brains to think, reflect and work out how to spread the word. We are already embedded within a real community, a place full of good people, and we hope our difference will cut through the digital noise. Of course we may need to compromise, we are pragmatists not zealots but let’s see how we go.

Creating livelihoods

The three of us in the collective support ourselves with income from part-time jobs but a proper ‘living’ must be on the near horizon. We have small amounts of grant funding from foundations who believe in our vision, we hope this will increase but we plan to become a ‘viable entity’ within a few years. We don’t know exactly what that looks like yet but our vision, expertise and determination will take us there.

We have benefactors letting us use their land in exchange for our help with creative ideas, we have mentors supporting our business development. Most importantly, we are connected to a global community of like minded flax practitioners with whom to share knowledge (like weird old books from 1777, photos of strange flax fungus or clever weeding tricks).

Why do we need this?

Our western ‘civilisation’ feels at breaking point. There is a need for a radical rethink through projects that can expedite change, prepare for future eventualities but are able to simultaneously operate in the current dynamic and multiple realities. We believe we can do this.

To follow our journey of new ways of being, doing and making things please sign up and share widely. We try not to mention the big F word (fashion) but we will mention the small f (flax) quite a lot. We acknowledge we are entangled in a world of clothing that needs changing through immersing ourselves in soil, land, experimentation and community. Join us to explore how we untangle ourselves and create stronger, more resilient local systems of production.

We are practicing textile agroecology in partnership with our bioregion, demonstrating that small-scale growing and production of flax, natural dyes and linen is possible within a tiny radius of a local landscape.

We run a vertically-integrated, holistic textile enterprise that integrates ecological flax growing, careful energy and water use to enable hyper-local, decentralised small-batch production.

Our name contains layers of meaning, referencing common flora, commoning and the common good. We are referencing a time where industrial ‘works’ provided a range of useful goods and services to local people and consumerism was less extreme.

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to follow our journey in developing agroecological ways of being, doing and making.

Subscribe now