I bought a wooden flax break from 1811 on ebay, the scutching knife and the hackles I made myself. The processing took far longer than I had anticipated and was so incredibile dusty. I can seriously recommend you to wear a nose cover when processing flax. Mostly my grandmother Margit and I were breaking, scutching and hackling in a rotating system so our arms could get some change in action. At some point my mother Dagmar and my father Rolf also jumped in to help. I have to say, it was significantly harder to process the flax stems which had been bent due to the storm, because they were often entangled. In the end it took us 5 days, around 4 hours per day to process all the patches. But the look of the beautiful hackled flax made up for all the work that we went through!

In the next and also final post of this series you can read about the analysis of the yield of each field.