Flax

During FDR’s first administration the program for helping farmers offered incentives to try other cash crops and as usual uncle Carl tried these out. On occasion he grew flax. Some of the flax that uncle Carl grew was mixed with oats, perhaps the oats had been used as a cover crop and the two were harvested together (although my recollection is that the flax ripened later). These mixed oats/flax were stored for a while in the old granary and he couldn’t find a market for the mixture very readily. I think he finally managed to dispose of the mixture for feed in some way.

On another occasion the flax was windrowed and then because of rain it didn’t dry out enough to permit combining. We had to walk the fields turning over the windrows by hand, a tedious task. That may have been the year when the flax was finally threshed sometime in September. For some reason there was a proliferation of crickets in connection with the flax and the ground in the vicinity of the threshing rig was literally blanketed with the insects.