Linseed

I have been harvesting linseed from my flax plants; without any tools it is a laborious task consisting of crushing each seed-head individually between my fingers to release the slippery seeds from their capsule chambers, then letting the wind winnow the resulting fragments in the palm of my hand. I've had two goes at it so far and cleared perhaps half the seed-heads. Each one contains half a dozen or so seeds, and there are many flowers on each of my half-dozen plants -- I shall probably end up with a couple of tablespoons of seed, at a guess, which is a lot more than the teaspoon or so I got last year from a single random plant.

( Poppies )

( Mesembryanthemums )