Blog
Watching them grow
They are born measuring about 1mm and they grow to be approximately 7,5cm, before starting to show cocooning signs. When I suggested to raise silkworms in Serralves, for textile purposes, I was thinking about starting with a few - something around 150, not only because we were doing it for the first time, but also because I wasn’t sure about how much food they needed and if the Serralves mulberry trees were enough.
No silkworm will be left behind
When the silkworms are just babies, they take up a single tray, and cleaning up one tray is quick and easy. But when they start to grow, we need to spread them along several trays, so they have enough room, and suddenly, cleaning up 11 trays isn’t that quick.
Portuguese Wool - the locks
In the meantime, the processing and analysis of the portuguese wools keep going, down in Viana do Alentejo, in Guida's and Isabel's hands. Here, I'll share some images of the work in progress that I'm following from a distance
Fleeces and more fleeces of portuguese wool
We started by opening all the packages that had been arriving for the last weeks, to analyse and separate all the wools. From the Trás-os-Montes Churras to the Algarve Churra, from the several merinos, the Saloias and Bordaleiras, it was a real pleasure to get to see and touch all these wools for the first time.
Portuguese wool from north to south
These are only a few of the packages that have been arriving to Serralves, from all over the country, filled with raw wool from all our sheep breeds. Since late April that we have been working hard at making the necessary contacts to be able to have all this material gathered, and start what, along with the development of the three textile fiber cycles, I also proposed to do this year for the Saber Fazer em Serralves program: a little book dedicated to analyzing and comparing all the wools produced by our local sheep breeds.
The growing Flax
A week after sowing and it seems none of the catastrophes I feared occurred. The birds didn’t flood in to eat the seeds, we didn’t bury them too deep for them to sprout, and we didn’t kill them from lack of water.
How many seeds do we need and why?
I think the question I tried hardest to find a clear answer to from the people I consulted and the material I read was the exact amount of seeds I would need for a given area.
Flax growing advice from Eng. Flávio Martins
There are books that are more extense on the flax subject, but I consider these written in the 1940’s by Eng. Flávio Martins something special because they had a clear mission: to ensure that the farmers that were growing flax for EFANOR had all the necessary information to produce good quality crops.
Here they are!
Four days after the sowing, the little galego flax sprouts started peeking out.
Flax - Sowing
The research I've done so far has made me realize how complex this little plant is and how the quality of the flax we'll get depends almost exclusively on what is done at the time of sowing, and well, also on a series of meteorological factors that we can't control.
Flax - preparing the soil
Our flax was sowed a little bit later than it should have, by the 23rd of April. The plan was to do it two weeks earlier, at the end of March/beggining of April, but problems related with the equipment necessary to prepare the soil made us postpone it several times, and also change the location, and this date was the best we could do.
The Flax Engineer
When I went to the BPGV to pick up the Galego Flax seeds, and explained Eng. Ana Maria Barata what we intended to do and explore through this idea of growing and processing our own fibre in Serralves, she told me about this colleague of hers that worked at the seed bank years ago: at some point, he had worked in a project related to flax and had developed some equipment that we might find interesting.
Housing extension
The silkworms are constantly growing and the number of trays grow with them. From one tray we went to have five. The number of caterpillars per tray should be controlled and they should be spread out as much as possible.
Instars and moultings
Silkworms, in the larval stage, go through an enormous size increase and, periodically, they need to shed their skin in order to be able to grow - they are born with just a few millimeters and they grow to be 7 or 8cm long before cocooning.
The Flax field in Serralves
I haven't even talked about sowing the flax, that we did last April, but by now the flax has flowered and the seed capsules are maturing. I'll get around to talk about it, but I needed some time to organize information, take care of silkworms and plan a few more things I haven't talked about yet, and all along the flax was growing.
Clean. Feed. Repeat.
During the growth weeks in between the hatching and the cocooning, silkworm rearing is basically about cleaning the installations, feeding them, and repeat the process while we watch them grow.
The Bowen Shearing Technique
The first few times I talked with Suzana about the type of shearing done by Martin, she told me he used a specific technique, called the Bowen Technique, and directed me to this video me to introduce the subject.
Why shear?
The only purpose of shearing is not to extract wool as a raw matter, and I would even say that for most breeds kept by man, that is not even the main goal. Here in Portugal, where most sheep aren’t bred specifically for wool, and where most of the wool is no longer so valuable as it used to be, the animals are shorn anyway.