Just waiting......

The indigo plants are starting to grow, but I'm having to water them just about every day.  The soil is very sandy and well drained so my mornings are pretty much watering, weeding and talking to the indigo.  I've also planted around 30 various heirloom tomato plants, an assortment of peppers and eggplants, marigolds between the tomatoes, red amaranth (a gift from a friend), cosmos seeds and mammoth sunflower seeds.  The dyer's coreopsis seed came today and I'm hoping the Hopi black sunflower seed come by the end of the week.  Everything is mulched with goat compost and now I'm adding wood chips on top of the compost trying to keep the soil moist and cool.  Who needs a gym!

I thought I would share some more pictures from the farm.  

 These are the little indigo plants.  Soon they will be approximately 10 feet tall!

The bees!  Humm....I wonder how indigo honey would taste?

How many of you have ever seen an olive blossom?  I haven't, they are very small and interesting.  Historically, olives were one of the plants the the colonists were encouraged to grow and there were several olive groves in the Lowcountry  but they were destroyed by hurricanes.  We now have active olive groves again!  Check out the Georgia Olive Oil web site.

And finally, let me introduce you to Beauregard.  He is a bottle fed baby and is quite a character, wanting to suck on your fingers and follow you around.   Beau will be the new herd sire as he's not genetically related to any of the females.

Soon I will be posting more on Eliza and her family, as well as some of the other interesting historical people that were involved in the indigo industry in the Lowcountry.

Yay! We have sun!!

It's a beautiful day in the Lowcountry, the sun is shining, there are fluffy white clouds drifting by and it's about 75 degrees.   Here are some pictures of my little indigo patch, I've finished putting goat compost between the rows and the seeds are all nice and tucked in. 

And, here are little indigo babies!

I also thought I'd introduce you to some of my support staff.  These are the silly guineas.  Their job is to eat bugs and the old wives tale is that they keep snakes away.  We can only hope!

The most important support staff are the goats!  Their job is to make fertilizer and compost and of course milk.  It is just so much fun to watch them, especially the babies!  They have very distinct personalities and are very curious.

This little girl was climbing all over her mom and standing on her back.

I thought I'd end with this little girl who is only a week old.  Very sweet!

More to come......

I thought that as we were waiting for the weather to warm up and get sunny, hot and humid so the indigo can grow, I would share more about the historical aspects of indigo culture in the Lowcountry.  I thought I would share more of the interesting story of Eliza and her family and also the stories of some of the other people involved in growing indigo here.  Yes, there is the story of the curious young girl, but, there is so much more.......

Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Indigo

In the first blog post I mentioned Eliza Lucas a lot of y'all might know who she is and some of you probably don't.  So here's her story.

Eliza Lucas was born in the West Indies and educated in England.  In 1738, Eliza's father Major George Lucas, feeling that the climate of South Carolina would be better for his invalid wife's health, moved his wife along with their two daughters to Wappoo Plantation in the Charleston, SC area.  Wappoo was one of 3 plantations he had inherited from his father John Lucas of Antigua.   In 1739, Captain Lucas was called back to Antigua leaving Eliza, at the age of 16, to manage his plantations in South Carolina.  Almost 50 years later, Eliza wrote, "I was very early fond of the vegetable world" and "My father was pleased with it and encouraged it".  In the encouragement of his daughter's curious mind and also in the effort to find a commercial crop to replace rice, Major Lucas continually sent Eliza various plants and seeds to try, indigo being one.  By 1740, Eliza was experimenting with indigo which she said had "greater hopes" than anything else he had sent her.  It took Eliza several years to get a viable crop.  Her first crop was cut down by frost and, from the seeds she saved from that crop, she only got enough for 100 plants the next year.  In the meantime, her father sent  Nicholas Cromwell, from Montserrat, an experienced dye maker, to make the vats and assist her in the process of extracting the dye.   Despite Cromwell's attempt to spoil the dye, the small 1741 crop produced "20 weight" of indigo.  The 1742 and 1743 plantings were not successful, but in 1744, she had a good enough crop and, with the help of a new dye maker, Patrick Cromwell, Eliza was able to produce 17 pounds of "very good indigo".  Six pounds of indigo was sent to England to be tested and, in a letter sent from London on December 3, 1744,  it was stated "I have shown your indigo to one of our noted Brokers in that Way, who tried it against some of the French, and in his opinion it is as good", and in another unidentified letter it was stated "the sample of Indigo sent here....has been tried and found better that the French indigo".  Most of the 1744 crop was saved for seed and was given away in small quantities to a great number of people.  In 1745, there were at least 5 other planters experimenting with indigo and by 1747, 135,000 pounds was produced for export.   On the eve of the Revolutionary War, over 1,000,000 pounds of indigo was being exported from the Charleston harbor.  All this started by a curious young girl.