Catching Up!

Today I found the first bloom on an indigo plant!  It won't be long before we start harvesting and processing it into extract.

 

 A couple of weeks ago I was given a wonderful gift of some Indigofera suffruticosa pods.  As  you can see from the photo below, the seeds, which are the little black dots on the left side, are quite small.   It took me a while to extract the seeds from the pods.  While working on the pods at night I was clearing and preparing more land on which to plant them during the day.  Luckily I had help from some of the farm interns.  Thank you interns!

You can tell they are Indigofera suffruticosa because they have curved pods.   Indigofera tinctoria  has straight pods.

These seeds are quite robust as they came up after only a week in the ground.  If we have a long warm Fall we should be harvesting and processing until the first frost.

Once the indigo comes up, they grow very fast.  Some of the plants are now over my head.

I've also been introducing some of the interns to dyeing with indigo.  We've been having such fun!

Just a couple of the many things we dyed that day drying on the brush fence.

Emma wants to be a part of everything we do.  I'm surprised she doesn't have blue spots on her muzzle!

One more picture of the indigo.