It's finally time to harvest my Japanese Indigo! This video is part one of my new indigo series and an integral part of my Tending a Handmade Life mission.
It seems like it took forever to finally take off, but the day is finally here to do my first cutting of the season. My little raised bed indigo patch is pretty small, but yielded a sizeable harvest. I started the Japanese indigo/persicaria tinctoria and indigofera suffruticosa in a seed tray back in late April. Our climate is much cooler than what I had been used to for the last couple of growing seasons in North Central Florida, so growth was much slower. The Japanese indigo has done quite well, but the second variety I'm growing, the more tropical indigofera suffruticosa, is taking much longer to get to harvesting size. Time will tell if/when it gets there.
In this video, I harvest the indigo and start soaking the leaves in water from my small creek. Adding to the adventure, this is the first time I'll be using something other than city/chlorinated water for the whole process. I'm using creek water for the soak and will be using our well water when I create my vats. I'm excited to see what sort of difference, if any, I notice in the qualities of the dye.
Videos to follow will be the aqueous extraction process, creating dye vats and the dyeing of assorted cloth ... linen to cotton to silk.
So that's it for now! Stay tuned for the next in the series, when the indigo magic really starts to happen!
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Music: End Of The Road (Instrumental) by Anthem of Rain
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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#japaneseindigo #naturaldyes #ruralliving