Two adult ladybugs on the stalks of a Japanese indigo plant.

Japanese Indigo Vs. Whitefly

This post is one of the many posts I’ve been meaning to write since 2024. A long time ago. We don’t know how long. Well, OK, in this case we do know how long, thanks to math and calendars and our lived experience.

Why post now? Because 2024 wasn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with a whitefly problem, and I am pretty sure it won’t be the last, so it still seems worth documenting.

Over Memorial Day Weekend of 2024, while I was busy at Massachusetts Sheep and Woolcraft Fair, my Japanese indigo seedlings got exposed to too much sunshine. I was dismayed to find them shriveled and crispy when I got home, but they bounced back quickly thanks to the loving ministrations of my partner Matthew, who watered them and put them in the shade.

Here’s what that recovery looked like: Shriveled leaves of Japanese indigo seedlings along with newly formed green leaves.

The shriveled up leaves just fell off and the new growth emerged from the joints or nodes along the stem. At the time I didn’t notice the suspicious little white blobs. I was just worried about heat stress on the plants, and relieved that they recuperated. But I should have paid closer attention!

About a week later, on June 1st, I noticed suspicious white fuzz. This was also the time of year that thick rings of yellow-green pollen were circling the puddles in the parking lot and cottonwood fluff was blowing everywhere and accumulating like mini snow drifts. There were a lot of gunky, airborne plant-parts settling on things in general, but I finally noticed that this wasn’t cottonwood fluff. Here are a couple photos of the fuzz:

A fibrous white fuzz clings to a spindly Japanese indigo seedling.

Thin filaments of white fuzz are sticking to light green leaves of Japanese indigo seedlings.

Closer inspection revealed whitefly larvae. I had trouble getting my phone to focus on the teensy white blobs, so this not the most in-focus image. But you get the idea:

Also, there was a sticky sheen of honeydew on the leaves. It’s both a visual and a tactile clue. Obviously the tactile quality is missing here, but just imagine the stickiness:

Bright green Japanese indigo seedling leaf with a sheen of sticky honeydew.

Here are the whitefly larvae backlit from the other side of the leaf:

Yellow sunlight shines through a green leaf casting shadows on tiny insect larvae.

So, I read up about dealing with whitefly and decided that physical removal was my best option. I sprayed the leaves with water using a spray bottle, gently smooshed the larvae with my fingertips, and wiped off the leaves with a wet paper towel. This was on June 2nd.

At first I didn’t think that was going to work. The stress of the whitefly attack so soon after the stress of the sunburn put the plants into a physical stance that almost looked like a scream, like the plant equivalent of AHHHHGGG!!!!! The leaf color was yellow tinged with red, and the leaves shifted their angle to point straight up, close to and parallel to the stalk:

Small seedlings convey their stress by orienting their leaves vertically.

I decided that they also needed bigger pots with more soil that wouldn’t dry out so quickly, and more nutrients. With the combination of repotting and wiping off the sucking insects, it didn’t take too much time for them to settle down again and return to a happier, more relaxed state. Here they are, not completely happy, but moving in a good direction.Leaves on small Japanese indigo seedlings are returning to a more relaxed, horizontal position after wiping off the whitefly larvae.

Fast forward to July 28th. Seedlings had been transplanted into beds. Plants were huge. I’d been tending the garden and at the macro level, everything looked good. It was time to harvest leaves and prep samples for a program at work. I posted about that project on Instagram at the time, and may eventually post here, too, even though it was a long time ago. But, when I looked closely, I was dismayed to see that despite the lush plant growth in a whole new growing locale, there were still teensy white blobs!!!!

Granted, these look a little different than the earlier whitefly larvae and I don’t have high resolution closeups to get a definite comparison. It’s possible this was a different white, soft-bodied, juice-sucking insect. Maybe a white aphid, if there is such a thing, though most aphids I’ve met are greenish or yellow. So, it seemed likely that the whitefly had come along to the new location after transplanting.

Fortunately, the plants were clearly not stressed and were clearly thriving. They had plenty of nutrients and water, and they could just shrug those juice-sucking bugs right off! They had plenty of juice to share.

AND, looking closer while I cut the stalks, I noticed one, two, a few, many ladybugs!!!

Here are some of the adult ladybugs on the leaves in the garden:

A red and black spotted ladybug on a green leaf.

An adult ladybug nestled in the crevice of a leaf.

Two adult ladybugs on the stalks of a Japanese indigo plant.

While I was stripping leaves off the stalks, I found a ladybug larvae, which I saved and returned to the bed:

A ladybug larva on the back side of a Japanese indigo leaf.

And this is a very blurry photo of what I believe is a ladybug pupae that I found on one of the leaves:

A blurry image of what is possibly a ladybug pupae.

In conclusion, my observations were that even with a heavy, persistent, recurring whitefly infestation over the course of a growing season, Japanese indigo plants had no trouble fighting it off and thriving. Early on, they managed to bounce back from a double-whammy of heat and sun shock followed by whitefly. I would not be surprised if the first shock made them more vulnerable to the second. It seems likely, actually, that their weakened state made them more vulnerable to insect attack, initially.

With plenty of nutrients and water, the plants were able to thrive, regardless. They were producing plenty of pigment, which you can get a sense of with the dark blue mark on this leaf:

Small white soft bodied insect larvae on a Japanese indigo leaf with an oval shaped blue mark indicating the indigo precursors in the leaves.

I realize in retrospect that I could have done a better job of documenting the nutrients I added. I don’t have records of exactly what I added to the seedling mix or to the beds. I had the garden soil tested at UMass in February of 2024, and added blood meal and lime according to their recommendations. So, I can’t tell you exactly which nutrients or in what quantities you’ll need to keep your persicaria plants happy and resilient enough to fend off pests such as whitefly, should you encounter a similar problem.

But I do feel confident in sharing my experience that plants, pests, and predators can coexist in a balance as long as the plants have plenty of food and water. I did not introduce the ladybugs. The plants were able to call in the help they needed from insect friends in the neighborhood, even when the human helper did not notice that they needed more support. Ladybugs found the food source and created a robust multigenerational community to eat up the whitefly larvae.

Here’s the bed on August 6th looking lush and exuberant:

Lush bed of deep green Japanese indigo plants with a bed of orange cosmos in the background.

Close up of a swamp milkweed seed pod with a few seeds still inside.

Goings On in the Winter Garden

New year, new attempt to revive my beloved but neglected blog with a post about my garden in winter. These photos are from midday Saturday January 3rd, 2026.

Here are two slightly different perspectives. One view says, “Sticks are here, amidst other sticks.” Big sticks and little sticks, above and below, in many shades of copper and silver, laying this way and that.

Dormant plants in the dyeplant garden with snow on the ground.

The other view says, “Hill! Sky! Look to the distance!” There’s a broader, hilltop perspective. Both true and both lovely. I think this second view shows more of the tracks in the snow reflecting all the activity that’s going on, even in the dormancy of winter.

View of the snowy hill top garden with distant hills in the east.

As I approached the far side of the garden, an oval-shaped dark gray furry creature toodled away quickly from the garden towards the woods. I am pretty sure it was a vole judging from the velvety dark gray color, the trundling gait, and the other vole tunnel and channel tracks around the garden. I think this line of tracks was made by that hasty vole. I don’t have a before and after photo to confirm, but it’s in the very same spot. For more about identifying meadow vole tracks, see the lovely descriptions and images in this post by Mary Holland.

Small tracks in the snow left by a vole.

Quite a lot of teensy prints were clustered in the black-eyed Susan bed:

Lots of tiny prints in the snow with small black seeds from black eyed Susan scattered about.

It makes me wonder whether the seeds are a good source of food. I suspect so, though maybe there’s something else about this bed that makes it appealing. It’s on the southeast corner of the plot. Here are a couple images of dense, intensely dark black-eyed Susan seed heads:

Spherical intensely brown seed head of black eyed Susan against a white snowy background.

A singular spiky and spherical black eyed Susan seed head against a snowy white ground.

Despite my worry in the “Whodunit” post that the black-eyed Susans weren’t coming back and that possibly the bronze fennel was to blame, they have spread and thrived and have been happy as can be.

Next up, going around to the south-facing bed, are the marigolds. It was a bumper year for marigolds. In the background behind this dried flower head there are some tracks in the snow, but I didn’t look closely enough to figure out who made them:

Faint tracks in the snow behind a dried marigold seed head.

It’s interesting how the colors fade differently on different flower heads, and the different stages of growth they were in when they froze/dried out. The in-focus one in the photo below is bleached out, glossy, and luminous while the out-of-focus ones are a dull mildewy gray. And the dried head behind them still has petals clinging to it.

One very pale bleached out marigold seed head amidst other darker ones.

Then there are the star-like orange cosmos seed heads, one of my favorites, a little further toward the west on the south-facing bed:

Single orange cosmos seed head.

Next to the cosmos, in the southwest corner of the plot, are the dyers coreopsis. I grew them from seed last year, in various colors and sizes, with seeds I’d saved from a previous year, originally from Grand Prismatic Seed. I saved seed again for this summer, and there are still tons of seed heads left, as you can see:

Flopped over stalks of dyers coreopsis.

Single dyers coreopsis seed head against a snowy background.

Behind the dyers coreopsis towards the north side is the Japanese indigo bed (also grown from seed, also originally from Grand Prismatic). There’s a lot going on here, with blue-green dried leaves, red-brown stems, and some pinkish-tan dried flower clusters. So beautiful! I know that mice like Japanese indigo seeds (ask me how I know), but in this case they don’t seem to be seeking them out.

Tangle of pink and tan colored dried Japanese indigo stalks and some dried seed clusters.

In the center of the garden is the madder bed. It was a very productive year for madder seeds, both this this garden at Bramble Hill and in the second-year raised bed at Historic Deerfield. Hopefully that will be the subject of a future post.

I had a hard time convincing my phone that those hard, round, black blobs were truly the things I wanted to focus on, so the madder seeds aren’t quite as clear as I’d like. But here, hopefully, you can see the abundance, even after I collected a lot in the fall:

A mound of pale colored dried madder tops with dark-colored seeds scattered throughout.

A small cluster of three madder seeds with snow behind.

One sole intensely black madder seed that's not quite in focus.

On the the northeast corner of the garden is the perennial bronze fennel. No wonder it self-seeds everywhere!

Umbel-shaped bronze fennel seed head drooping over.

This next photo is the curled-up leaves of a woad plant. It’s like it got too hot and threw off the covers in the middle of the night! I’ve never read that woad plants generate heat, so something else is probably going on here.

Green, curled up leaves of a woad plant surrounded by white snow.

And last but not least, back on the east side of the garden, the swamp milkweed made a come-back over the past couple years. It has established itself in a couple new spots (another future blog post, hopefully).

Close up of a swamp milkweed seed pod with a few seeds still inside.

 

Unusual Woad Behavior

I have a giant backlog of posts to write from 2024. Selected photos are sitting in folders labeled things like, “Weld Regrows After Cutting,” “Mice Like Japanese Indigo Seeds,” “Making Lakes,” and “Swamp Milkweed Returns.” Maybe I will write those posts at some point. They’re not exactly time-sensitive updates, more like observations and experiences to share that might be of interest any time to like-minded dye plant growing people.

But meanwhile, I am going to write a short post about unusual woad behavior that I observed in June of this year, which is currently 2025.

I grow woad every year. I just love it. The type of woad I grow and seed-save is Chinese woad. When I bought the seeds from Richters in 2004, it was labeled as Chinese woad, Isatis indigotica.

Then, some while later, I heard about a dispute among botanists regarding the existence of this type of woad. The argument was that it’s not its own species, it’s just a variety of European woad, Isatis tinctoria. So, for a time I stopped referring to it that way, and just called it woad.

However, in the past couple years other people I know who grow woad (hello Molly McLaughlin and Becky Ashenden) have commented that mine doesn’t look like theirs. The plants look quite different and they seem to behave a bit differently, too. I now feel confident that the differences between Isatis indigotica and Isatis tinctoria are significant enough that at the very least they should not be considered “the same.”

I had the chance to compare the two types of woad plants growing side by side at the Fabric of Life dye garden during my workshop last fall. They had already been growing European woad (self-seeding). In the spring of 2024, we planted Chinese woad right next to it for the fall workshop. But I neglected to take a photo of the two side by side, both of which we harvested for our vat that day, because it was raining all day. I didn’t pull out my camera until the very end when there were bright colors to feel happy about (another potential blog post).

Here’s a photo of the self-seeding European woad in the Fabric of Life dyeplant garden in Shelburne, MA this spring. The leaves are dark green, hairy, and a bit sticky to the touch (even when it’s not raining).

In contrast, my woad is a much lighter, chalky shade of green, completely smooth to the touch with no visible hairs. I have posted a great many images of woad on this blog over the years, but here’s one for comparison:

In fact, this image is from a post where I described another unexpected woad behavior. In this earlier post from 2019, I was dismayed that my woad was already bolting in its first year. It was surprising and unexpected to me, but perhaps it’s typical of Chinese woad under certain conditions.

This was illuminated for me thanks to the incredibly informative post by Ashley Walker on Nature’s Rainbow from March 2021 entitled Growing Chinese Woad Isatis indigotica. Their post includes excellent photos, several helpful academic references, descriptions of the way that I. indigotica behaves in their climate, and how it differs from I. tinctoria. It’s a really thorough summary and a very interesting read!

*Edited to add:  I don’t regularly have the problem of first year Chinese woad bolting and flowering, which seems to be a bigger issue in the gardens of Nature’s Rainbow. It’s happened to me a few times, but not often enough to be an inconvenience.

This spring I decided not to let the whole bed of woad at Bramble Hill Farm go to seed. I did let them all bloom for the sake of the beautiful color, that sweetly stinky fragrance, and the insects who love the flowers. But then I dug up most of the bed before the seeds matured.

A few days later, I noticed that snake decided to shed its skin in the pile of uprooted plants, which was quite a thrill. It feels like magic is afoot here.

I left a few plants for seed, which I harvested later in June.

OK, so finally we get to the “behavior” part of this post.

One of the plants I cut down to seed-save from was both laden with mature, purplish-black seeds AND growing new flowers lower down the stalk.

The whole stalk:

Close up of the seeds (sorry, not a lot of contrast against the grass):

Little yellow (sweetly stinky) flowers lower down the stalk:

So, in addition to bolting in its first year when exposed to very cold night-time temperatures, Chinese woad can apparently continue to put out new flowers even when the main part of the stalk has already produced mature seed and it’s presumably past the flower-setting stage. So versatile!

A Dye Garden Whodunit

This blog post is about bronze fennel (Foeniculum vulgare ‘purpureum’ or ‘rubrum’), black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta spp.), and yarrow (Achillea millefolium spp.). It could also be called “The Case of the Disappearing Rudbeckia.” To state my conclusions up-front, bronze fennel is allelopathic, black-eyed Susan cultivars are “short lived” perennials, and the yarrow remains a mystery. Read on for the long version of the story….

For many years I have been growing bronze fennel in my dyeplant garden. There’s so much to love about it. Visually, it adds height, texture, color, and a sparkly sheen. It’s a host plant for swallowtail caterpillars. It’s indestructible, and it smells amazing. As a dyeplant, it’s admittedly modest. It makes a soft, pale, brassy greenish-yellow with alum on wool. But overall, its many fine qualities make it well worthwhile.

Reddish-green bronze fennel patch with glossy, feathery foliage.

The bronze fennel patch started out in the north-east corner of my garden with a six-pack of starts umpteen years ago. Bronze fennel self-sows readily. This is a bit of a pain because I have to weed it out from places that I don’t want it to grow. But I’ve let it spread to other spots in recent years because it never occurred to be that there was anything to worry about. In particular, I let a couple bronze fennel plants mature alongside a bed of black-eyed Susan, two yarrow cultivars (red-orange and magenta), and a few swamp milkweeds on the south-east corner of the garden.

Last fall I was inspired by the Xerxes Society’s “Just Leave It” campaign to leave dead plant material in place over the winter. Many other organizations, too, were promoting “leave the leaves” and “leaves the stalks” as overwintering insect habitat and seed heads for birds to eat. So, I decided to let all the stalks and dried seed heads stand over the winter. I have to confess that I don’t usually get around to tidying up the garden in the fall anyway, but it felt nice to think that it was for a good cause and I wasn’t just being a slacker!

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Blue and Black Yarn

Way back in 2020 I got some lovely, lustrous Romney fleece from the Richardsons in Phillipston, MA. Yes, that 2020.

I dyed a lot of it blue with woad.

When I post photos of my dyeing results, sometimes people ask me, “What are you going to do with it?” I’m tempted to say, “Do? What do you mean? It’s done!” Making color is fun and satisfying all by itself. But, yes, I do aspire to spin yarn and ultimately weave cloth with it. This blog post is about some yarn that I have spun!

Over the years I have posted many images of woad vats on this blog. So I will skip the dyeing process in this post, and stick to the yarn production process. Here’s how it happened:

In 2021 I got a picture in my mind of a yarn that combined various shades of woad blue and black alpaca. I was inspired by some lovely silvery gray yarn from New York Textile Lab which is 50% Romney 50% alpaca. It’s a luxurious yarn that embodies the best of both fibers. I, too, was hoping to combine the sheen and lustre of Romney with the softness and silkiness of alpaca.

The black alpaca roving is from Snowfield Alpacas in New Hampshire, purchased at the Fiber Festival of New England. When?  A long time ago. We don’t know how long.

I spun a teensy sample with a drop spindle to see what it might look like, and I loved it:

I wanted to make a significant amount of yarn so I could weave enough yardage to sew into “something.” That’s as far as I’ve gotten with my vision of the finished product. I know a lot of people spin with a specific project in mind, but welcome to my process.

I weighed out one pound of woad-blue locks, thinking at first that my blend would be 50/50 and I would end up with 2lbs. prepared fiber.

I flick carded the locks to remove any remaining vegetable matter (though the fleeces were really clean to begin with) and to combine various shades of blue. Here are a few locks lined up and ready to flick:

Here’s the little bundle all fluffed up:

And here’s one with lighter shades of blue:

What are those white areas? When I dye locks in a woad vat, sometimes the dye doesn’t penetrate all the way through the lock. This is especially true near the cut-end of the locks where it’s denser. It’s even more true when I’m exhausting the vat and the locks are slurping up the last bits of color.

Then I ran the locks through a drum carder to further blend the different shades of blue. Here’s the set up one fine day in July of 2021. Our cat Sammy has inspected everything. Having detected no danger, she’s relaxing and grooming.

I gradually carded all the fleece into little batts.

Here’s a basketful of batts. The blue in this image is a little more Smurfy than real life, but you get the idea:

This image shows the sheen much better. You can also see that there’s a lot of color variation still, despite all the blending:

And here’s a view from the cute, curly end of a rolled up mini-batt:

I split the wool batts and carded them again with the black alpaca roving. I have a mini-carder, and each blended batt was about one ounce.

The first 50/50 blue-and-black batt was deep, dark, and dramatic, but I wanted more sparkle from the blue. So, I sampled some more and settled on a ratio of 70% wool and 30% alpaca. Which meant that I needed to card more wool get 2lbs blended fiber. Here’s the 70/30 blend:

I really love the contrast of the black and bright blue in the spun yarn, as well as the more uniformly blended dark-blue areas:

Because the alpaca and the wool are not consistently blended, I got worried about leaving the yarn as singles for weaving. The areas that are all-alpaca are fluffier and the staple length is much shorter. I worried about how the different textures would behave. So I plied it. My future self may or may not thank me, but what’s done is done. Here are the two skeins I’ve spun and plied thus far:

My present-day self is very happy. I absolutely love how it looks and feels. These two skeins together weigh about 8 oz. so I am about halfway through the fiber I prepared. Which is totally fine because it’s really fun to spin!

Making Brown with Black Walnuts Part Two

To re-cap, I had managed to transform linen yarns, grown and hand spun at Aker Fiber Farm in New Hampshire, from lovely shades of silvery- and golden-tan into more drab versions of same colors. This was deeply dissatisfying. But, if at first you don’t succeed… try, try again.

I thought about the factors that might have led to such disappointing color, and decided to change a few things the second time around. I was in a hurry at this point, because I was planning to deliver the yarns in just a couple days. So, I moved through some steps quicker than I normally do.

First, I made a fresh dyebath using only the very greenest of the walnut hulls that had been soaking outside. This involved finding the bucket that contained the hulls I had collected earliest in the fall, which was tucked under a table and very well protected from squirrels. It was a little bit of an excavation project. Again, I used 3 gallons of hulls to make the dyebath, but I only used the brightest green ones:

Second, I used fresh tap water to make the dyebath, not the liquid that the hulls had been soaking in. I heated the bath to about 180°F, maintained that temperature for two hours, then allowed it to cool and steep for a couple hours. I strained out the hulls while the liquid was still very warm, instead of giving it time to cool completely. I did not add any vinegar this time. The pH was 6.

Third, I re-mordanted the fibers with aluminum acetate at 5% WOG at 100° and let the yarns soak in the mordant solution for two hours. I rinsed the yarns before putting them into the dyebath. After about ten minutes in the dyebath, I decided that this situation really called for iron sulfate.

I’ve used tannin with iron on cellulose before. I have even written some blog posts about it. So I knew it would darken the color significantly. I had been hoping that with black walnut I could get a dark color without iron. But at this point in my story it was Thursday and I was planning to deliver the yarns on Saturday, so I figured I’d better go with something that I was certain would do the trick.

I dissolved 1 Tbsp. of iron sulfate in a tub containing 2 gallons of hot water. I pulled the skeins out of the dyebath and “worked” them briefly (meaning swishing them around in the solution to try to prevent blotches), wearing gloves all the while. The color shift to a dark brown was basically instantaneous. I returned the skeins to the dyebath without rinsing.

Then I continued to heat the skeins for an hour, and they cooled overnight in the dyebath.

Once again, I let the the skeins drip and dry a little before rinsing. And, here they are all washed and dried:

You can see the yarns wound into balls by Locally Dressed here.

The color of the linen shirt actually grew on me as it dried, so I left it alone. Obtaining an unbleached-linen look on linen is a lot more satisfying when that wasn’t the original color!

I do believe that the greener and more resinous the hulls are, the richer the color you will get. However, I’m positive that it was the iron sulfate that ultimately created the dark color I was able to achieve on the linen yarns. I am currently taking the Maiwa class Natural Dyes: Alchemy Chemistry Craft, so in a few weeks I will be much better informed about the chemistry of the tannin-iron reaction!

I am a lot more cautious about using iron on wool. A fresh dyebath, with no tannin or mordant at all, yielded this medium brown on Western Massachusetts Fibershed white wool singles spun at Green Mountain Spinnery:

Making Brown with Black Walnuts Part One

Fall 2023 was a bumper year for black walnuts around here. I started collecting them in October, and with very little effort filled up three 5-gallon buckets.

To prevent them from getting black and oozy, I filled the buckets with water. Being submerged under water kept them pretty fresh. I covered the buckets and stacked weights on top to discourage squirrels until I could remove the nuts from the hulls.

As noted in my last blog post, there’s always more to learn about everything in life, black walnuts included. This fall I was struck by the variation in size, shape, density of hull, color of hull, and fragrance from one tree to the next. I don’t think the differences had to do with altitude (down in the valleys versus up in the hilltowns) because sometimes two trees right across the street from each other were carrying fruits with noticeably different hulls. I don’t have any photos of those observations, but documenting these variations would be an interesting project for another year. I did not separate them by “type” or keep track of which hulls went into which dyepots.

My first dyeing effort with this fall’s abundance was a collaboration with Locally Dressed, who is participating in the Northern New England Fibershed design challenge. You can find out more about what Locally Dressed is all about on her social media and her blog and website.

Without giving too much away, I will just share that I dyed handspun linen yarns from Aker Fiber Farm. The yarns are destined to part of a garment and/or accessory woven by @marionceres. The finished pieces will be showcased on August 17th, 2024 at Sanborn Mills Farm in Loudon, New Hampshire.

Here are the yarns. Lovely, right? Why mess with perfection? Rest assured, I understand that most of the fabric lets the natural colors of this linen speak for themselves. But sometimes you want a little bit of contrast. Hence my mission to make brown.

I was consulting two different sources in this process, Jim Liles’ book The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing and the how-to pages on Botanical Colors’ website. Their directions differ somewhat, plus daily life imposes its own limits. What I describe here is what I ended up doing, but I’m not saying it’s the best way to go about things!

To start with, I scoured the skeins. Well, actually, first I weighed them and recorded the weights on waterproof labels. For scouring cellulose fibers I often use a liquid scour, but I didn’t have any on hand. So, first I just hand washed them with my regular laundry detergent, then simmered them with soda ash at 2% weight of goods (WOG in dyer’s shorthand). I heated the skeins in the soda ash solution until it reached 180°F, then held at that temperature for 30 minutes, then removed promptly and rinsed.

The next step was a tannin treatment. I had a few options for tannin, and decided to use chestnut tannin at 10% WOG. I dissolved the tannin (which comes as a powder) and soaked the fiber overnight at room temperature in the tannin solution.

Next up, mordanting. Even though I did have aluminum acetate on hand, I decided to go with the aluminum sulfate/soda ash combo described on the Botanical Color website here. Yes, the mixture does “bubble vigorously,” just as they describe! The fibers soaked in this mordanting solution overnight, with no heat applied.

Then, back into the tannin solution for another night. Then, because of pot re-arranging, they went back in the mordant bath. This was just a storage issue for the various liquids in their various stages, not a purposeful decision.

As I mentioned, the black walnuts had been soaking submerged in buckets of water since October, and this linen-dyeing project got underway on November 16th. I didn’t mention that I was also dyeing a linen shirt in this process (the one with the weird pink-stained arms, if you saw that post on Instagram back in August 2022). The total weight of the fibers was a little over 15 ounces, basically 1lb.

For my first try, I used about 3 gallons of hulls (removed from the nuts, which I just tossed out for the squirrels), and filled up the dyepot with the water they’d been soaking in. I heated the hulls until they reached about 180°F and maintained that for 2 hours. Jim Liles says to add vinegar or other acid, which I did, but he doesn’t specify a pH. My pH was 5. The hulls steeped about 24 hours, then I strained out the hulls and topped up the liquid in the dyepot. I think it’s cool how you can see the texture of the walnut shells inside the hulls:

I rinsed the fiber after the tannin-mordant-tannin process, which perhaps I should not have done. Ah, well. Here are the prepared fibers before dyeing:

Then I added the damp fibers to the dyebath. As before, I heated the pot up to about 180°F then maintained that for one hour. Then I let it steep overnight. I like to do a delayed rinse, so I let the fibers drip-dry for a day or so before rinsing.

Then I rinsed them. And…. Come on, now. Would you call this brown? I would not. I would not say that it’s any darker than the original color.

The date by which I had agreed to deliver the yarn was drawing closer. Not much time left to try again, but try I did!

 

 

 

The author is smiling while she hangs green and orange cloth on a laundry line. Pots of red petunias are lined up at the base of a tan-colored fence.

Back in Black (Walnut)

Hi Folks, I’m back.

Social media is a funny thing. Back in July of 2019 I started an Instagram account @localcolordyes to get a little buzz going about the upcoming natural dye exhibition, The Art and Science of Dyeing, at the Botanic Garden at Smith College.

I had the honor of dyeing the fabric for the exhibition. Here’s some of the cloth hanging up to dry in front of our apartment.

Yellow, orange, and red fabric are drying in the early morning sun. Shadows from the fence make a pattern of diagonal lines.

Yellow, orange, and red fabric glistens in the sun. The light on the yellow fabric in the foreground is glaring and makes a bright contrast with the shadows. Shadows from the fence make a pattern of diagonal lines.

Yellow, orange, and red fabric glistens in the sun. Shadows from the fence make a pattern of diagonal lines.

In the photo below, I managed to get a monarch butterfly mostly in focus as it flittered over the fence! Good times.

A red, orange, black, and yellow monarch butterfly flies over the fence near long pieces of naturally dyed cloth that are similar shades of red, orange, and yellow.

The show was slated to run from September 23, 2019 to June 4, 2020. It opened when it was supposed to, and it was fabulous and beautiful. I felt happy about the whole experience.

I documented some of my dyeing process here on my blog and on my brand new Instagram account.

But like everything else in March of 2020, the Botanic Garden and the gallery show shut down. I have kept up my Instagram account fairly regularly since then, but I have only made a few blog posts.

I kept thinking, “I really need to get my blog up and running again.” There was no lack of topics to write about. But it just didn’t come together. My blog is kinda long-form (also maybe long winded, sorry). I tend to think a lot about what I’m trying to say and spend a lot of time re-writing the text. Whereas Instagram is simple and brief. One photo and a quick description is enough. Boom. Done. Don’t overthink it. I didn’t really have the brain-band-width to devote to longer or more complicated things, anyway, so it was fine.

I don’t hate Instagram, despite the valid reasons that other people do. I have connected with many inspiring and like-minded folks and learned interesting things on that platform.

Yesterday, though, I had a social media experience that reminded me why I love my blog so much and why I missed it. And ta da, today, a blog post! Yay.

Yesterday a notification on Instagram told me that the Frank A. Waugh Arboretum at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst had started following me. I don’t know why, but I thought it was cool. “Hello, Waugh Arboretum, pleasure to meet you. Nice trees ya’ got, there.”

But also, I was like, “Wow. How did I not know there was an arboretum at UMass?” And then I figured I would follow them back because trees are awesome and I love them and I can literally walk to UMass. I looked them up and read through their Legacy Trees Tour.

I got to their Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) entry and read this sentence: “Songbirds also rely on black walnut as an important ecological species, as its leaves host over 20 species of moths that songbirds feed on.”

20 species of moths? What???!!!

Just in case you forgot, black walnut hulls are an amazing source of natural dye. Depending on the fiber and a few other factors, you can get a range of colors from dark chocolate-y brown to golden tan. It’s rich in tannins and can function as a mordant assist on cellulose fibers, as well as giving great color in its own right. Plus, edible nuts. Glorious wood. Fancy leaf-structure. Elegant stature. An all-around rock star of trees.

A quick search led me to a page about black walnuts from the Maryland Biodiversity Project.

I am just gonna quote the whole section because it is such as bonanza of information. You can follow the links yourself to see beautiful photographs of these intriguingly-named creatures. And the many, many links are all “live.” You can just go to them directly from this page. Like links are supposed to do.

“Relationships:

Black Walnut shells produce an allelopathic substance called juglone, which inhibits the growth of plants beneath it.

Has been recorded as a host plant for Banded Hairstreak.

Host plant for various moth species including Luna Moth, Regal Moth, Imperial Moth, Walnut Sphinx Moth, Fall Webworm Moth, Walnut Caloptilia, Pecan Leafminer Moth, Monkey Slug Moth, Skiff Moth, Sad Underwing Moth, Bride Underwing Moth, Penitent Underwing Moth, Yellow-gray Underwing Moth, Widow Underwing Moth, Banded Tussock Moth, Angus’s Datana Moth, Walnut Caterpillar Moth, Red-humped Caterpillar Moth, Black-blotched Prominent Moth, Closebanded Yellowhorn Moth, Walnut Shoot Moth, Pecan Leaf Casebearer Moth, American Plum Borer, Hickory Shuckworm Moth, Pecan Bud Moth, Gray-edged Bomolocha Moth, Sleeping Baileya Moth, and Small Baileya Moth.

Decaying shells host the fungus Walnut Mycena (Database of World’s Lepidopteran Host Plants).

The fruit fly pest Walnut Husk Maggot feeds on Black Walnut fruit.

Black Walnut is a host plant for the Butternut Woollyworm.”

Everyone knows Luna Moths are gorgeous, but check out the Monkey Slug caterpillars and the Woollyworms! Even the “plainest” of these moths is made of velvet and is glorious.

Every single one of these insects is a world unto itself. I don’t mean self-contained, I mean huge and complex. Each of the birds that eats them is a world…. There is so much going on all the time, and it’s all connected.

I have personally had experience with the little squirmy larvae that live in black walnut husks, the Walnut Husk Maggots. I knew I should learn more about them and what their lives are like–and what their futures might hold if I didn’t gruesomely boil them in a dyepot. Poor little things.

But I had never imagined that so many other bugs were also intertwined with black walnut trees.

So, now when I walk under a black walnut tree I will be thinking about all these other bugs and birds, too. I now have to find out how many of these moths live here in Massachusetts.

See, this is way too much to jam into an IG post. Though you’re welcome to follow me at @localcolordyes for shorter snapshots of what I’m up to.

There’s Treasure Everywhere!

I love gardening. As someone who doesn’t own property, I have always been grateful for access to land to cultivate a garden, whether it was a town community garden plot or space on a farm owned or managed by a generous neighbor. There’s nothing quite as grounding or satisfying as getting my hands in the dirt and tending plants.

However, gardening can be full of frustration and disappointment. It can be exhausting. One’s labors can be many and one’s successes few.

Gardening dye plants comes with a particular irony for me. You can’t eat them. They are not, strictly speaking, necessary. One can certainly live without dye plants. Why go to all that trouble?

I started writing this post in the summer of 2020. We had a dry spring. We had a dry summer. As of May 2020 our part of the state was under “significant” drought conditions, which persisted through the fall. We were lucky never to get to the “critical” level that other parts of the state faced. You can check out the map of drought conditions in Massachusetts here, with updates posted throughout the summer and fall. I spent a ridiculous number of hours hauling gallons of water via car, which comes with a fossil fuel burden, trying to keep a couple beds of woad alive. I gave up entirely on the bed of flax I planted in April.

Honestly, why bother?

I know why I love making dyes with plants. Color is beautiful and beauty makes me happy. To be able to participate in this process of beauty-making helps me feel connected to, and part of, the many incredible forms of life on this planet. Creating color feels magical and meaningful. It is mind-boggling and humbling that plants can give these colors to us, over and above all the other gifts that plants bestow. Medicine, food, fragrance…. Oxygen alone would be enough!  I am deeply grateful to plants for all their lessons and awe-inspiring power. “Hey, need some color to brighten your day? Let me help you with that.”

But sometimes I look at all the abundant color that grows freely, of its own accord, with no effort expended on my part, in the fields and roadsides all around me, and wonder why I work so hard to maintain a dye plant garden. July and August (when I first started writing this post) are especially good times to reflect upon the abundance and take stock. There’s treasure everywhere (to quote a beloved line from Calvin and Hobbes).

Calvin and Hobbes There's Treasure Everywhere

It’s the middle of winter now. Gardeners are planning gardens and ordering seeds, or feeling glad for seeds saved. What to devote garden space to, and what to gather by the wayside?

Here are a few of the most prolific dye plants in my neighborhood, photographed in June, July, and August of 2020. I will save a discussion of the use and implication of terms such as invasive, noxious, and opportunistic for another day. Hopefully “introduced” or “naturalized” are accurate enough for now.

Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota) is an introduced species from Europe that can be found everywhere. It makes a lovely cool, clear yellow. It readily fills in marginal spaces along the side of the road, next to railroad tracks, and under power and utility lines.

It also fills in fields and open places. It is so prolific that I usually use just the flowers for dyeing, but I suspect the foliage gives similar colors. Also, it smells delicious when the dye bath is heating up!

 

Next up, tansy (Tanacetum vulgare). It is also introduced from Europe. It is also quite aggressive. It is another source of yellow, albeit stinkier. It’s more on the gold side of yellow, a bit more brassy or brown than Queen Anne’s lace.

Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) is yet another introduced species from Europe. It is especially known (and lamented) for displacing native wetland plants in New England, but can also be found in drier habitats along the side of the road or underneath power lines. Whatever else one may wish to say about purple loosestrife, it is stunningly beautiful and makes bees very happy.

 

Purple loosestrife can make a variety of colors ranging from tan to olive green to gray, with the use of iron. I have even read a recipe for making black, but the amount of iron and heat called for seem overly harsh for wool. I feel like it has a lot of potential as a tannin source, and I haven’t explored it nearly enough.

Also visible above is jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) which is a native species here in New England. I have never used it for dyeing. I have heard from other dyers that it makes a rich yellow or gold. Personally, if I’m gathering rather than cultivating, I tend to stick with dye plants that are generally agreed to be *too* abundant. If I’m going to use a native species, I feel that it, too, ought to be unquestionably abundant. While jewelweed is not at risk or endangered here in Massachusetts, I don’t tend to find it in wide swaths, so thus far I have left it alone.

A native plant here in New England that I feel totally fine using is goldenrod. There are several species, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t identify them all, so maybe I shouldn’t be so cavalier. The type I’ve used is Solidago canadensis, I believe, though I am not positive that I can tell it apart from Solidago odora or sweet goldenrod. Yes, it makes yellow. A cheery, intense yellow. I think it’s the most vivid when you pick the flowering tops just before they are starting to bloom, when the buds are still pretty tight and the overall color is a neon greenish-yellow. In this photo it is a modest presence amidst a collection of other plants, but you can often see it filling whole fields around here.

For now, I think I’ll wrap things up with black walnut (Juglans nigra). The green hulls from the nuts of these tall, lovely trees are a rich source of brown. Last year was actually not an abundant year for black walnuts. These were some early drops in August, and after that I didn’t find many mature nuts. Maybe it was the drought or maybe just not a mast year for black walnuts.

In a more abundant year, I can easily collect a five gallon bucket full from underneath just one tree.

To get the most intense color from black walnut hulls, you have to pick them up promptly and use them while the hulls are still green. They also smell wonderfully fragrant at this stage. If they sit on the ground too long, they start to get soft and black, and teeny little maggots start to grow. I believe that these are either walnut husk flies or walnut husk maggots, but I need to read up more about them. I find them squirmy and off-putting, but I’m sure they have their own lives to live and jobs to do on this earth, so I feel kind of bad boiling them to death.

As Calvin gleefully notes above, one of the treasures that are everywhere are disgusting grubs!

The Woad That Was

Before the woad that (almost) wasn’t, there was the woad that was. I planted a bed at the end of May, and it grew just fine.

Here it is, a teensy bit past its prime but still happy as can be, on August 7th. I harvested 4 lbs. of leaves.

I know I have posted many times about woad vats, but I never get bored of woad. After all these years, there is always something new to learn. Lately I have been trying to be more aware of the temperature at different points in the process.

I have often noticed that the woad vats I run at the end of the season, once the weather is cool (or even freezing), give more color. I had always assumed that it was because older plants gave darker blues. But now I wonder whether the cold air temperatures that bring down the temperature of the vat liquid very quickly are responsible for the enhanced color.

Recently it’s come to my attention that high temperatures reduce the amount of color you can get from woad. If this is so, then hot weather in July and August might be the reason for lighter vats earlier in the summer. To test this temperature hypothesis out in the hot summer weather, I was trying to follow the guidelines from Teresinha Roberts on her site woad.org.

I rinsed the leaves.

I coarsely shredded them, put them in another 5-gallon bucket, and poured on the steaming hot water. In the past I have always just boiled the water, and poured it straight over the clean leaves. It’s always (or almost always) worked fine. But I was trying to learn more about the temperature factor this time, so I let the water cool to about 180 degrees F. before pouring it over the leaves.

I like to fill up the bucket all the way with water so I can expel some air when I put on the lid. I topped up this bucket before putting on the lid. Once the bucket was full, the temperature came down to 160F.

Then the leaves steeped for 45 minutes. After 45 minutes, the temperature was about 150F.

I wanted to get the liquid down to about 130-135F before adding the ammonia. I had a long way to go.

At this point I realized I should have bought a big bag of ice. The few icecube trays in the freezer were woefully inadequate to cool five gallons of hot liquid on a hot summer’s day.

Here’s my puny amount of ice cubes:

I put the five-gallon bucket into the larger pot, and added cold water.

It didn’t do a whole lot to bring down the temperature. Not one jot, in fact.

As I understand Teresinha’s directions, I should have brought down the temperature while the leaves were still in the liquid. But, I felt that the thermal mass of all those leaves would just retain the heat forever. So, I strained out the leaves and put the bucket of liquid back into the ice water. I also tried to press icepacks around the outside of the bucket. It was very inefficient.

This cooling process is supposed to occur very quickly. I was not very quick, alas. But I did get the temperature down to about 140F, eventually.

I added the ammonia to pH 9. Ammonia is my preferred alkali for this because it is already liquid and I can buy it at the grocery store without advanced notice when I have failed to plan ahead. It’s purely a matter of practicality.

I aerated for 10 minutes with my back-and-forth-bucket-pouring method. It seemed very blue but not as foamy as usual.

After all that pouring back and forth, the liquid was about 135F. Not ideal, but close. Sprinkle on some RIT Color Remover (sodium hydrosulfite) and wait another 45 minutes. Ta da! Reduced. Maybe a tad over-reduced. It’s fine, don’t sweat the technique. This video is NSFW but the song is so very funky and fabulous! I felt like I had already fretted more than I ought about my failures with the temperature, and just needed to get in the groove and move along with the process.

For this vat I was using two skeins of two-ply woolen yarn from our most recent Western Massachusetts Fibershed project, spun at Green Mountain Spinnery. The white is a blend of Montadale and Merino crosses. The gray includes some Romney and Romney cross fleeces. I also used two skeins of dark gray wool-alpaca blend from New York Textile Lab. And, some kinda scrappy fleece that was either too long, too short, or too much vm to send to the mill. Hand carding is slow, but I hate to waste anything.

The white wool skein was in first for 20 minutes*, then the gray wool skein for 25 minutes*, and then I put the NY Textile Lab skeins in together a couple hours*. I left the first batch of fleece in the vat overnight*. Here are the skeins and the first batch of fleece (about 8 oz.) oxidizing in the dappled shade of a spruce tree out back the next day.

There was a lot of color left in the vat, so the next morning I put in the second batch of fleece (about 6 oz.), and left it in all day. I pulled it out in the afternoon.*

Here it is in the afternoon of Aug. 8th.* If you’ve done any indigo dyeing then you’ve seen this transformation from yellow to blue before, but it’s always exciting! Fleece still submerged in the reduced vat:

Oxygen starts to hit the fibers and the blue starts to develop:

More blue develops as the oxidation process continues:

Here you can see the fleece from the day before, which has oxidized for about 8-9 hours*, compared to the fiber that’s just getting started:

After the fibers had plenty of time to oxidize and were basically dry, I rinsed them in a vinegar solution to neutralize the alkalinity, then did a couple rinses with clear water. Here are the skeins after neutralizing and rinsing:

And here are samples of the two batches of fleece:

Four pounds of fresh leaves dyed a pound of yarn (four 4 oz. skeins) plus 14 oz. of fleece. I am pretty happy with that. Now, I realize that in order to truly compare the results of hotter versus cooler liquid, I’d need to run two vats simultaneously with all other factors being the same…. Another day.

*After I published this post I re-read my notes. I should have done that in the first place since I obviously can’t trust my memory! It’s a good thing I take notes. I realized I had made some errors when I originally wrote it. The asterisk indicates something I’ve updated since I first published the post. Sorry for the inaccuracies!