Although the main focus of FARM Davis is growing food to give away, we’re also cultivating a small plot of fiber and dye plants. Many dyes can be made from food waste (such as onion skins and pomegranate rinds), while other dye plants (such as coreopsis and Hopi dye sunflowers) attract pollinators to the garden. We’re growing some cotton from FoxFibre seed and in the past have grown flax and grazed sheep. If you’re in the area, come experience the garden first-hand; otherwise, click on the pictures below to see how our garden grows!
FARM Davis Fiber and Dye Garden
Coreopsis
This wildflower blooms and reseeds itself prolifically. The flowers can be used as a dye fresh or dried, and they just keep coming throughout the summer! Over the course of a couple months, I was able to collect enough blossoms to fill a quart mason jar when dried. At the Textile Trio dye workshop, we…
Madder
A fellow fiber fanatic donated the seed for this, and I’m quite happy with how well it’s doing. Madder is a long-term investment, as it takes 3 years to develop thick enough roots to use for dyeing. We’re growing it in containers both to make it easier to harvest the roots, and to keep it…
Onions
Onions! We grew and donated lots of ’em. The part used for dyeing is just the papery outer skin, so it’s easy to harvest for dual purposes. We grew red onions, but yellow ones work just as well.
Purple Iris
The first time I tried using purple iris as a dye, I scavenged the spent blooms from my neighbor’s green waste pile. Hers were so dark they were almost black, so I wasn’t sure at first if these would contain enough colorant. But they do! Unlike other flowers that have to be picked fresh and…
Cotton
A couple years ago, we planted a small patch of cotton from Sally Fox’s colorful varieties. We were stunned to find that some of it came out red, and carefully saved those seeds apart from the rest (a mix of browns, greens, and white). This year, I was so excited to try and grow some…
Pomegranate
Although the pomegranate trees are not actually IN the dye garden, they are one of the most reliable sources of color that we have out on the FARM. But it’s not the color you might expect… …and it’s not from the juice. Here are the remains of some pomegranates that were juiced by one of…
Indigo
This is my first time attempting to grow indigo, or even dye with it. Our plants haven’t seemed very happy, but have hung in there through some rough patches. I’m hoping that we can at least get some seed to plant a bigger plot next year.
Hopi Dye Sunflower
This is one I’ve read about but only just this year got around to trying. The sunflowers were huge! The seeds were tiny! They are supposed to make a purple dye, but when we tried them in the Textile Trio dye workshop the yarn looked gray coming out of the dye pot. After it dried,…
Black Beans
Another Hopi dye crop, and excellent filler of burritos. In the dye workshop when describing my dye method with these beans, I said that I go for the laziest way possible to do things (but then noted that somehow that involved planting the beans and tending to them for several months, then picking and threshing…
threads of song 