Journal

Dye Garden in August: Studio Club Blog

The dye garden has burst into bloom - the air is humming with bees (though few butterflies) and every day new flowers appear.

I am keeping a track of what flowers when, how many flowers I can use, the picking timings and yields.  Ideally I want a garden where I can harvest by myself from May until mid September.  

I don’t want everything blooming at once as I would need to invest in more presses and another dehydrator and then have them standing empty for parts of the year.  I don’t want gaps or gluts.

June and July were mainly Dyer’s chamomile - I really couldn’t keep up with the picking from my 16 plants - but now, though it is still flowering, it is at a much slower rate.

The plants I am harvesting now are tagetes - a dumpy bedding mix that I will definitely grow again - cosmos rubenza, dark dahlias which I am pulling apart for the petals, and the start of the scabious black knight.

There is a little weld - some excitingly from a self sown plant - and a few coreopsis. I will try and increase the weld, the coreopsis is all going into the tunnel next year.

Disappointments have been the Hopi sunflowers which arrived with blight in the seeds and which are limping on but I shall not plant in this part of the garden again, also the annual coreopis which looks at least a month away from flowering - which will take it up to a potential frost date.

Here is a film of what the dye garden looked like on 11th August.

And, alongside all these dye plants, I want to make sure that I keep lots of the plants for insects and birds - so that means keeping the long line of agastache which you can see in the film, along with some euphorbias and all the self sown calendula.  To be honest these are a lot prettier than the dye plants - most of which are stripped of flowers as soon as they are at their peak!

I also like that the garden is lightly sprinkled with food - kale, Jerusalem artichokes, lettuce, coriander.

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