August 18th, 2026
Instead, with the help of my (much more garden savvy) friends, I grew tomatoes, peppers, squash, strawberries, and melons. The last of these were sadly hollowed out by rats, and many of the others were destroyed by my landlord, who claims he “thought it was all weeds” and “forgot he could text me to ask.” Story for another day. In any case, by that point, I’d entirely forgotten to start my indigo seeds, and it was too late in the season to start growing them. This past spring, I...made the exact same mistake. Or rather, I thought maybe I’d just direct sow them and see what happened. But fortunately, my same gardener friend remembered the excitement from last year, and gave me several of her own indigo starts to grow. Last week, they were finally ready to harvest.
It turns out that the leads of the natural dye workshop weren’t kidding when they said that indigo was an entirely different beast. The Sunday I decided to harvest the leaves, I did some research and found that I would first need to set out in search of several key supplies: buckets, pH strips, a siphon, and pickling lime. The lime was of the foremost concern; searching for it took me to no fewer than three stores. Fortunately, my sister and her girlfriend were having a slow day, and kept me company over the phone the whole time. Narrating each of my stops to them as a late-summer thunderstorm built and then burst overhead was almost certainly what kept me from giving up and saying I’d finish the job another day. By the time I reached home again, the rain had stopped, and the leaves of the indigo plants had softened away from their stems in a way that made them easy to harvest.
After that, I let the leaves sit for 3 days. During this time, they fermented and released a kind of stunning amount of green-blue pigment. Forgive me if this section of the blog is just me repeating the process as described in the above mentioned post from Homegrown Greens, but it really was thrilling to come down every day to the yard and peek under the lid of each bucket to find an entirely new hue. And after the next step, I felt like some kind of apothecarian witch.
By the way, if you’d like to follow the same instructions I have been, I’ve found this blog/recipe post to be a wonderfully thorough and easy to follow guide. Once I’m ready to make an indigo vat, I’ll need to jump to another website’s instructions, but I don’t imagine I’ll need to worry about that before fall.
The final step was to add pickling lime into each bucket until it reached a pH of 9 or 10--we don’t know for sure if we hit that number, because SOMEone (me) bought a liquid-based pH testing kit for aquariums that required on clear liquid turning a certain color to indicate its pH. Being that the liquid in the buckets was, at this point, an opaque and viscous blue that reminded me of fountain pen ink, this method didn’t really tell us much. So we eyeballed it. Then we aerated each mixture again. Hopefully this method works, but if not, I have since ordered test strips for whenever the plants are ready to be harvested again. But now, we wait.
I am writing this mostly because I really enjoyed doing it, and because I took pictures, and because I did it with my friends. But I’m also writing this because I hope that if you read it, it will remind you that everything comes from somewhere: every color, every fiber, every object. There’s pleasure in just engaging with that fact. Working to make a thing I take for granted reminds me of the labor that makes up the whole world I inhabit.
There’s pleasure in trying to make something that has a use, with your friends or your cat or all alone. There’s pleasure in making things that have no use at all, as well. But if you’re lucky enough to have free time, and space, and a sudden spark of interest in something you know very little about, you can act on it! You don’t need permission. That’s something I took a long time to learn, and I think it’s something we’d all do well to remember. You don’t need anyone’s permission to play.