Weld grew in my garden before I came to live here. 

After I moved in I noticed this tall plant with it's multiple flower spikes which popped up in my flowerbeds, but I had no idea of it's potential. It was only when I started investigating growing my own plants for dyeing wool that I realised how lucky I was that weld seems to love my soil.

It grows a rosette of green leaves early in the season, sending down a strong taproot. It doesn't really like to be moved but if I see seedlings early enough they will usually tolerate being moved to a convenient place in the garden.

This one has not chosen such a convenient place to grow!

Once they have established, the plants begin to send up flower spikes with tiny yellowish green flowers. The whole plant can be harvested and chopped up for using fresh or can be dried to use at a later date. I always leave some flowers to seed themselves for next year.

Weld yields a bright, fresh, yellow dye. This is some of my first handspun wool from sheep who graze in our next-door village. The first steps towards my dream of creating truly local textiles.

I have been interested in woad as a source of colour in cloth since I was at agricultural college (about 20 years ago), when I wrote a study of the history and potential future of the plant as a commercial crop.

These things go in circles and for a long time I had no connection with woad at all but when I started investigating planting my own dye garden it was woad that first came to mind.

From my earlier studies I knew that getting the blue colour was not a simple process but I was keen to experiment and see if I could use woad to dye wool that I could spin myself.

I plant the seedlings in deep cell trays to minimise disturbance to the roots when they are planted out. I use a peat free compost made in the Lake District, from sheeps wool and bracken.

 This years seedlings are just emerging while last years plants are about to burst into flower. Woad plants are biennial so you harvest the leaves in the first year. This is when they have the most pigment. In the second year seed is collected for following harvests.

These are the woad plants in full leaf in the garden last summer.

It is easiest to harvest the leaves and use them straight away. They were historically fermented and made into dried balls to be stored for later use but this is not necessary on the scale that I use them.

 These are the same plants today (April 2021). The flower stalks have elongated and the yellow flowers are about to emerge.

 The process for extracting blue pigment from the leaves and dyeing the wool has several stages and I will write another post about that in due course.

 Here is some wool that I dyed with woad. You can see that it is possible to get a range of shades of blue. I really enjoy working with a plant which has such a rich history within the story of our textile industry.