Notes from the Dye Garden: The June Weld Harvest

Weld is not a patient plant. It spends most of the year as a low rosette of leaves, easy to overlook next to the indigo and madder beds, and then in the second week of June it throws up a flowering spike three feet tall almost overnight. We watch for that spike the way other people watch for the first frost. Once it appears, we have about ten days to cut the whole plant before the yellow dye locked in its stems and leaves starts converting to something duller.

This year we cut on a Tuesday, six of us in the garden by seven in the morning before the heat set in. Weld doesn't come out of the ground; you cut it at the base and hang the whole plant to dry, leaves, stems, and all. The garden smells green and slightly bitter for days afterward, a smell that clings to your hands and doesn't fully wash out until the next morning.

We dry the stalks in bundles from the studio rafters for about three weeks before they're ready to simmer into dye liquor. Dried weld keeps its color for years if you store it right, so a good June harvest can carry us through dye lots well into the following spring. We rarely get through the whole crop before the next season's rosettes are already up.

Weld gives us the clean, bright yellows we use for the undyed-wool overdyes in the dye garden collection, and it's the base for most of our greens, which we get by overdyeing weld yellow with a pass through the indigo vat. The order matters. Yellow first, then blue, gives us the mossy greens we like; the reverse gives something colder and more blue-leaning.

Every harvest is a little different depending on the spring we had. This year's plants ran shorter than usual after a dry May, which usually means a more concentrated dye. We won't know for certain until the first test skeins come out of the pot, sometime next week.

If you've bought anything from the dye garden collection, some fraction of its color traces back to a Tuesday morning cutting weld before the heat came up. We like knowing that, and we hope it's worth knowing on your end too.