This week we took the final few buckets of flowers from the field. Another couple days of heavy rain, and potential freezing temperatures mean I really have to give up on all the summer flowers.
The flower fields are fading, but the maples around our house are bursting with color right now. How lucky we are to see the changing seasons.
A real close up of the scabiosa seeds I'm saving for next year's dye.
One of my favorite flowers is black knight scabiosa. The seeds look like little shuttlecocks. The flowers are deep purple and always covered in pollinators. They add a lot to arrangements, but are more thrilling because of all the pigment they hold.
I'm a novice at natural dying, but have gotten purple to blue to green colors from these flowers. My favorite gardening jacket in this photo was dyed green using scabiosa. It's a bit uneven, so it will get a second treatment later this month.
I'm a novice at natural dying, but have gotten purple to blue to green colors from these flowers. My favorite gardening jacket in this photo was dyed green using scabiosa. It's a bit uneven, so it will get a second treatment later this month.
Today I got very muddy digging up some of the dahlias to save for next year. We had so much rain over the weekend that the shovel squelched with each clump of tubers that came out of the ground.
This spring I discovered how easy it was to propagate strong dahlia plants by taking cuttings. That alone is why I'm going to keep growing this crop.
