I will be starting a few of my Indigo seeds in pots so I can move them, in the hope that our new home will have a garden where I can plant them in the ground. I also have an idea to explore about setting up a dye garden off site, but I’ll need to look into that a little further before I can get to excited about if it can go ahead or not!

One of the saddest parts of having to move is knowing how much we had made this place our home. We really love where we live and invested in our lives here more than we ever had in past houses!

This also means the gorgeous bulb garden bed I planted, full of jonquils, daffodils, iris, ranunculus and anemones will most likely be lost, although I will attempt to dig a few bulbs out with the dirt so I can bring some with me in pots. There is around 300 bulbs in the bed though, so I wont be able to dig up all of them. It’s also full of dwarf snap dragons and cottage flowers, it’s the flower garden I’ve always wanted.

I have a lot of house hunting ahead of me! We were lucky with the house we’re in now, it’s very big, we have a guest bed, and both my husband and I have our own work spaces. It’s unlikely we will find something so large for the same price again, so the downsize is going to hurt! We’ve gotten used to having a lot of space.

These days the impact that I have on my environment and the world as a whole is quite an important deciding factor in the way that I work. At the moment I am able to work at a level where I know that I am working in a sustainable way. Working with natural dyes is obviously going to have less impact on the environment at the point of manufacture, and for someone like myself who plans to grow, harvest and extract their own dyes, sustainability would be about as high as it can really get in this day and age.

Whether or not working with natural dyes would be sustainable when used in a high paced manufacturing environment is debatable, and it’s my belief that if only natural dyes were used in all manufacturing they would not be, but when they are being used by a single artist working alone in their studio to create one of kind pieces, the carbon footprint is small.

I also want to talk about sustainability in relation to consumerism. One speaker at at seminar I recently attended made a comment, which was said quite quickly and perhaps wasn’t very well thought out that nearly had me leaving their talk as soon as they said it. The comment was about how people want an experience when they are shopping, and sometimes people just walk into a store and they don’t know what they want, but they just want to buy something in that store. Anything.

For me, that concept of purchase just to have that experience of purchase –  it is just the opposite of who I am. I absolutely never do that kind of thing. Maybe that stems from me becoming more frugal since becoming a mother, from my raised awareness of my impact on the earth, or by my realisation that I don’t want to own stuff just for the sake of it.

For many years now I’ve teased my husband about moving to a commune and living off the land, of not being constantly bombarded with technology and media, and advertising and branding etc etc etc. Of course I think I’d manage about 2 days of that lifestyle before I was curled into a ball crying softly for my iphone…but still, a balance is necessary! Even as a small business owner who wants to derive a liveable working income from my craft, the idea of consumption just for the sake of it just doesn’t work for me.

I’ve had this post sitting here for quite some time, in fact I’d forgotten I’d written it! But this morning this blog post popped up in my news feed due to following Judy Hill on facebook and it reminded me of all I had written. It’s a wonderfully informative post about natural dyes and how they can cause the destruction of an environment, specifically how brazilwood is no longer available as a dye source because it has all been harvested.

I picked up the 3 strongest looking plants and have chosen a place in my front yard as their new home.

They are going to be separate to the rest of my dye garden, but this will actually be a good thing because they need half shade, and my main dye garden is going to be in full sun.

I started digging out a ruined garden bed in the front yard yesterday, and planted the Indigo with a few lillies nearby, as I just had some bulbs arrive as well. Lillies are one of my favourite flowers so I can’t wait for them to bloom! My jonquil garden is beginning to bloom in the bed next to where the Indigo is, so once the Indigo flowers as well in September my front yard will be a feast for sore eyes!

I think I will also plant some snap dragons and cottage flowers around the Indigo as well, to fill the bed up. Whatever I can find that will tolerate a bit of shade.

I’m also finally getting round to digging out the proper dye garden bed in the back yard. Since I’ve injured my shoulder (no idea how!) I’m hiring someone to rip out all the rubbish that is in it and then doing the rest myself. So hopefully in a few weeks I’ll have some lovely pictures of a dirt filled bed!

It’s funny, I’ve never been much of a gardener before I lived in the house we live in now. But looking out the window at my flowers, and going and inspecting them every day makes me think that now I wont be able to live without a garden!

Ok so most of these photos are of my flower garden. I can’t help it, it’s so pretty!!