I’ve been farming annual row crops for a couple of decades but in the last couple of years, I’ve been working on adding some perennial row crops to our gardens. I planted a row of Dyer’s Chamomile (Cota tincotria) a couple of springs ago and I get so excited to see it bloom early in the season when the annual plants are still just seedlings.

QUICK FACTS:

Perennial

Germination time: 10-21 days

Seed planting depth: unburied on the surface

Light: full sun

Spacing: 1-2’ apart

Plant height: 2-3’

CULTIVATION

I prefer to start Dyer’s Chamomile seeds indoors about 8 weeks before our average last frost date. The seeds are tiny and like many tiny seeds, it’s best to sow them right on the surface of the soil. Once the danger of frost has passed, the seedlings are transplanted out to the garden. Since I grow Dyer’s Chamomile as a row crop I space the seedlings 1’ apart but in a home garden with only a few plants, I’d probably give them more room and space them 2’ apart. My plants grew significantly during the first summer and set many blooms by the end of the season. The following spring the plants emerged and were in full bloom by the beginning of the summer. We use drip irrigation here on our farm and Dyer’s Chamomile is one of the crops that prefers to be watered every day. Some crops can go every other day or even longer but Dyer’s Chamomile wilts and looks very sad if it doesn’t get its daily watering. I imagine it would do well in a rainy climate.

HARVESTING

I’m still trying to find the balance between harvesting Dyer’s Chamomile blooms often enough to promote more blooms yet giving the flowers time to grow to their maximum size. The flowers are kind of slow to mature. They start small but if you give them more time to grow they become much bigger and heavier. Last summer I was harvesting just once per week whereas almost all the other dye flower varieties I grow are harvested 2-3 times per week. I use my hands to harvest the blooms and kind of bend and pull them upright to get them to snap off with minimal stem attached. After harvesting, the flowers are brought in and dried in hanging tiered mesh baskets. They take only about 5 days to dry completely here in our arid environment.

DYE

Many dye plants yield yellow so I wasn’t in the biggest hurry to set up a Dyer’s Chamomile dye bath. When I finally got around to it last summer I was enamored by the shade of yellow it yielded. When the dye emerged from the flowers it looked like the sun had melted in the pot. Dyer’s Chamomile yields the richest, warmest, shade of yellow I’ve ever seen. I’m excited to try some over-dyeing with it, particularly with indigo for shades of green, and maybe cochineal as well to see what that will yield. I will write a blog post soon to share my methods and results.