We started the seeds on March 19th 2024
Some small leaves started to come out. The photos are from April 5th 2024.
The above pots are seeded with W and R types from Museum in Tokushima. The below pots are the seeds from Furusho factory. They did not come out, except one pot with one plant… we are not sure if the seeds had problems (it could have been last year’s seed. The chances of germinating decreases drastically after 1 year for Persicaria seeds), or the green house had a problem as the other pots in the same green house also did not grow well. We planted more seeds (F) in the same pots and moved some of them to the “good” side of the green house.
April 28, 2024
It is now transferred to the field. The last photo is from 2 days after the transfer. It is growing well so far.
May 22
There has been a lot of rain in Salzburg. Indigo is doing good so far. The flower in front is Rucola.
25 June 2024
There are two types of indigo planted in Salzburg, and now you can see the big difference. It looks like “R” kind is doing much better. Maybe it suits the weather here better. They are planted as a part of vegetable garden and getting a very good care. It is about 30cm high now.
25 July 2024
The plants in Salzburg is very big, passed knee height and is already blooming. ( just one!) We are harvesting it today.
we trim it to ~10cm high, make sure to leave fresh leaves coming out to make new branches. We were surprised to see some new roots coming out directly from the branches. This plant can spread on the side ways like this. The leaves looks very healthy and unlike the ones on the balcony in Berlin, there are very little yellow or dead leaves inside. We left the flowering part so it can make seeds.
The harvest looks quite big now. we rolled/massaged the leaves one branch by on branch to let the enzyme in the leaves to come out and form the indican inside the leaves. Normally in Japanese indigo harvesting process, they cut the fresh leaves and dry it on the ground. I suspect by cutting, the plants releases the enzyme. As we do not have space to dry the chopped leaves, we use this massage method I saw in video from one of the Indigo maker in Japan. after few minutes, you can already see the leaves turning blue.
Then we made small bundles and hang to dry. It should dry in few days in this summary weather.
11 August, 2024
After 2 weeks of drying in the cellar, the plants are fully dried and we separate the leaves from stems. Leaves weigh about 620g, and stems are about 1000g. Normally they do not use stems to make sukumo in Japan as it contains less indigo, but there are such thing as stem indigo (Kuki Ai) exist as the second grade color to color Kendo uniforms. I am thinking of also using stems to try composting them separately.
In the mean time, the indigo plants are growing! After the first harvest, it already grew back to ~20cm size. The part I left to flower is already blooming.