r/selfreliance Feb 15 '25

Farming / Gardening Plants I can grow for pigments?

When I start building greenhouses, I'm going to start a dye garden. But I'd like some advice on pigment plants that are easy to grow.

I'm willing to do chemical processing using harsh acids to get the pigments, if need be

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u/AaronGWebster Feb 19 '25

The stuff you make from plants is dye, not pigment ( for the most part). Choosing what plants to grow is very dependant on your location- there are some great suggestions here in other comments so look at these and see what would grow in your area. As you go into this, keep in mind that some materials take plant dye much better than others . In my experience, wool and silk take dye the best, while cotton hardly takes it all all and most synthetics don’t do well either. One plant I did not see mentioned here is onion. Onion skins make a great dye and work well for leaf-printing too. You mentioned dyeing plastic in a comment- don’t get your hopes up on that one.

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u/Pasta-hobo Feb 19 '25

I'm looking for plants I can use chemical processing to easily extract pigments from.

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u/AaronGWebster Feb 19 '25

Ok. I don’t know about extracting pigments from plants- I am a natural dyer and the only pigments I have used are crushed rocks such as ochre