Goodness gracious, great balls of WOAD

Woad balls are made by seriously mashing up the leaves, squeezing out excess water and chlorophyl while forming them into balls.

I’m a sucker for historical practices and I’m growing woad, so I just had to make woad balls. If you look at my June 28 post, “The Mother Woad” you’ll see my, how my woad babies have grown, and can learn a bit more about woad, but essentially It’s a plant source of blue dye and pigment. So what’s a woad ball? Well yes, it’s a ball of woad, but it’s more than that. It’s actually a first step in fermentation and processing of the plan. Historically “Woad balls were very valuable and used for trading.” http://www.thewoadcentre.co.uk/the-history-of-woad/ For me, on a pragmatic level, woad balls allow collection at the optimum time for harvest, concentrates the active ingredients of the plant matter and preserves it for future use whenever I want to actually use it. 

Here's the squeezing part; it feels so wrong to squeeze out all that nice juice. But what is squeezed out isn't something needed for the dye. I poured all the juice back onto the ground, as a kind of compost tea.

It’s not easy to find anyone selling woad balls or pigment, I don’t know of anyone in this country who sells the processed version, as opposed to the seeds. It was essentially replaced by indigo grown in hotter climates than where I live. Let me digress here to explain the term “indigo.” To quote Wikipedia, “Several species, especially Indigofera tinctoria and Indigofera suffruticosa, are used to produce the dye indigo.” So the word “indigo” can mean the dye or pigment, or it can mean some of the plants that can make it. Woad produces indigo, but not at the high concentrations of, say, Indigofera tinctoria. So why bother with woad? Part of it is climate-I can grow it locally, and part is curiosity since it was used so successfully for so many centuries by my ancestors. In the few dye pots I’ve done so far with woad, it is not identical to indigofera tinctoria etc. that are generally used for what is generally called indigo. Let me give you a food analogy; popping vitamin C pills will give you way more vitamin C than broccoli or an orange; but that doesn’t mean that the broccoli or the orange should not be eaten and you just eat capsules of whatever nutrient. By just taking a synthesized version, you’re losing out on a lot of other stuff. I’m curious to explore this plant (woad) that was the main source of blue for thousands of years. 

The photos above are screen shots from video I took. I need to edit the videos into something that makes sense, keep checking back to the blog, I'll let you know where to find them. 

The finished woad balls. You can see the woad plants in the garden plot above the board with the woad balls on it. I didn't harvest all the leaves, there will be more to come, the first planting is growing fast. On the right side of the bed, it's hard to see but there is a second planting that is coming along.