Marigold flowers

I have been collecting marigold flowers for a few years to dye fabric, but haven’t tried it yet. Since   dying fabric with marigold flowers needs a lot of flower petals and I am not sure how much I really need.

This is from previous years. I dried flowers and cut the petals off from the base of the flowers. Since this process of cutting flowers from he plants to getting dried petals is time consuming, I wasn’t doing it much but the marigolds in my garden have been blooming one after another, I thought I would start collecting flowers again.

And this is what I cut last evening. Marigolds bloom until the first frost kill the plants. There will be more.

(Full of 2 baskets made about 700 flowers.)

(Drying.)

I have seen online shops carry dried flowers with the flower base in a bag, but I think the color after dying is less intense. Or, is it on purpose to use the flower base in a dye bath? The seeds contained in the flower base is black, so it may add depth to the color? I am not sure. A few of the members of my art quilt group are interested in plant dye, I will have to find how many flowers I need to have a decent dye bath so that I can give them more information. So I started to count the numbers of the flower and check weight before and after drying the petals.

I need marigold to improve the soil so have many of them every year. They kill/repel bad nematodes in the soil that cause problems to plants roots. They also attract pollinators, and suppress weeds underneath them. They end up becoming a bush. The plants after flowering are chopped up and mixed in compost, still good for nematode management for the vegetables I grow next year. It’s a useful flower.