The Honeysuckle Tea House is bringing indigo back to North Carolina with its first-ever Indigo Harvest Celebration on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
David Harper, executive director of the nonprofit Unique Places To Save, who aids the tea house in organizing events, said Honeysuckle specializes in “farm to beverage technique.”
“Because we grow the herbs and the berries on the land, we can then convert them into beverages like teas and smoothies," Harper said. "You can literally look over at the mint plants where your beverage came from.”
Sunday, however, the tea house will be shifting gears by hosting the harvest celebration. This experience will primarily consist of a workshop hosted by Harper’s wife, Caroline Harper, an indigo artist from South Carolina.
Caroline Harper will teach her class about how to harvest the indigo plants, extract the blueish dye and dye a scarf with it. Along the way, the class will learn about the history of indigo in the Carolinas, take a tour of the Honeysuckle property and hear from Caroline Harper about how she got started with her art form.
The harvesting of indigo plants is new to Honeysuckle but has a storied history in the Carolinas. The plant was harvested near the coastal areas of North and South Carolina before the Revolutionary War but was then replaced in popularity by rice and cotton.
This is the first time indigo had been planted at Honeysuckle.
Ryan Smith, a farmer at Honeysuckle, said he has one bed growing that includes South American and Japanese indigo.
He said there were two instances of the Japanese variant of indigo being pulled up out of the ground, but it is currently regrowing.
