If you’ve cooked with beets, you know that beets are a rich magenta color that can easily stain your hands, cutting boards, and more! Beets are accessible and easy to work with and are a good place to start when experimenting with natural dyes.

You can use beets from the garden to make food coloring to dye frosting, dye Easter Eggs or dye fabric. The deep pink hues from beet juice are exciting and beautiful.

Beets provide a great lesson in the temporary nature of some natural dyes. If you dye fabric, for instance, solely with beet juice, the color will look great the first day but will fade over time.

When dyeing fabric with beets, using a mordant is generally useful: a mordant is a substance that helps a dye bind to the item being dyed. With beets, for instance, adding vinegar or salt to your dye bath, as described in this article, will help the color last longer. Alternatively, you can treat your item in a vinegar or salt solution before dyeing it in the beet solution, a technique used in this tutorial about making a beet-dyed dish cloth. 

Dyeing with beets is just an introduction to the wonderful world of natural dyes. Your school garden can be an amazing source of natural dyes that you can use for dyeing projects with your students. In addition to beets, other garden-sourced dyes include marigolds, red basil, red cabbage, red and yellow onion skins, and mint.

Dyeing with red cabbage can provide an opportunity to teach students about acids and bases: using vinegar or baking soda as a mordant can result in different colors. And if you get really into natural dyeing you can plan a garden centered around natural dyes, planting other specialty dye plants including dyer’s coreopsis, weld, madder, indigo and black hollyhock. Try out natural dyeing with beets but don’t be afraid to expand to other plants as well: the results can be truly surprising.

Happy dyeing!