For our Spring Equinox egg hunt, we made our traditional plant and vegetable dyed eggs. We have been doing this since my children were four, and it is something they look forward to every year. This year I let them color pictures on the eggs with beeswax crayons first to try something new. There were baby chick eggs, fairy eggs, eyeball eggs, mother earth eggs, you name it. While they were doing this, I took four large stainless steel pots and filled them with chopped beets, purple cabbage, nettles and turmeric root.
I filled each pot with just enough water to cover eggs, and boiled them with the plant material and a generous splash of vinegar for 15 minutes. Then the pots sat with lids on for about two hours.
When I removed the eggs, they had turned some lovely colors. The beet eggs were pale pink, the cabbage eggs were violet blue, and the turmeric eggs were bright yellow, and the nettle eggs were pale green!
Hunting for all these eggs was great fun, and the chickens got a special spring treat of boiled cabbage and beets. My happy egg hunters will be eating a lot of deviled eggs and egg salad this week!
For further adventures in natural dyeing, I have heard that onion skins (we just hadn’t saved any this year), coffee grounds, spinach, blackberries, huckleberries, and indigo work well too and make some interesting colors. It’s fun to experiment and see what you come up with.
Happy Spring!
So inspiring! I've never done this before, it sounds like fun!
A Happy spring indeed, lovely eggs cheers Marie
So awesome! We were gone this weekend and I really didn't realize it was Equinox. We're getting ready for a big Beltane celebration in May.
How do the eggs react to the vinegar? Are they edible afterwards? Sounds silly but I didn't know!
Crystal
The eggs do great with the vinegar. They are totally edible afterwards too. Sometimes a little color seeps through the shells, but you know it's natural veggies and not food coloring so you can eat away! As far as temperature/food safety stuf…The eggs are sitting in very hot liquid while the color is soaking in, and if you put them back in the fridge right after this, I think it's OK. Have fun!
Lara, did you use brown eggs or white? My hens are all brown layers, and are in full production so buying white eggs just for dyeing seems silly. I just wonder how the brown eggs will take the dye.
For this year we bought some Naturally Nested white eggs because we just didn't have enough eggs from our hens to go this far. I have dyed brown eggs in the past, and they do take color, it just comes out a little different and less bright.