How to Dye Easter Eggs with Natural Ingredients

Are dyed Easter eggs a staple on your Easter table? This year skip the toxic store bought dyes and dye Easter eggs with natural ingredients. The end result is beautiful pastel colored Easter eggs, and I’ll show you what worked and what didn’t and how to dye Easter eggs with natural ingredients.

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Every week when I get my Instacart grocery delivery (use code PHILIAK125 to get $10 off your first order for new customers!) I am amazed at the quality of produce they pick out. Vibrant fruits and vegetables of all shape and sizes, and I can’t help but think of the rainbow salad I made.

As I cut the fruit and veggies for various dishes, I keep the scraps in a bowl. That bowl full of produce scraps will go downstairs into the basement and will get fed to my compost worms. That’s right, I have little compost worms in the basement (remember when I made rosemary tomato focaccia and shared about my compost?). Still, it’s weird, I know.

When I first came home from the store with two giant bins and asked my husband to help me make me a compost bin he thought I was crazy. He said that if he smelled it the worms would be evicted. I’m happy to report that they have not been evicted and happily live in a bin in our basement. If it’s really quiet and you’re standing right next to the bin, you can hear them, it’s a little crunching sound, that creeps me out and I run back upstairs lol. In the summertime I use the compost in my little garden.

I don’t always remember to feed my compost worms, but I try to at least feed them every few weeks. As we were over at my in-laws, my mother-in-law asked me what I was doing with all the vegetable ends I was going through, and because we were talking about the upcoming Easter holiday asked if I had ever dyed Easter eggs using natural dyes.

How had I never thought of that?

I was SO in love with the idea, and it just so happened that that very next day my Instacart grocery delivery came, perfect timing, right?

We set out dying Easter eggs with fruit and vegetables and used this very helpful guide:

We took a little creative liberty with what we had on hand, and found that the colors that came out best were brown, yellow, and green. The pink and purple didn’t really quite turn out the way I would have thought, but were still pretty (in full disclosure we didn’t have any tea on hand, so we left that ingredient out, maybe that would have made the difference?)

The brown – the dye was created from ground up coffee and vinegar. It created this beautiful brown and had almost a speckled texture from the coffee grounds.

The yellow – we used 1 tablespoon of tumeric powder and 1 cup of shredded carrots

The green – 1 bunch of parsley, 2 cups of spinach, 1 cup of muddled blueberries, 1 tsp tumeric powder

For each of the dyes all you do is fill a 2 quart pot with 1 quart of water and 1/4 cup vinegar, add in the vegetables or fruits, bring the mixture to a boil and then slowly submerge white eggs (uncooked) in. You boil the eggs for 13 minutes, then turn off the heat. We found that we had to leave the eggs in the water for about half an hour for them to turn any kind of color. Remove the eggs from the pot with a slotted spoon, and if needed rinse off any vegetable debris with warm water.

It was such a fun activity, I could definitely see getting the whole family involved and dyeing Easter eggs the natural way!

I’d love to know – do you dye Easter eggs?