How to Harvest Your Lavender From Your Garden

Lavender is an amazingly versatile plant that every gardener needs in their plot. It is medicinal, edible, fragrant and, beautiful. You can do so many things with your lavender. Just look around on our website to see all the many lavender projects and recipes that you can do.

It’s already the first part of July and as always time is flying by. We just did our first lavender harvest of the year and we’re so excited to share it with you. The smell of fresh cut lavender is one of the best. I love this time of the year.

Lavender

This years harvest is from our 2 and 3 years old Lavendula Angustofolia (English Lavender) . We have a couple of Phenomenal Lavender that we planted this year that probably won’t start to bloom until next year because we ordered plugs that were very small. We also have our first year propagations that are big and healthy. It’s will not produce flowers this year but next year should have some lovely heads.

You need to find the types of lavender that will best work for your space. Some are large plants and some are much smaller. Each variety will look and smell different from one another. If you are wanting to harvest from your plant you need to decide what you will be creating and choose your variety accordingly.

Plan Your Lavender Planting

Our plan is to build off of our healthy plants by cutting several starts to propagate. Each year as our plants get bigger we can get more starts from them. Last year we had 12 starts for trial propagation. We tested several methods of propagation and several locations around our yard to see where they did the best.

Trial Varieties in Your Yard

In 2017 we had 25 lavender plants. They were trials to see where they liked to live in our garden. We had a harsh winter and now we only have 14 plants but we learned a lot. Before we planted our plants we read a lot of information about how to care for lavender. Our challenge in our area is that we live where our soil is mostly clay so we have to amend our soil. As much as it went against the grain (generally I’m picking rocks out of the soil) we added small rocks to our soil to help the plants drain well.

Dry Cold Winter

Unfortunately some of our plants didn’t get sufficient water for them to be able to live through the winter. Although lavender doesn’t like to be soaked it still needs to be watered quite a bit in the heat of the summer and possibly watered through the winter if you don’t receive enough moisture during the winter months. We had a really dry winter hence the loss of our new lavenders.

What is your favorite lavender variety? What grows best in your area?