Last Saturday we woke to over 3 inches of snow on the ground. While that might be normal for Minnesota or Vermont, it's very unusual here. This week Saturday was sunny and in the high 50's - a lovely day.

April has been a miserably cold month this year. The lavenders are slow to wake, the daffodils that can bloom as early as February in some years, weren't blooming until a week into April. Tulips are now coming on. The poor folks in Skagit County where they have the April Tulip Festival are suffering because now the tulips are starting to bloom, a few weeks after the "start" of the festival. Ah, Mother Nature, we must never forget that you are the boss.

Much of the vegetable garden is planted and I put in a lot of yarrow down in another space near the lavender field. We'll be growing more herbs there this summer, rather than ornamental flowers. A sunflower maze is going in on the new field - Whoopee!

Ria and her husband came into my shop today. I've known them for years since Lavender Wind Farm was so small we just went to a few farmers markets and didn't have anyone coming onto the farm. Her husband has gone downhill significantly due to progressive Parkinson's Disease. However, today they were excited to tell me that they had read that lavender tea made a big difference to the problem of sweating that he had been experiencing. They said each night she padded the bed with several towels over and under him and in the morning all the towels and bedding were soaking wet. Sometimes, she'd have to get him up in the middle of the night to replace his wet clothing and towels.

So, about week ago, after reading about lavender helping with sweating associated with Parkinson's Disease, they came to the farm to get some lavender to test this theory. They report that on the first night after sipping a couple of cups of lavender tea during the day he had dramatically reduced sweating, and the second night the bed was dry. Ria said it made a difference in his energy level, too, because his body doesn't have to cope with the loss of the fluids from the extreme sweating he had been suffering.

Some aromatherapy and herbalists say that lavender, taken internally as tea, can stimulate the flow of bile, be mildly sedating, and can help with headaches.

I'm not able to find scientific studies that prove or even test that lavender helps with sweating symptoms of Parkinson's disease. So, this is definitely an anecdotal testimonial. However, you wouldn't have dared suggest there'd been a mistake to this relieved couple that have enough on their plate in dealing with the ravages of Parkinson's Disease.

Tires smelling like lavender? You've got to be kidding, right?

Not at all. Apparently, Kumho Tires has come out with a lavender tire that can be smelled inside and out of the car. They've found a way to imbed the rubber with heat resistant scented oils - this can't be REAL essential oils.... I've been seeing mentions about this product for over a year, but it hasn't seemed to take hold of the public's imagination or desire as far as I can tell. But, I'm not in the tire business so I really don't know.

Here's the article on it in the online Arizona Daily Star

Kumho Tires ECSTA DX tire is described on the company's site. It's amusing, really, the company's site is done with typically male design - hard edges, lots of black, and tons of description about the performance of the tire. It just doesn't go with an aromatherapy product... I have to wonder who they are marketing to? It can't be women - not that we don't like solid facts about tires, but if you're trying to add a floral aspect to a product wouldn't you put a picture of flowers somewhere in there?

What do you think? I'm really curious about how this will play out.

WIND - it's in our name and this weekend we saw why. All of the Puget Sound region had wind from a fierce storm that barreled in from the Pacific. Our farm saw winds that reached 70 mph at 7:30 on Monday morning. That's high, but we can expect to see that probably three or four more times this winter. It's scary here when that happens, the windows bend in, the gutters rattle, and the exhaust fan from the stove makes the most horrible clattering noise. The nursery pots get overturned, and two lavender plants got blown out of their pots completely.

I like to think our plants are very strong by the time they are purchased for people's gardens! They've had to go through a lot to survive, no pampered greenhouse plants here, that's for sure.

The harvest season is winding down. We still have some Super lavender left, it's not done blooming. The sunflowers are going nuts, though! We planted three acres of them to hold the dirt down in our new field.

It looks like I'll be getting a life back so I can write in the blog. This farming life is very intensive, but I've never been happier. We are a small lavender farm with a BIG view and some great gardens - this all takes a huge amount of work. We are also intimately tied into our community, which involves volunteering with various organizations including the uniquely Whidbey sort of thing - Lighthouse Environmental Programs. Then, last January, I went and said yes to being the president of the Central Whidbey Chamber of Commerce. It's a real stretch for a farming type to be president of such an organization, especially when anything at all is expected during harvest season, which for lavender lasts three months. What was I thinking?

It looks like we'll be getting our jams and jellies into a relatively small grocery chain. I'm really excited about that - it's a large step for our product line to grow beyond the farm.

The distilling with the copper still has been, simply, just fabulous. It helps people see how essential oils are made, and I get to create some fine hand-crafted oils that smell amazingly good right away. Our farm is still small enough that we can distill with 100% copper and that makes a huge difference. The quantity is small, so we sell it mostly to our own customers and use it in our own products and can't consider wholesaling much of it.





Our new gardens with pond and gazebo have been a hit this year. Though the pond has evaporated much more than I had planned. We are looking forward to the rainy season so it can fill up again. We created it to catch the rain water that falls on our roofs and driveway in order to use the water for watering our nursery stock. It has been a lesson in more forces of nature while we watch first the wind and then the sun suck up the water. We expect the pond to fill this winter. It didn't last year due to last construction. Even though this summer was wetter than normal, the water still left us. We do have lots of fish (goldfish and coy), though, that have grown and now we are seeing tiny new ones, so they are doing very well.

In addition to the fabulous changes in our landscape we also are working on our essential oils.

Right now we are now bottling up our own essential oil that was distilled last year. We take truck loads of flowers over to a neighbor's still and I work like a mad-scientist to get it distilled. It's fun, smells wonderful, and then we bottle it up and store it for a year to age - like fine wine. Now it's ready to bottle and we have a limited amount (remember we are a very small lavender farm). We have it in 10 ml. bottles for $6.75. If you want it in bigger bottles, watch our site for availability.

To let you know what's coming soon: This year we got our own fairly small Alembric Hand Hammered Copper Still and have been practicing on some left over dried lavender. Oh, my gosh! This is wonderful oil and fresh hydrosol that is really different than any oil distilled in bigger, non-copper stills. We are not yet bottling it up, it doesn't have to age as much, but we want to be sure of what we're doing with this new version our our oil

This is the season for plant jitters. Most people are getting a whiff of spring in the air and starting to think about planting in the garden. For us nursery types, it's a different story - we've been thinking about your planting for a long time, and hoping that our customers will want what we've grown. This time of year I get jittery.....

Maybe, I ordered too many lavenders! And other plants! We have a TON of little plants some of which have been transplanted and the others are waiting to be done. We have very little room left to put them. Fortunately, we have so much planting to be done to recover from the pond construction that many of the plants will be absorbed into the property. But the pond itself now has plants lining the shelves that have water on them.

We're so used to dealing with drought-tolerant plants that having bog plants is like being on a different planet. I don't know how to deal with plants that like wet feet. I'm sure I'll learn, though, and I'm looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, to put my jitters to rest I want to tell you, that if you're around Whidbey Island and looking for lavenders and herbs, then we're the place for you. Check out the varieties we've got!