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.