Farming Tools and the Workshop & Dad

One part of farming I never thought about when I used to think about what farmers do is the workshop where machines are fixed, invented & built, or other structures and or equipment are made. It is amazing how important handyman skills are in the farming life. We have to fix our tillers, tractors, and mowers. We have to build boxes, screens, sorters, strippers, storage boxes, and market containers. It's a large part of farm work.

My father died in January and I've spend about two months sitting with him and then planning his Memorial Service for all the people who loved him. This has been a very sad time, and yet joyous due to celebrating his life, learning more about it, and getting closer to my brother and sister. Dad was an excellent scientist and administrator, and he was an excellent craftsman and had a huge workshop that he used constantly. He was very creative and developed all these really cool things to use at his place and his lab. He was known in his field for building a box that helped model a molecule in which he used wood and glass to do what fancy modeling computers do now. He built a catamaran barge to use in the little harbor he lived on. He made me a cheese press when I had goats and was making cheese.

So, now we are trying to figure out what to do with his shop. Surprisingly, each one of us three has a degree of handyman abilities. My brother is building his son a treehouse, my sister rebuilds pianos as well as does things for her farm, and I build what I can for our lavender farm. I think Dad would be proud of us, and pleased that we value what contains so much of his sweat worked into every tool handle and piece of equipment. Each of us would like to have bits and pieces of the shop, so we'll divide it up and give family friends the rest. It's like little bits of Dad will be dispersed throughout the country to continue his good work.

Thanks, Dad.

Creativity and Competition

Today I spent the day in our State Capital, Olympia, with a group of farmers from my area. The one thing we all agreed upon is that it is refreshing and unfortunately rare to have farmers share the details of their farming with others. There is a fear that by sharing information we will be copied or beat to the market. While a little of that fear might be true, I would like to propose that it can't be really true. And that is because it's not the idea, it's what you DO with the idea that makes a project or product truly your own or unique.

Ben Lillie explains it much better than I, in his Physics blog on Coincidence and Creativity

Harvesting Lavender

From the end of June until sometime in October we are harvesting lavender. Different varieties bloom at different times, and we have over six varieties grown for commercial harvest. Here Leslie is harvesting our Provence lavender. We harvest by hand, using a Japanese sickle. We now use kevlar gloves to protect our workers hands and wrists - those sickles are incredibly sharp and can do severe damage.

The lavender is cut at the base of the flower stem, and then bundled with a rubber band. Each bunch is lain on the previously cut bushes until they are gathered up for hanging inside where it's dark and there is warm, moving air to dry them out. If we have a period of rain, which is relatively rare in our area but this year we had a rainy end of August, the lavender simply dries much more slowly.

The smell of the lavender is so wonderful, and carrying in arm loads of bunched fresh lavender is a delight.

After the lavender is dried, we either use it on the stem or take it off to use as dried bud for sachets or cooking.

Lavender Wind Spa Dog

Bailey, the Lavender Wind Spa Dog is communing with one of our decoys. We are harvesting in the background. Bailey was a delight this summer, she greeted our customers - sometimes with barks, other times with a wagging tail.

2008 Art Festival and Taste of Provence

A month ago we had our Third Annual Lavender & Wind Art Festival with a Taste of Provence. It was sort of the first, because we combined the two events into one big festival - and big it was! There were over 3,000 people who came.

There was a great wine garden that had a "fence" of lavender bunches and fabulous cheeses and french bread.

We had lots of music, and one of the staples of Whidbey life - the Shifty Sailors - were very popular.

The artists showed their creations and some sold quite a bit! Families of the artists came to help out, too. Our staff helped some of the artists set up. They also hung many artists' works in our own display areas.



The weather was fabulous, the Olympic Mountains guarded the event. The staff worked their tails off! It is humbling to see the dedication and hard work that so many people put into this event - the artists with their works and their booths, the musicians with their instruments and talent, the folks from WSU Extension who staffed the wine & food tent (did I mention that section was a fundraiser for the WSU Island County Extension Sustainable Agriculture position?), the staff in their constant attention to the needs of the visitors, artists, and volunteers. The farm, in its beauty and purple splendor on that weekend, put on a fabulous show!

Farming is NOT an exact science. Someone (Mother Nature) keeps us from having the same situation year in and year out. This year in the Pacific Northwest we had an unusually cold and rainy spring. It looks like we are now getting to a more normal summer pattern. But, the cold wet spring means we still have green grass and our lavender is just barely starting to be purple.

Will that mean that all the varieties will be slow to bloom? If so, our purple alert which reaches 10 around mid July, might not get there until the end of that month.... Tune in, to find out.

Have I raved recently or even at all about the people that work here at the farm? The folks that work here are amazing - funny, kind, hard working, dedicated, smart, creative, and did I mention hard working? They are: Kathy, Stacy, Abby, Mare, Leslie, Maxwell, and then there's Rick and me. Over the years there have been more - and sometimes they come by for a visit, I love those days.

Over the last couple of months Stacy and I have been developing recipes for our new line of mixes. In order to work on the recipe we have to make up batches of the goodies (by now Stacy is the one who does most of that while I flitter around waiting for them to come out of the oven).

Stacy is mixing up stuff - Great except we've all gained weight as a result!


Then Leslie inherited Bailey now known as the Lavender Wind Farm Spa Dog. She's a delight - mellow, watching the people and only barking when the UPS guy comes and she knows he'll give her lots of dog biscuits if she barks at him.

Leslie has been so fun for all of us, and boy oh boy can that girl work!! She even dug out moss from our neighbor's place and brought it here for the step into the gazebo. She's an inspiration, too, because she took time off from her career to hike the Appalachian Trail - all the way! She blogs about the farm, too.

Kathy comes every other week or so and files papers for us. She comes in time for lunch - a fine farming tradition that we uphold with devotion. Some of the folks bring energy bars for their lunches and we make fun of them. Then they eat cookies or lavender shortbread. It was Kathy who really got the gift shop started - she kicked me out of the room, telling me to get my potting and gardening stuff out of there - no arguments. We're so glad she did!

Bottom line: I love this group of people! More about the rest later.

Who'd think about Lavender being useful against Bedbugs? On the other hand, since it's so useful against so many insects - why not? Read about it

If you just want to cut to the bottom line: use twenty drops of lavender essential oil into a spray bottle filled with about 2 cups of denatured alcohol and spray onto the affected area.

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!

Was Baskin Robbins peaking into our freezer? Last year we had several flavors of ice cream for sale at our shop - Vanilla lavender, blackberry lavender, and caramel cheesecake lavender. Folks loved 'em - came way out here just for an ice cream fix.

I just found out that Baskin Robbins has come out with a blueberry, lavender, and chocolate ice cream. It sounds DIVINE! Unfortunately, they don't have any stores less than 1 1/2 hours away - so... anyone out there that tries it, will you let me know what it's like?

Meanwhile, stayed tuned to our shop - more flavors are planned for this year. We're not Baskin Robbins, it's hard to get out here but worth it.

I'm in one of the hottest art capitals in the country - Chicago. The art community here is very strong, galleries everywhere. And for me, a friend who I've known since I was 11 years of age who teaches are at a local university.

Do you know how many products are packaged nicely and labeled "lavender" in downtown Chicago (or any other city) that don't have a drop of real lavender essential oil? No? Neither do I. However the fragrance industry is awash with mixtures of artificial scents combined with natural ones. There probably isn't enough lavender essential oil in the world to provide all the producers with enough to go around, so I guess we shouldn't complain. I wonder if people who have allergy problems to scents are reacting more to artificial oils or to true essential oils. Anyone know?

Did you know that lavender oil is an ingredient in varnishes that artists use on their paintings?

"It can be used as a medium to give body to the color as well as a certain amount of bite, which improves adhesion to the lower layers. It can have the effect of either increasing or decreasing dry time, depending upon the other ingredients it is mixed with. If pure, it also works as a diluent, and was widely used in the middle ages. It Dries more slowly than Turpentine, allowing the artist to work wet in wet."

People use lavender oil in overglazing when making painted ceramic tiles. It seems to be used as a drying retardant.

SIGNS! On Monday the Island County Commissioners voted to approve a signage program much needed in our area. In Washington we have a state Highway Motorists Information Signage Program wherein businesses and recreation/tourist places can apply for signs to be placed on those signboard that have "Gas" or "Food" or "Tourist" kinds of things. It's not easy to qualify, but once a business does a sign gets put up. Well, it does IF the business is right on the road that is off the highway. Any more turns and "follow through signage" is needed.

In Island County we now have a provision to apply for that follow through signage. Yahoo! That means that Agritourism oriented farms can now be found. That means that other small home-based businesses that qualify for the state sign system can be found. In a rural area, where even knowing an address doesn't mean that a place can be found because the roads wind around and are sometimes not well marked.

Over the last two years we've been putting up sandwich board signs at the intersections and they do make a difference - the only trouble is that they are illegal. So, we don't do that anymore. If counties want to help small farms survive and if we realize that part of small farms (that are near urban areas) need to rely on agritourism signage is a key component.

Do farmers blog less than others? I'm looking at my series of blog entries and realize they are very intermittent. I have a cousin who writes in her blog at least once a day. When I get up the first thing I do is look out the window to see what the weather is doing and decide what I can do outside. In the winter, it's often inside work because we don't work out in the field when it's too wet or snowy. On Whidbey Island we don't have much snow, but every once in a while we do and this year has had quite a lot (for us). Coming from southern New England and having lived in Denver for many years, it doesn't compare. This is a banana belt compared to those places.

Even when I'm inside, though, I'm consumed with the tasks I've put off in order to do the work outside. So, there is precious little time to write in a blog, much less think of something remotely interesting to write about.

Today will be different, though, because I'm visiting my son who lives in a city far away and I have the luxury to kick back, gaze out the window and think up something that might be interesting.

The weather! It's January and constantly like this - windy, spotty rain or more, chilly.... It's hard to get out to finish the pruning. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we can also transplant. It's actually a good time to do it, as long as the weather is above freezing. The ground is very juicy and the temperatures are cool enough that the plants are dormant. The only problem is getting up the gumption to go out and do it.

Lt Rain 37°F (3°C) Humidity: 82 % Wind Speed: ESE 21 G 26 MPH Barometer: 30.31 in (1026.70 mb) Dewpoint: 32°F (0°C) Wind Chill: 26°F (-3°C) Visibility: 0.00 Miles

I just hired another Coupeville teen - now we have two 14 year olds working here. I like to think of kids as my "other" crop. This last summer we graduated three that had been with me for several years - one had been here since she was 14. It was a proud moment as well as being rather poignant - to go to their graduation and cheer them on their way to college. Meanwhile, Spencer, the new kid at the farm, has been doing very well. Yesterday he dug out the dirt and grass from the fence around the vegetable garden so we can replace the fencing. It's old enough now that the voles and rabbits can just chew through it and get into the garden to eat OUR food. Spencer said he didn't mind it at all, was listening to music as he worked. I think iPods and other portable players are such a gift - it makes working so much more pleasant!

Each year we have a holiday party and the three new college kids (who have left Lavender Wind Farm to go on with their lives) came, one with her boyfriend, and they were happy. Each one was growing in her own direction, and because they are still freshmen, that direction is still rather fuzzy.

This year we got our first company sweat shirts.


This year we have lots of new stuff planned for the upcoming season. And this winter we are taking care of lots of background paperwork. This is usually a chore I avoid, but to avoid being outside in this weather.....