I've started working on ideas for lavender bags to hold the harvested buds and flowers. Here's a few I've come up with. It's been fun learning how to make flowers out of ribbon.

Ahah! Lavender WILL grow a second crop!

It is as I suspected. Once I harvested the lavender and trimmed the bushes back nice and neat, a new crop of flower is budding and even blooming AGAIN! Wow! So cool! I've noticed that some of the stems are a bit shorted, but other than that they look the same as they did when they first bloomed this year. So, the moral to the story is: Harvest your lavender when it blooms because another crop will grow and be ready to harvest by summer's end, if not sooner. I still haven't finished removing the buds and flowers from all that I dried and harvested earlier this summer. Looks like a very bountiful season.

Harvesting and drying

I'm learning that there are pretty easy ways to dry the lavender in the arid Utah climate. Hey, anything will dry out here! First I carefully laid the lavender on newspaper on the floor, single layer, and waited several weeks. Then I noticed the lavender was drying within a week, so I increased my area of lavender "spreads". Well, this got crazy because it was all over the place. So I decided to try just putting the lavender in bundles in paper bags to dry out. Works well, and the dropped flowers land in the bag. Finally I just resorted to cutting the lavender and tossing it in the big brown paper grocery bags, then leaving it somewhere to dry out. The time consuming part is removing the spent buds from the stems. I sit in a comfortable chair with a bag of dried lavender still on the stems, and shred the buds off into a bowl, then I toss the stems and leaves. I was keeping the leaves, but I noticed that the leaves are prickly, and not suitable for a sachet bag. I wanted something soft to handle. Once I get all of this gathered, then I'll work on the sachet bags.

More lavender harvesting

This is a little fabric pocket I made out of scraps to display my fresh lavender. Simple to make, but I think I like the look of the lavender basket better. Plus that was more fun to make.

What type of lavender is this?

It's growing in my backyard, partially in shade, but seems to be doing quite well there. I planted it several years ago, but don't know what type it is. The blooms are much lighter in color.

Lavender basket

I found a book about lavender projects by the "lavender lady". One of those projects is this lavender basket. It's very small, like the lavender wands, but the ribbon weaving doesn't go all the way up. The trickiest part was getting it started, then making the handle. She mentioned twisting the fresh stems to avoid breakage. Well, I didn't have much luck with that, but the ribbon holds it all together anyway!

Harvesting lavender

As I've cut the lavender, I place it on newspaper in a room with good ventilation. My plan is to dry it all out in a few weeks, then use the flowers and leaves to make potpourri. I'm also drying out petals and leaves from other blooming plants in my garden. Last year I made lavender wands and wreaths, which I also plan to do this year. Fresh cuttings will be used for those projects. I read an idea of making a mini Christmas tree from fresh lavender: buy a foam mini tree and fill it with the fresh lavender stems; let dry a few weeks inside a paper bag, then seal in a plastic bag to retain the scent until December.
I don't plan to make the lavender oil. It just sounds like too much work. But I did buy some in Hawaii at the lavender farm on Maui. I plan to let the plants keep multiplying and making "babies" that can be moved around the yard. They are great landscaping plants here in Utah, especially in full sun.

Partial harvest of lavender

This is a photo of how much I cut back the blooms when harvesting. As you can seen in the previous photo, I cut them down to maintain a rounded shape. I learned in Hawaii that this prevents the plants from becoming woody. My hope in the experiment is to see if the plants bloom again this summer. We've had a tremendous amount of rain this spring, and my hopes are that will extent the blooming season.

My lavender June 2009

This is the lavender that I am growing. It is a transplant from one of the original plants. This spring I cut it back completely, trimming off all spent blooms from the past year. I noticed that the lavender aroma was still strong even then. And more.....we could smell the lavender when we removed piles of snow from the plants this past winter! They are such hardy plants.

My Garden of Lavender

This is my first blog. I've decided to keep a record of the lavender growing in my northern Utah yard. We redesigned our yard about eight years ago in the attempt to have a more eco friendly landscape. We took out the sod around the perimeter of the property that never seemed to get enough water to look right. Then we added rocks and drought resistant plants. The results have been wonderful, especially the lavender. We started with just two small plants in the corner, and now have about fifteen plants. These are all off shoots from the original two lavender plants that we have moved into different locations in the yard.