Lavender Growing

I have an area of about 20 feet by 15 feet with about 100 lavender plants. In 2007, my harvest was well in excess of 10,000 spikes of flowers.

The soil here is a mix of sandy loam. Perfect for growing all kinds of flowers and herbs. Several years of experimenting in the gardens and in the kitchen has led to some interesting changes in the way I grow my plants.

If you want to grow lavender, there are no two ways around it. You need full sun, and you need well-drained sandy soil.

If you don't have those things, you may be able to grow a plant or two, but they won't do very well and won't live many years. You can get around the need for drainage by building raised beds, but you must have sun. You may also try growing some lavenders in large patio pots. I've never had much luck with that, but I'm not much for growing things in pots.

Too much work. Too much extra watering. And I'd much rather enjoy the plants and the gardens.

I am fortunate that my soil is sandy loam. I live in Windsor, CT; about a 5-minute walk from the Farmington River, about a mile above where it meets the Connecticut River.

A lot of the soil in this area is clay. Rich red clay, fabulous grey clay of the best type for potting or brick making. In the late 1800s Windsor had somewhere around 40 brick factories and kilns, making bricks and shipping them downriver. My basement is made from bricks, and in Mill Brook down behind my house we find bricks with a wide variety of company logos.

But this location, up on a ridge above Mill Brook, and up a hill from the Farmington River, is not clay. It's the kind of rich sandy loam that is great for growing almost anything, including the shade tobacco that is used for cigar wrappers, and for which this part of the Connecticut River Valley is famous.

So starting with having well-drained soil, I put my plants in and they have grown for me. We're zone 5 (maybe being re-zoned to 6 with global warming) and a few plants will die in the winter if it's cold enough, long enough. But mostly the main type of lavender, Lavandula angustifolia, survives.

There are many different types of lavender. L angustifolia, or L. spica (as it is sometimes called) is the basic English Lavender type. French lavender, Spanish lavender, and some of the really exotic cultivars of English with the frilly leaves will not survive here in Connecticut.

I've concentrated on growing what will grow in the ground. Here. Without a lot of extra work. And with good productivity.

If you live somewhere else and want to know more about different types of lavender, by all means. There are some great books out there. I recommend The Lavender Garden by Robert Kourik. Different types, great photos, a history of lavender, and some recipes for potpourri and some cooking recipes too.

Originally, most of my lavenders were in the back yard where I had built four square gardens, each 8x8, with 1x4 boards to shape them, slightly raised but using native soil. These gardens had a few lavender plants, but all sorts of herbs and flowers. Lavender was not the focus.

I wanted more plants and made a line of them on both sides of the front sidewalk leading to my front stairs. The plants grew well there, too, and I noticed something interesting.

They really grew on the side that was next to the cement sidewalk. Leaning over, as if to absorb the extra heat from the stone.

I experimented with some leftover roofing shingles, laying shingles down between the plants.

Now they grew well all the way around.

The shingles also prevented weeds from growing up between the plants. Less work, more growth, more lavender flowers? Cool.

The shingles didn't look so great, though. So I added a layer of stones on top. And mixed in a few shells from the beach, and lots of pieces of crystals that we brought back from our various adventures. One of our hobbies is hunting crystals of quartz, beryl, mica and the like at various old quarries or mineral localities in the region, so to bring back a few extra pieces of stone each time was definitely not a bother.

By the second year, I was not only getting a huge harvest of lavender flowers in the end of June, but also a sporadic growth through the summer, and an additional harvest into early autumn until the frost came and halted any further growing.

Each spring I cut back the plants with good clippers to about 1/3 of their size. Being especially thorough to cut back any of the long leggy growths, firming up the shape of the plant. I try to get all the cutting back done by April 15th tax day as things really start growing by the beginning of May and that way the plant isn't putting energy into a part that I'm going to clip off.

I save all the clippings.

They can either be bundled into rolls for smudging or smoking foods in the meat smoker, if you have one, or the grill, if you have that. New growths can be put into a controlled sandy mix in hopes of putting down new roots and growing into new lavender plants. Even if only 1 in 10 of those cuttings takes you will have a whole batch of new plants.

If you're rolling or bundling the cuttings, tie them tightly with string and then put them into your attic or some very dry place so they really dry out for a couple of weeks. Otherwise, even lavender will get moldy and be useless.

Because people ask me, I will tell you I don't fertilize the lavender plants. I do not need to use any chemicals to prevent black spot or anything else like that. Bugs don't like lavender, nor do deer desire to dine upon it. And I prefer to grow organically with no added chemicals since I also raise butterflies and have both Morgan, my daughter, and Maui, our big red Macaw, who we take outside on a leash. I don't think it's necessary to use chemicals in the yard. If you don't like dandelions, buy yourself a two dollar dandelion digger and get some exercise by digging them out; don't add to groundwater pollution by pouring hundreds of pounds of foreign chemicals into your lawn.

If your lavender isn't looking healthy, add more drainage. Wet lavender plants that stay wet will begin to decompose. Staying wet causes yellowing leaves and black, mildewed foliage. As part of your spring cleaning, clean out under the plant, remove extra growths that are too close together, and cut the plant back.

Happy growing!