How to grow lavender from selecting plants to harvesting.
Spring is the time to plant seeds and to get gardens going. Last spring we took hundreds of lavender cuttings and stuck them in the ground to root. Now we are potting them up.
We are sharing our trade secrets with you. Enjoy and we hope you grow wonderful lavender plants (or buy them from us if you can’t wait for your starts to root).
Grosso is a fragrant lavender with dark purple lavender flowers on long stems. It blooms in mid-July and splays out, as if the flowers are too heavy for it to hold up. It has a wonderful fragrance and has a high oil content. It is great in sachets, potpourri or dried flowers.
The plant grows to about 3 1/2 feet around and at least as tall when flowering but is more compact when not blooming and measures about 2 1/2 feet around.
This is a late blooming variety, with a large bush and longish flower stems and silver grey foliage. One of the nice things about it is that it does bloom late so it gives you lavender usually into September (at least in the Pacific Northwest).
Lavandula x intermedia
FRED BOUTIN
This light purple flowered lavender is one of the last to bloom in the season. Good for hedging.
Plant height: approx. 36-48”
Stem length: approx. 16-18”
Hardiness: zones 5-9
In 2009 I went to a Lavender conference in Cambridge, UK and got a chance to visit the amazing Downderry Nursery owned by Simon Charlesworth. He has created the best greenhouse system I’ve seen for propagating and growing lavender. On a scant 2 acres of land they produce about 400 cultivars of lavender for sale. It was inspiring!
The greenhouses were engineered to be perfectly level so they could easily water the starts from below which helps with disease problems from watering above.
They had a special greenhouse just for rooting the cuttings that was held at an even 70º F and the cuttings rooted quite quickly under their care.
Coming home to our greenhouse with its lack of power and electricity, and the lack of means to build what we had seen, we thought about other ways to propagate our lavender. Back in 2002 I had visited a lavender grower in Nyons, France, who taught me that lavender can be propagated right in the ground. While there are problems doing that if you are going to be selling lavender plants commercially because the dirt in your ground isn’t sterile, it’s a great way to propagate for your own uses.
Making the beds for outdoor propagating can be somewhat formal as these framed ones are, or you can build rows in your fields. Whatever you do, you will have to be prepared to weed them during the rooting time.
The beds need to have level soil so there won’t be puddling when you water them.
Sometimes you have to hunt around in the plant to find the right branches for cuttings. You’ll want to have a good attachment to the main stem, as well as a good leaf structure to sustain the cutting until it roots.
When you take off the branch you will see a “heel” from where you gently tore it off the main stem. This is good. Roots grow more easily from that heel.
You can see the leaves that are on the bottom part of the cutting, remove them up about 3/4 of an inch because you don’t want the leaves to be in the soil.
After removing the bottom leaves, you’ll pinch off the top part so the bud that will try to flower won’t be there. You want that cutting to put its energy into building roots not making flowers.
After you have prepared the cutting put it into the Willow Water* you have prepared.
When you have gotten all the cuttings you want you take the bucket of them and stick the into the soil you have prepared. We make holes in the soil with an old chopstick and then stick the cuttings in and pat the dirt around them. You can stick them fairly close to one another – it won’t hurt them at all. We do them about 1/2″ or so apart in a row and the rows are about 1 1/2″ apart.
About 2 to 3 months later… dig up your plants. The roots will be intertwined, but if you take small clumps at a time, they will stay moist enough to keep the roots viable while you gently pull them apart and pot them up.
Growing lavender is an exercise in patience. It takes 3 years or more for a lavender plant to reach full size, and that is after you’ve got a cutting that has roots. You’ll be taking cuttings in the late spring or early summer (because the soil temperatures are high enough so it will work) and harvesting the rooted plants in the late summer. Then you’ll have to grow them out in pots. If you don’t have a heated greenhouse you’re looking at the next spring before those plants are ready. You have to love this to do it!
by Sarah Richards
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*Willow Water! You can use rooting hormone if you want. But, if you are certified organic or trying to be, then you can’t use those hormones, so what to do? Use willow water – We take twigs from our willow trees and put them in water, they stay in that water for the whole cutting season because those twigs will make roots. During that time we will use the water they sit in and replace it with fresh water. You pour off the water in the willow’s bucket, and then put fresh water back in. Take the poured off water and use that for when you are taking cuttings that day. Discard after using it.
Lavandula x-intermedia is a hybrid cross between Lav. Angustifolia and Lav. Latifolia. The Lavandula Angustifolias tend to have a high quality but low yielding oil, whereas the Lavandula Latifolias have a poor quality but high yielding oil. So there are quite a lot of hybrid crosses of various varieties of these two lavandulas and Provence is one such cross.
Provence is not typically found in that French province, rather, it is a cultivar that was hybridized in Canada. Nevertheless, it has found its way throughout North America, the United Kingdom, and other countries.
It has a sweeter, less camphorous scent compared to most of the other x-intermedia hybrids. The oil is also sweeter, but it does not have a larger yield than the angustifolias, which puts it at a disadvantage compared to other x-intermedias. Therefore, many growers don’t distill Provence, they tend to use it for both crafting and culinary applications.
At Lavender Wind we use it for all three, and we do distill it. The Provence Essential Oil is very nice. Our Culinary Lavender is a blend of Provence and Folgate.
Provence is susceptible to root rot due to overly wet conditions. The flowers dry well and the bud is easily taken off the stem. Too easily, in fact, and it is well known to be useless as a dried flower because the blossoms shatter off the stem once they are dried.
Purple Bouquet is AWESOME! It is the variety on the right. Next to it is Hidcote Pink, and to the left of that is Folgate. Purple Bouquet blooms a bit later than the other two so it isn’t quite in its full bloom in this picture.
The plant is not very large. This plant is in its 4th summer.
Purple Bouquet lives up to its name. It produces a longer stemmed flower than many other Angustifolias and it holds up well when dried. The fragrance is strong and pleasing.
We like this variety for making lovely dried bouquets. Because we have so much wind at our farm, our stem length tends to be a bit shorter than stem lengths on farms more protected or inland.
For Comparison here is an image taken June 30, 2015 of six varieties in our field. The Grosso and Provence weren’t yet in bloom in this image.
Hidcote Pink has been available since 1958. It is an average sized lavender with pale pink flowers. In the picture above it is next to rows of Lavendula Angustifolia “Folgate”. Together they make each other pop. Hidcote Pink is a lovely lavender for contrasting with other, purple, lavenders. But, even on its own in a garden it provides that lovely mounded pink look that only lavender plants can provide.
It is not very good for drying because it loses it’s nice pink and dries to a brown color. It does make an unusual oil. It has a bit more of a camphoric scent than other angustifolias, but there are some people who swear they prefer it and say it is a more masculine presence. This is in spite of it being a pink lavender, though lavender essential oil doesn’t keep any color purple nor pink.
It blooms with other early lav. angustifolias. It doesn’t give much of a second bloom, but sometimes, if it’s feeling agreeable it will send out more flowers.
It is a bit more than 3′ around when it is blooming. After pruning it’s closer to 28″ across. (These measurements are at our farm, which can get very windy and that can make the plants a bit smaller than in less windy situations.)
Lavendula Angustifolia “Hidcote Pink”
Major Lawrence Johnston brought Hidcote to England from France in the 1920’s. Hidcote Pink is thought to be available by 1957 or 58. Adapted from The Lavender Lover’s Handbook, by Sarah Bader
Is excellent for landscaping, culinary, and oil.
Lavandula Angustifolia “Folgate” is the official name of this beauty.
Out of 39 species of lavender and over 400 varieties within those species we grow 14 of the commercially on the farm. We have more in our demonstration garden.
This variety (Folgate) produces bushes that are quite large for this species:
We have just harvested the first row of it in this season’s bloom.
The bees love it, can you see the bee that was up early in the morning to start working on gathering pollen?
The flowers are lush. This is what one looks like next to a ruler.
