It has been awhile since I wrote my blog, I guess I have gotten lazy. Regardless, our lives go on. We are coming to realize that we DO have a LOT of lavender. We started it all with several small baby plants given to us by a friend, ..5 years ago….and now they are just growing everywhere. They are in our flower garden and baby plants are showing up every where. They have taken over an 80 foot section of our veggie garden

It is kind of hard to tell from this picture because I have given each of the plants a partial shave job. I have been careful to leave lots of lavender for the bees, as they seem to love it. It does feel rather weird sawing the tops of the lavender (with my new tool shown below), while the bees are zipping in and out of each of the flowers.

Lavender seems to be very popular in the stores and markets these days, so we figure … perhaps since we have SOOO much of it, perhaps we could add to our already extremely varied farmers market stall.

Most farmers market stalls seems to be reasonably focused, IE… veggies…..soaps…. pottery… baking goods. However our stall is all over the place, from veggie, or berry plants to veggies and berries. And toques, seeds, and of course ROCKS. OH and we sell Garlic as well. Right now we are just starting to harvest some of our early varietals of garlic, such as China Rose.

Oh and here is a picture of our market booth from last summer. As you can see quite a smorgasbord of stuff…..

But THIS year we shall have Lavender. We have not fully sorted out what exactly we will do with the dried Lavender, but we had to get the harvesting and drying started as it the time to harvest them now.

PLUS we need to get the lavender dried before we need the whole shop for drying garlic.

We have 6000 garlic planted this year and this is always an exciting… stressful time of year… hoping I have done everything possible to get the best garlic possible. There always seems to be a few areas that seem to have puny garlic. It’s funny though… you never know until you pull the garlic out of the ground… how big it will be. They say that the final 2 weeks the garlic can double in size. I tend to be inpatient and harvest too soon, but that is why I grow a few earlier varietals, so that I have something to do to keep me from harvesting the main garlic crop too soon.

They say that you should stop watering the garlic a few weeks prior to harvesting it, but it has been so hot and I just struggle with the thought that IF the garlic is going to double in size, how will it do so without water?? So I get a bit “schizophrenic” (if you can use that term anymore).. these days with “Ken we have to shut off all of the water to the garlic”, to “Ken… the garlic is just too dry.”… Of course Ken goes along with all of my suggestions because who would want to bear the blame if the garlic turns out too small. 🤨🤨

It really is hard to believe that THIS is what our property looked like 6 years ago.

AND this is today…..with likely about 30 loads of wood chips, which have all broken down into soil. Funny there were no weeds back then.🤔

Tucker turned 12 a month ago and so has exceeded our ages (so in dog years he must be 84?) but still is keen to go up the mountain with us each day. He does not bark as much as he used to and had not howled in a few years, but I guess we are all getting a bit older. Cannot remember howling recently either 🤔

We Do get some great rainbows.

Janet, Ken and Tucker