Week 10 - Harvesting the Lavender

We harvested part of our lavender crop at the beginning of this week. We have two different varieties of lavender - Grosso and Super. They are both varieties of Lavandin aka Lavendula x intermedia (I think that's the correct Latin term). French Lavender anyway. We harvested the Grosso only as the Super isn't ready yet.

T came and helped us using his special machine which cut the flower heads off and caught them in a big bag. P helped him with this, while I fed and bathed the girls - we did the harvesting between 5-7pm as it had been wet overnight and this gave the lavender all day to dry out. Plus it worked out well with P being at work during the day. They harvested 10 rows of lavender and we stored it all over our garage floor overnight.



The following day T and I took the flower heads to a distillery in Woodville. The process was very interesting. The lavender heads are put into a large vat and steam is run through it. The steam/water vapour then cools down as it travels out a pipe, turning back into water and oil which has been released from the flowers. The oil floats on top of the water and is syphoned off at the end of the process. There's a pretty good Wikipedia article on the process.



We had somewhere between 300-400kgs of flower heads, which gave us 7.5 litres of oil. Now the oil has to sit somewhere dark and cool for 6-8 months to age/mellow before we can do anything with it.

We also have 7 x 20 litre buckets of distilled water aka hydrosol to use. Apparently this can be used in soap making later on, or we can just put it in our baths as it has some oil residue in it as well.

We also have all the 'cooked' lavender heads to be spread over the garden as mulch.



Apart from that there hasn't been a lot of work going on this week. It has been raining quite a lot this week, replenishing the water tank and watering the garden. T said it was just as well we harvested the lavender at the beginning of the week as it would have been ruined by the heavy rain.

The heavy rain also caused us to discover a birds nest blocking the gutter at the back of the house. Water was pouring out of the gutter and onto K's bedroom windows, and straight through the gaps in the leadlights and all over her bedroom floor. At least the floors are wooden and there was no furniture there.

We have taken a break from making bread this week. The last couple of loaves have gone mouldy real quick. We think it was because of the humidity lately. I've done an experiment today and made a loaf, sliced it all up and put it in the freezer, just as I would do with store-bought bread. Not sure how well it will defrost/taste so will include an update next week.

-M