First Day of Dried Lavender Harvest
Another year’s harvest blog, but the story of where the stems come from when you order a dried bouquet, cooking stems, or loose flowers. Watch for a recipe this next week for your Thanksgiving turkey!
Almost three weeks late, but lavender harvest is finally here! We started harvesting at dawn this morning, when it was cool and the etheric energies rising. The first harvest is for the dried lavender, cutting when only one or two calyxes open, so the bouquets do not “shatter” when dried and tied into bouquets. We have only two or three days to catch this window of time.
Cut lavender on way to drying shed.
I am always ambivalent, however, to harvest the beautiful stems just as the bees are finding them. We sheer them into the much smaller mounds they spend most of the year in. Just as they are at their most beautiful, they are cut down!
Lavender is hung upside down and dried in the warm dark.
We then hang them upside down in our drying shed, leaving them in the warm dark until they are dry. The dark preserves the color.
It will be another week or two before we begin harvest for the distillation, when the calyxes are mostly open, the oils more present.
Harvested mounds next to that lavender yet to be harvested.