2019 has been a tough year so far for lavender farmers, for all farmers actually. Its been 6-8 weeks since many of us in the lavender community started getting a gut feeling that something wasn’t right with our lavender. Because of our cold, extremely wet spring, lavender wasn’t coming out of winter dormancy when we anticipated. Our lavender should have been growing and starting to green up in early to mid spring, but for many farmers (in the great lakes area and also across the country), our lavender wasn’t showing much if any, sign of life in early May. The consensus was to be patient and wait a while for warmer, dryer weather – we hoped our plants would start to grow, just a bit later than usual. After a few weeks, some lavender farmers began to heavily prune back their plants, in hopes that this would spur new growth. I tried both strategies; I waited (not very patiently) several weeks then heavily pruned back. That was only successful for a small percentage of my crop. After the first week of June, I decided it was time to move forward and to call them dead instead of dormant. Between 2/3 to 3/4 of my plants were not even starting to grow so I decided to pull them out and replace with new plants.
I thought it would be really painful, but pulling out and replanting wasn’t nearly as hard as sitting, watching and doing nothing! So many of my plants had great looking root systems, they were tough to pull out and they didn’t look rotted or diseased but I pulled them out anyway. I wonder if they would have eventually started to grow – I guess I’ll never know. Here’s what our field looks like after the purge of dead plants and replanting. Tiny plants, but atleast they are green and healthy and growing, Not at all what I expected to have this summer.
Looking back, was there something we could / should have done differently? I expect we will be pondering that question for a long time, but being so widespread, it appears the never ending cold wet weather was just too much to handle. Moving forward, we plan to implement some new procedures, try a couple new varieties, install more drainage. Our lavender field is historically very well drained, but 2 weeks ago we had an 8-10″ deep river running through it, washing out newly planted lavender babies and adding more water to stressed out older plants that had managed to survive.
We will have very limited supplies of fresh lavender this year I’m afraid. We will have some – here’s a photo of one of our survivors – covered with buds, soon to be covered with flowers. But I don’t expect our newly planted babies to produce many flowers this year. Farming is like gardening – Audrey Hepburn said “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow “. Tomorrow the lavender will grow and next year will be a better year. Mother Nature just wanted everyone to know she is in charge!
