Lavender Fields and Farming Challenges

we are open on Thursdays through Saturdays from 10:00 to 5:00 and Sundays 1:00 to 5:00 and our website is high country lavender VA as in virginia.com and we I'm happily ship to any location that where you may be [Music] what we talk about a lot on our farm is diversification you really have to diversify in order to make it as a small farmer don't you you do you do you can't put all your irons in one fire you have to be flexible and creative absolutely uh-huh we're gonna check out a lavender plant she's going to talk us through it this one is a four year old lavender plant this is called lavender phenomenal we have five different varieties in the field we have phenomenal we have hid coat we have rel velvet and we have grosses these make great four bundles and sachets our roll velvet is our culinary lavender that we use to cook with we have a lot of honey bees on the lavender the lavender attracts the bees we have several people in the area within a mile radius of us that do keep these and their bees do come and visit our lavender you can see some of the lavender the damage to the lavender from the water on some of them the plants start blooming about the third week in June we harvest about the first week in July I usually leave about a quarter of the field for the bees and the butterflies and then come back in and get that the middle of August I used that for sachet lavender the lavender that is harvested about the first week of July is what I use for my bundles lavender it stays on the stem if you pick it too late it will just shatter off the stem that's not good for a bundle but it's fine for a sachet [Music] well Barbara we decided we'd bring you some stuff from our garden missus tiny Ridge has got some squash there for you and some cucumbers we thank you so much for having us here at High Country lavender I hope you guys enjoyed this video I hope you learned a little bit and we'll be back up here when they get