the (lavender) flow of life
The flow of life, at least in terms of our lavender, just turned another corner.
Thanks to some great helpers and the cooperation of Tāwhirimātea (Maori god of weather), all our new seasons lavender oil is now safely in amber bottles and stored in the fridge.
Our Pacific Blue is always an early harvest and this year the hot weather brought it on even earlier. The week before Christmas saw us out in the fields with our Japanese tea harvester.
In the very early days we once used a sickle to hand-harvest 1,000 plants, but the process physically broke us! Thanks to the lightweight tea harvester, we can now harvest over 5,000 plants in hours rather than days.
Grosso always matures later and this year it was mid January before we turned over the harvester and started harvesting that crop. As an aside this year we experimented with leaving the cut lavender in a shed for 24 hours to naturally reduce the amount of moisture. This shows promise, as our yield from this crop was higher than cutting and distilling on the same day.
Thanks to some really expert distillation from Keith and Charlotte we increased our yields for both lavender species and the scent this year is divine!
We are now fully stocked with both Pacific Blue and Grosso essential oil and our other products.
Check out our facebook pages for some video shots of the oil making process!
