More lavender … and weeds

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we had absolutely no clue about farming. Yes, during a herbalist training I learned about the benefits of lavender and other herbs, but nothing about growing them … and certainly nothing about having 25 000 lavender plants.

I was superproud of us when we managed to finish planting after 3 weeks and the months after that there wasn’t much to do except waiting for spring to arrive. I expected of course to see beautiful lavenderflowers emerge … but soon I learned that nature doesn’t work that way.

Yes, the lavender plants started growing … slowly.  But, the weeds were a lot faster. So, soon you could find us every day with our shovel in hands, carefully removing weeds around the baby lavenderplants.  Yes, with a shovel, no tractor.  That one came only to clean between the rows, but between the plants it had to be done by hand and shovel.

From locals we soon learned the saying “la terra è bassa”, something farmers often say when they complain about back aches: “The ground is low.”   Well, that is certainly no lie.

We kept going and soon one of the four fields was done and then … Well, then we learned our next lesson : Weeds never stop growing (except during the wintertime). So, once finished one field, we almost had to start all over again.

So, we never really managed to get all the fields cleaned up.  But we found the solution, after years of trying to get “clean” fields, now we call them “wild lavenderfields”  😉