Well, we missed the lavender harvest again! We really needed to harvest the food grade about ten days ago while we were on vacation. So now the lavender is feeding the honeybees and they seem to love it. Our oil lavender is just getting ready to bloom.

Annmarie and I went out this morning to refresh our lavender wreath. We have had a very nice wreath on the wall in the dining room for last 2-3 years and even dried out it was very nice but most of the smell had vanished. So we decided to try and redo it with our own lavender. I did the lavender harvesting and Annmarie did the wreath building. It took a lot longer than I anticipated to harvest the lavender. I was cutting it a single stalk at a time! The honeybees were everywhere and we just ignored each other. The hardest part of having bees is just learning to ignore them. If you ignore them they just tend to do their own thing and all is hunky dory. I had to reach out to the expert afterwards about how to harvest lavender efficiently. He said to use a hand sickle and sent me a little video on how to harvest it. This was very helpful and I have already ordered the hand harvesting tool! We persevered and harvested enough for the wreath. It is a little lopsided but we are going to keep it for a year and try again next year! We decided to mix colors in ours this time and I cut lavender from four different types of plants which I think affected the uniformity as I kept moving to different types of plants and Annmarie built the wreath as I was cutting flowers. If I had precut all of the flowers we could have mixed all of the types together initially and our uniformity issue would have been solved. It smells amazing. We have a vase of lavender in each bathroom now also.

Annmarie and I have been doing more research on farm camping hosting. We would like to do it up the creek next to the wheat field. It would be fairly primitive. Power would be 12V solar for lights only, some form of composting toilet setup (these vary dramatically so more research is needed), solar shower, canvas tent of some sort and all of it built on an elevated deck next to the rock outcropping. It would go in a place that we cannot use currently. So we would not be losing any land. This would require us to move some fencing so the animals will stay out. You would have to walk in to the site about 125 yards, no vehicle access. We would provide drinking water in 1/2 gallon glass jugs. There would be an outside kitchen with a single propane burner and propane grill. I want to put in a spot to hang two hammocks on the deck also. We are still doing a lot of planning before we do any real work. There are several projects on the farm that have to get done before we work on this.