🌱 Planting a Lavender Field 💟 : Flower Hill Farm 💐

[Music] [Music] hi flower friends it's nicole from flower hill farm and it was so cold this morning it was 44 degrees so it's warmed up quite a bit but it's still in the 50s but it's a lot easier to work in this kind of weather it had been so hot for so long i am grateful for these temperatures so i am in a spot that we have yet to plant anything in on the property it's kind of hidden um and i'll show you guys where it is but maybe we'll do like a full farm tour coming up once things are all in the ground we're we're slowly but surely getting everything into the ground now this is going to be an area where they're probably going to be 10 rows just like this one and we've placed them far apart because we want to be able to mow in between them because these are permanent perennial beds so we've got all of those proven winter plants that came in the mail from spring meadow nursery we have all of those to put in we have and now we have lavender so lavender's something that i've wanted to put in the ground for years and i've i've grown it before at my old properties and my sister has always dreamed of having a large quantity of lavender she's an amazing cook so we're we are there are many reasons why we're planting this lavender i don't plan on doing like a lavender farm or a u-pick or anything like that and we're obviously going to incorporate it into our bouquets so i have a few hundred lavender plants here we're to be putting into the ground we have three varieties so we live in zone 4b upstate new york there are over 400 varieties of lavender there are only a few that i can successfully grow here lavender needs winter protection it likes good drainage it does not like to be wet at all i've actually had a few that i left out in the rain and they got root rot and they're no longer with us so they don't like wet feet at all so they also don't really need fertilizer they are not that picky of a plant they just like good drainage so this first tray of lavender that i'm putting in is phenomenal totally wrong just found the tag it's head coat not phenomenal so the first thing that i did when i decided i wanted to actually go ahead and put the lavender in this year was i got a hold of dave dowling and he told me the kinds of lavender that i would be most successful with here and he told me three different kinds he told me munstead phenomenal and he also told me it's a head coat h-i-d-c-o-t-e so i planted some last year and they came back they came back quite large just the first year so i planted it as a plug it was probably i mean it was smaller than any of these it was maybe maybe this big when i planted it in the ground last year and it came back with like 10 times the size and it's got 40 or 50 buds on it already so i want to make sure that i make the holes in this landscape fabric big enough for it to come back to its potential i don't want it to try to come back and then be like unable to because the landscape fabric so this is dewitt fabric it's four foot cloth and guess what guys it works in the bed maker that we got that amazing new attachment for our kubota tractor it works in the bed maker and it did a fantastic job um obviously this is a hilly area so it's not perfectly flat and that's okay with us this is our land this is our property we're just working with what we have so i'm planting these about the same way i planted the peonies i'm planting them about 30 inches apart and i'm going to go ahead and use this stick right here as my measuring tool it's actually 24 inches but i'm going to measure in between the outside of the holes so it'll end up being about 30 inches i am so excited just by knowing how much my phenomenal lavender came back from last year i can't even imagine what this is going to do it's going to be amazing i know it is so we have a lot of plans for this lavender really excited i can't my sister has plans too she's got lots of plans come on i'll smell that it smells so good okay i'm sorry tuck you back into your home okay so i'm gonna start burning holes guys and we'll see how far we go uh we i think the rows are probably 150 feet long yeah i think that's about 150 feet yikes a lot of lavender [Music] so okay so i was able to burn 57 holes in this first row so i'm just going to start planting and and just keep going the claw my sister got me these gardening gloves like three or four years ago and i love them they're perfect for digging like a mole [Music] when we were building these beds probably last week we ran out of cloth right there so we were about 25 feet short of finishing the bed but that's okay maybe i'll put a picnic table or something right there that'll be nice i think okay so the first bed is done and they're kind of what's nice about the bed maker is it hills it up a little bit because like i said lavender likes good drainage and we have more of a sandy soil here so i don't think we're going to have an issue with that these are however going to require some winter protection so we're going to be making some frost cloth little hoops to protect them over the winter time and fortunately deer do not like lavender so they are deer resistant rabbits too the critters just tend to stay away from them because they have that strong odor of lavender so i'm really excited i did consider crisscrossing while planting to maybe fit more in a row but if you look at these images of a full huge lavender plant they take up quite a bit of room and i don't want it dangling over on to where we're going to mow i want to keep them nice and tidy so i definitely think that it's okay to plant them this way zigzagging might have been able to get me some more in the row but we have the space here i'm not concerned about um packing everything in so one row done i'm going to burn holes in the next one i am not going to have enough rows to finish this project today but we have to wait because well you can see how sandy my soil is here um we got about an inch and a half of rain over the past couple of days so we're waiting for the soil to dry out a little bit more before we go ahead and lay some more rows with the fabric it just works better when the soil on the drier side because it clumps up as it's trying to cover the sides of the fabric and this is a woven fabric which is why i burned holes in it if you don't burn holes in it if you cut it with scissors it will tend to kind of unravel but if you burn it it'll singe the ends and keep it from ripping any further ooh it's getting nice out now also not sponsored we just got a free t-shirt when we bought the tractor by the time i'm done with this there'll definitely be a few hundred lavender plants in here i'd like to try to get some more varieties but like i said um you know we need to make sure that they're winter hardy for our zone i think that's a good number for us there's no reason for us to have any more than that except i might want some different colors so i need to find some different colors that will grow well in this area but i do expect to have some winter loss that's normal lavender is a tough plant to keep coming back year after year after year especially if you don't protect it from the winter cold it's kind of it's like completely closed in and oh there's there's a dead bush over there we're going to get that out of here i just want to hang out back here hawk there's a hawk i make sure my chickens are okay oh there's another thing i wanted to tell you guys so i almost lost a lot of my lavender it had gotten too wet and it was root rot basically so it was in trays and those trays had been left out in the rain and i even took a picture and sent it to dave dowling perennial guru and i said dave are these a lost cause like i just got these a couple weeks ago i'm prepping the beds i don't have them in the ground yet they were out during a torrential downpour and he said just scour it for any signs of white and pot them up so that's why you see them in the tray that they are in because i potted them up out of their plug trays because the roots just looked dead so after i potted them up i've it's been about a week and i i keep a pull a couple out here and there and i saw fresh new white root growth so i was able to save them um not all of them the phenomenal did the best i would say the munstead i lost probably 30 or 40 of those plugs and that's okay that happens it was a mistake that i made by leaving the plug trays out in the rain forgetting that when it rains inside of a plug tray that's inside of a tray then it's going to sit in that water i should have been out there dumping it out or just taking the plug tray out of the liner and that way the the the roots would have had drainage and that was my mistake so i did lose some munstead a lot of it does show white fresh root growth though so i think a lot of them are gonna make it okay i'm gonna get back to work [Music] so [Music] i only have a few of these plugs left of this variety i guess i'm going to start the third row if if we hadn't run out of landscape fabric down that row i bet you it would have been perfect i see i think i have four or five up at the house that i couldn't fit in that tray and then i have five right here so i guess i'm gonna start this row with the head coat variety and then go grab the munstead or the phenomenal i'll see which one's looking healthier today really it was like touch and go for a week there with lavender i thought i was losing it all so we're gonna let this over here we're till it in a couple of more times and then let it dry out a little bit and then we'll make the other beds so we can finish out the lavender and then i'm also going to put the other um woody shrubs down here definitely going to fill in this area as much as we can because it's it's quite large actually let me show you so there's the rest of it we just need to till it up a couple more times let it dry out and then put the beds in but probably fit five or six maybe seven more beds in we're not gonna put them as far apart as we did the lavender we were just not sure with the tractor how far apart we could put the rows and get the mower down through so this will be like a big old perennial plot when it's done this landscape fabric typically lasts about five years but we'll see how it performs and we'll see if we have to replace it because that would be a giant pain in the butt i think oh if you're wondering why i'm not following the yellow line down so when we were using the bed maker to lay to lay this fabric the cardboard was a little wobbly inside like that was holding the landscape fabric on and so it was coming off a little bit unevenly so it was pulling to one side so the yellow stripe down the middle is not down the middle it actually looks the best on this bed but the other two beds it was not so good i am super excited to help my sister's dreams come true she's been talking about this for such a long time even as a kid she had this picture on her wall and it was just full of what looked like lavender i don't know if it actually was but anyway i am more than happy to make it happen for her so this is jessica's lavender field i love you jessica she is gonna make the most amazing macaroons that you've ever tasted oh maybe we should ship lavender tea my phone it's gina i know it it's gina lavender cookies lavender bread lavender dried lavender fresh lavender bouquet lavender lavender soap okay i'm gonna get back to work loving lotion lavender honey although it's really comfortable right here lavender cake i can just imagine you know sitting here very soon encompassed by lavender yeah that's gonna be good eleven the cupcakes eleven and muffins lavender potpourri lavender baggies anyway thanks for sticking around and we'll see you soon

Channel: Flower Hill Farm

Views: 64,662

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Id: Gfm73SyoItQ

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021