How To Grow Insane Amounts of Lavender Like A Pro

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the in my Gardener Channel so I have heard you I have heard you in the comments I have heard you in the emails and you guys all want to know how I get my lavender to be as huge and as beautiful as this Lavender is and so in today's episode I'm going to share with you everything that I know on how to maximize the growth of your lavender to take it from probably a c grade to an A plus grade lavender plan let's go [Music] so this this is our lavender Bush and believe it or not this is one plant this is absolutely incredible because the fact that this looks like it's probably two or three plants now this plant we've been growing for about the past three or four years now in the garden and every single year it doubles in size now there will come a time where it will kind of stop growing but what we've done to encourage the growth encourage the amount of blossoms we have here are quite a few things the first thing that you can do is pick the right variety so this variety is known as munstead munstead is a very bushy variety it's not going to be quite as compact as say like your Vera lavender or your English your common English lavender and so we have some common English over there it's looking beautiful but you'll notice even though they're about the same size same age plant they're much more compact the flowers look dramatically different as well it's a totally different variety of lavender so picking a variety like this munstead will make a huge difference to how big it can get and let me tell you yeah it smells there is no acting here the smell is actually intoxicating I the the amount of honeybees that are on here the amount of just it smells so amazing you guys you have to try this so pick the right variety that's going to make the biggest difference because with if the genetics don't justify a larger bushier plant you could do everything right that I'm going to explain that in this episode and you're not going to get a bigger bushier plant so uh the first thing pick the right variety all right the second thing that I do to guarantee a huge lavender plant is actually prune now pruning you might think is counterproductive to getting a huge plant because how do you have a huge plant if you're making it smaller well that's because lavender only flowers on first year growth that means all of this is New Growth that it's flowering on and how do I do that well I do that through pruning so what you'll notice is coming in here all of this growth is actually really really long the center of the plant it's not like a like an oregano plant or like a tomato plant where you know wherever it sets down wherever it touches soil it's going to root right it's not a mint plant either it's a it's actually a woody Bush and so the center of the plant is right in the smack dab of this uh the center of this plant here and it's grown out from there but what happens if it gets too long it gets too lanky it actually will have a hard time generating energy and New Growth so what's really important is in the fall not right now but I'll prune a couple just to kind of give you guys an example but in the fall what we'll do is after the flowers are all done we'll come in here and we'll actually prune out about a third of this plant thirty percent of this plant will get pruned back towards the center of the plant that will encourage all new growth which will then actually increase the overall health of the plant and the overall growth which increases the amount of flowers you get all right so pruning will also increase the overall healthier plan you'll notice here all this dead growth that's actually last year's growth and all that foliage is actually starting to have powdery mildew on it because it's just rotting away see this is what I pruned away this is the really thick old growth and it comes out here to to last year's growth and then this year's growth but if you don't want to have a lot of flowers well keep the whole plant it'll look really big but eventually it's going to die if you want a lot of flowers you actually have to properly maintain your plant and that sometimes means pruning off some of this stuff because if you get too much of this dead growth what it does is actually causes Center rot and that Center rot is all that plant material that starts rotting away creates disease and a diseased Branch cannot possibly create new growth so yes we sacrificed a little bit of this this prettiness for actual overall health now again we probably would wait till after the flowers are done because they're already forming but as an example this is what we're going to do to the whole plant after this after they're done flowering all right the third thing that we do to guarantee a huge lavender plant is we actually fertilize now it goes without saying that the more you fertilize the more you feed your plant the healthier and bigger it should be but the times that you fertilize and how you fertilize does make a huge difference to the overall plant health and how many flowers you're going to get now how we fertilize is in the spring we fertilize with Trifecta we fertilize twice a year the first time we fertilize is with Trifecta we use trifecta in our garden through yeah every plant doesn't matter if it's a flower or vegetable that's just what we use but use what you have on hand what you've come to know and love something that has lots of nitrogen because in the spring when we fertilize with nitrogen the goal is to get the plant out of dormancy to get it growing very fast and when it grows really fast all of that new growth is what it's going to flower on remember lavender flowers on first year growth and so we want to get lots of New Growth to encourage lots more flowers but then after the flowers are done when the plant is kind of getting ready for winter we follow up with a second fertilizing we don't fertilize mid-season we don't come back with a bloom booster and all this other scientific mumbo jumbo we literally keep it super simple all we do is we fertilize a second time about a month or two before our first frost date with again Trifecta now why Trifecta again that's what we use it's what we've come to know and love but it's also very high in potassium it has fast acting and slow release potassium so that it overall helps the winter hardiness of a perennial there have been many many studies that have shown that yes phosphorus will help with seasonal growth with flowers and root development a lot of gardeners turn to phosphorus however phosphorus is not necessarily something that your plant needs for winter hardiness winter hardiness has more to do with potassium and so when you feed your plant lots of potassium it's going to help them over Winter better which helps them set themselves better up helps them set themselves better for spring and so when they're set better for spring they're going to grow faster in the spring they're going to flower more in the summer and then the the whole cycle happens all over again and so we fertilize about a month or two before fall or before first Frost with a high potassium Trifecta we add that to the to the base of the plant and we basically just use a trench fertilizing method we basically pull the foliage up we dig a small little small little trench about an inch deep sprinkle the trifecta around the base of the plant for a plant of this size we'll use about a quarter cup of Trifecta and then we simply scratch it in we water it in well and that's all we do so fertilizing does make a huge difference all right the fourth thing that we do is we actually do not water now this could not seem crazier I know everything else in the garden loves lots of water especially in mid-summer however lavender does not like water it's a very arid loving plant now Lavender is grown in the Mediterranean regions of the world so it's very arid it has lots of sandy soil lots of well-draining soil it's also very fertile but they don't get lots of rain there's periods of of the growing season where they might not get any rain for a month or two and the same goes for this lavender we do not water this lavender anything that it gets is from the rain and so from the very beginning of the season this lavender has not had a drop of water from me watering this plant and what you'll notice is that actually encourages an overall healthier plant well the thing is a lot of gardeners will come in and they will actually water their their lavender and they think that their lavender needs the water to grow and to thrive and to be happy like the rest of their Garden the problem is is that often leads to root rot it also exacerbates that Center rot that we talked about with pruning that excess moisture actually it actually increases the likelihood of that foliage rotting and molding which then increases the disease on the plant and that ends up stressing the plant which causes it to look spindly have a lot of dead patches and it actually will fruit or not fruit but flour a lot less and so it's super important that you keep your plant as dry as possible now this is here in Michigan it is different your plant may need some water if you're growing it in like Arizona but again an arid environment is what this plant loves if you have the right type of soil and assuming it is getting some water not just no water ever it's going to do great so we rely on the rain to water this plant the last time it rained it was about a week ago so it's gone about a week without any water and then prior to that it went about four weeks without any rain so it is getting periodic water as long as it's getting that sporadic water the soil is literally we're talking bone dry and that's fine because there's moisture deep down in the soil and the plant is so large that it's actually acting as a kind of a living mulch it's protecting the moisture near the plant it's getting some moisture because it's clearly not dying all right in the fifth and final thing that is kind of an obvious one is the soil now the soil is super important because if you don't have the right type of soil everything else could go right with the exception maybe picking the right variety and everything else could go right and if you don't have the right type of soil your plant is not going to thrive and the reason why is going back to what I talked about with the fourth part of having you know a very arid environment right not watering well here's the thing if you have the wrong type of soil you're going to really have a plant that's going to be struggling a lot of gardeners will throw their their lavender into soil that's very heavy clay or very heavy sand if it's very heavy sand or very heavy clay those two growing conditions are not great for growing lavender because lavender does rely on moisture deep down in the soil and if it holds onto too much moisture moisture like in the case of clay you're going to have things like root rot it's going to be over watered it's not going to have enough aeration in the soil The Roots will rot and the plant will be stressed and it will not grow it will not flower as much if it's too Sandy the soil will dry out too much the plant will actually suffer from dehydration you're going to be watering very frequently and there's going to be a problem there right we don't water our we don't water our lavender but that's because we rely on a very good soil the soil we have here we grow in pure compost but like I said in an arid environment they have good quality soil right they have really good quality soil it's just it's let to go dry a long time so in a lot of the Mediterranean areas they have very rich beautiful volcanic soils they have a lot of uh you know old sea beds they have riverbeds and stuff like that that adds a ton of fertility to the soil it's just it's allowed to go dry and so it's important to have the right type of soil because if you don't have that you're not going to have a healthy plant overall and so that goes with everything in the garden though a healthy healthy soil ecology is what's important so that's everything we do to guaranteeing a huge lavender plant I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you learned something new and I really hope that you will cut some lavender put it in your window and smell the lavender every single day that it's there because it is such a beautiful plant to be growing I hope you guys enjoyed hopefully I'll learn something new and as always this is Luke from the Mi Gardener Channel reminding you to grow bigger take care bye the last dandelion oh it's weed seeds in the garden

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 123,093

Keywords: MIgardener, vegetable gardening, organic gardening

Id: fORS8cIATS4

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023