Weekly Pickings: 14 August 2024

Weekly pickings resumes normal service this week after our writer-in-chief took a little break last Wednesday!

The headline news this week is that the sunflowers are in full bloom, whilst the lavender flowering season is coming to its end. It’s looking like we’ll have lovely weather for the remainder of this week, so it’s still a good time to come if you want to see our bright yellow sunflower patches!

Read on for more details about the start of the farm, and for some insight into our harvesting process!

How are the sunflowers looking?

The second of our two sunflower patches is now in full bloom, so it’s a great time to come and see the sunflowers. These will be in flower for the next 1–2 weeks, after which we’ll be winding down the summer season. More news on that over the next couple of weeks.

How is the lavender looking?

The lavender is now coming to the end of its flowering season. Some areas of the field are looking more purple than others, but we have harvested several of our lavender rows now, as you can see in the photos below.

Although the visual spectacle is mostly finished for the season now, the lavender is still available to pick for the time being. It’s still just as good in terms of aroma for anyone looking to use it for crafts at home!

How are the wildflowers looking?

A few of the wildflowers are hanging on in the patch, but these are also at the end of their season now and will fade further over the next week or so!

Other news and views

August signals the arrival of lavender harvesting time both for large-scale cultivators like us and small-scale gardeners at home. It’s the best time of year to prune lavender; the flowers contain plenty of oil for aromatic purposes, whilst the pruning process also helps to encourage new growth the following year and to keep the plants neat and tidy.

With harvesting underway here at Hitchin Lavender, it might interest you to learn a little bit more about the process and how you can do it yourself on a smaller scale.

Our harvester is specially designed to process lavender flowers on a large scale. Attached to the back of a tractor, the harvester works using a spinning drum of metal teeth. The teeth pluck the heads of the lavender flowers from their stems and collect them in a trailer. You can see the harvester in action here:

You don’t need anything so grand as a mechanised harvester at home! Just trim back your lavender bushes to around 1–2 inches above the woody part of the plant using scissors or a hand scythe if you have one.

Once our trailer is full of harvested lavender flowers, we empty it out onto tarpaulin sheets and allow it to dry naturally outside. Here you can see us scattering the harvested lavender evenly to give it space to dry out:

Again, you can do more or less the same thing at home – you simply need to spread out your harvested lavender on newspaper. Within a couple of weeks, it’ll be dry and smelling wonderful for several years to come! At Hitchin Lavender, our dried lavender either goes directly into some of our products (like our embroidered lavender bags), or gets shipped off to Norfolk Essential Oils, who distill our lavender oil for us!

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Thanks for reading! See you again next week, lavender fans!