Adding Lavender to Your Farm

- And we have two amazing speakers today who will share their very extensive experience with lavender, so we have Wendy Jochems from Hope Hill Lavender Farm in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.

Welcome, Wendy, and we have Michele Capron from Lavender Essentials of Vermont in Derby, Vermont.

Thank you so much for joining us today, and I will moderate the webinar.

My name is Claudia Schmidt, I'm an assistant professor of marketing and local regional food systems at Penn State, and my co-moderator today is Sarah Cornelisse, who is a senior extension associate at Penn State as well.

Just a couple of general housekeeping items.

This webinar will be recorded.

You can submit your questions to the Q&A pod, but please continue to introduce yourself in the chat.

That's really interesting.

We love seeing that.

There will be an evaluation survey at the end of the webinar.

So when you close your webinar, an evaluation survey will pop up, and we would really appreciate for you to fill it out because evaluations give us a chance you know, to see what we can improve.

We will ask you what other webinar topics you would like to see and it also gives us, you know, more information in order to write even more proposals to provide you with more webinars.

And so the link to the webinar recording and the evaluation survey will come via follow up email to your inbox and it will be also posted on the PSU Extension website.

And again, this is the PSU Extension webinar, and we do not endorse anyone or anything.

Please take note of that.

And I also would like to make you aware of our next webinar that will be on March 23rd.

So it's coming up soon.

Registration is not out yet, but if you've registered through Penn State Extension, you will get an email to make you aware of this webinar registration, and that's about incorporating classes into your agritourism business.

And with this I will stop, and I'll give it over to Wendy.

So, Wendy, could you please share your screen?

- Sure, I think I can. (chuckles)

- [Claudia] Thank you.

- I am sharing my screen, and I can close out all these things, correct?

Alrighty. We're gonna start with the first slide.

So I'm starting with a peaceful, pretty lavender flower for my introduction, and we're gonna learn a little bit about lavender from the beginning, growing it, harvesting it, a little bit of products.

And I'm just gonna touch a little on a agritourism throughout the talk to give you a little information.

And this is scary 'cause you'll be like, "Oh is this their farm?" (laughs)

But this is when we purchased our 33 acre farm with a house in 2004.

We did this to bring two horses home.

It was an existing Christmas tree farm at the time.

And my husband and I were not Christmas tree farmers.

There is a plethora of Christmas tree farms in Schuylkill County; we're known for them.

So we were able to find a person to take care of the trees until they were gone.

We put up a big huge barn that is actually in this area now, this is not a blank spot anymore, to put these two rescue horses in.

But then, after the trees were harvested, what are we gonna do with this 33 acres?

Some of it is a tree forest.

We have Weiser State Forest behind us.

What are we gonna do?

My husband likes to work.

What are we gonna do?

I like lavender.

He's like, "Let's grow lavender." And I had no idea the volume that he had in mind, but this was the volume of about 1,500 plants to start.

So the land that looked all ratty and chewed up became a nice field that was soil tested.

This is drainage to...

sorry, a ditch for adding water lines to our greenhouse.

So when we started, we bought 1,500 plants from a wholesale nursery.

And you'll come later on to find out that we strongly recommend, and we learned from another lavender farm, you buy lavender from lavender farmers, not just your average wholesale nursery.

So we started slowly just realized it's a labor with growing lavender, a labor of love.

If you're thinking about adding lavender to your farm, I would probably not coordinate it with another crop.

Okay?

If you're growing a crop with the same bloom harvest time, In PA, lavender harvest starts mid-June and goes for the angustifolia into the Intermedia lavenders.

And I'm using the true Latin terms, meaning English and French.

You're gonna start mid-June to July for harvesting.

But that does not mean all your prep time before or your cleanup time afterwards.

But if you're doing a crop that is exactly the same time, it's really gonna be tough, depending on how much lavender you do.

Planting anything begins knowing what the plant needs to thrive.

So when I'm gonna be a lavender farmer, we get calls probably, I get calls usually January, February, March.

"I'd like to be a lavender farmer. What do I have to do?" And the first thing is know what you have to do to make it thrive.

It is a zone five to 10 plant, a USDA, hardiness zone five to 10 plant Zone five is negative 15 to negative 10.

Where I am in Pennsylvania we are six B.

Sometimes we do fall into that category.

And I can tell you as a lavender farmer, it happened to us probably six, seven years ago and we maybe even longer than that, we lost almost two-thirds of our crop.

And then you have to start over.

Thankfully you saw that greenhouse picture, we have our own greenhouse.

That helps that, that we can start our own plants and such.

So then the next step that you wanna do, I think I went too far, there you go.

It is a drought tolerant plant.

You need to know some things about it before you get started, not only it's hardiness zone.

It's a drought tolerant plant.

If you are in a wet area, a boggy area, you're not gonna do well with lavender.

Some of the other things to know about it is soil tests before planting lavender.

You are gonna want lavender in a soil of pH of six to eight.

We were coming from a Christmas tree field, so we needed to make some moderations before we put our lavender in our field.

If you're gonna plant five lavender plants, you can go ahead and plant it without a soil test.

But if you're gonna try to grow any abundance of lavender, you're gonna want your soil test first.

And most extension offices, I know Penn State does, offers a soil test to be done.

So lavender needs full sun, good drainage, pH of six to eight.

Some things to know for weed control.

This field here is totally different.

We don't have it just with the grass.

We actually have landscape fabric to help with weed suppression at this point.

We don't do any spraying of any chemicals on our lavender.

We're not labeled organic.

That was one of the perks of being lavender farmers.

It doesn't have a lot of natural pests or plant diseases to it.

So if you grow it right, you should be able to avoid any of the plant diseases that it can get, like Phytophthora, which is if it sits in too much water kind of thing.

But that is some things to know about it is the good drainage, the pH.

And one of the other things is with the landscape fabric, bark mulch, using a bark mulch, you would not wanna do that around a lavender 'cause that holds in the moisture as well.

So let's see...

And then we're gonna go on to knowing that lavender is a labor of love.

There is a lot of labor in lavender.

It is a hand harvested, hand weeded, pruned by hand, mowed between the rows kind of crop.

Okay, so there is a lot of work that goes into lavender.

I wish I could see my slide numbers, I wanna make sure I'm on the right slide there.

But one of the things you're going to want to know, going into lavender, if you're gonna take on this endeavor, like, "I wanna grow lavender, it's beautiful.

I wanna be a lavender farmer." What are you gonna do with it?

You can get it to grow 'cause you know all the things, the good drainage, the pH, all of that.

Well what do you wanna do with it?

What is your purpose of growing it?

Know your goal and then you're gonna pick your cultivars, which means the different types, according to your goals of your lavender growing.

If it's agritourism, okay, you just want pretty fields.

Well, a lot of times the English are very beautiful, but the ones that people want their photos by mostly are the French lavenders, which I will show you a slide on as well.

But I wanna show you some beautiful...

Angustifolia is its species name.

English lavender, AKA Lavandula, these are all different terms for discussing the English lavender.

Some lavender farmers get really upset if you just call it English lavender, you need to call it an Angustifolia, Lavandula Angustifolia.

But here are some cultivars: Hidcote, Buena Vista, Folgate.

Buena Vista is one of my all-time favorites now.

We had started with four cultivars. We're up over like 20.

Ours need to have a goal, like an end goal, why are we growing it?

We need an end goal to it.

Well, some neat attributes of Buena Vista, it's a beautiful purple bloom.

It is pretty reliable in our hardiness zone.

It is a good culinary lavender.

And the other neat attribute of it is it'll send off...

Some people get disappointed when you call it re-blooming, but it sends off some more blooms late August into September.

So when you can see lavender that time of year, it's awesome, so that's kind of a neat attribute about it.

So if your goal is agritourism, wedding venues, product production, photography, tours, farm store like we have at a Hope Hill Lavender Farm.

These are all options of being a lavender farmer, okay?

What are we gonna do with it?

I have to tell you, weddings we don't do because we don't have an indoor facility for people to come in out of the weather.

We do allow photography here with sessions and such with people.

We do farm tours and we do a lot of classes here like yoga, pottery classes, lavender wand making classes and such.

But here's another cultivar that if you're going for agritourism, wedding photos, big beautiful bouquets.

The Intermedias, or the French Lavenders, are typically your go-to plants or oil production.

When we originally started, we thought we were just gonna grow plants and produce oil and sell it to other soap makers and that was gonna be the way to doing it.

Well then once you realize that's not the end goal, if you wanna make a profit, you learn how to make soap, you learn how to make lotion, you learn how to make candles and that's what we did.

But here is one of the best plants for oil production is a Grosso, and that's the cultivar name.

Provence is a beautiful lavender plant, but in the state of Pennsylvania she is zoned five to 10.

She doesn't like our winters. I keep her growing.

Every year I propagate and I make some more and some survive, some don't.

And yes there are white lavenders as well that you can do.

But what you wanna know is your end goal of being a lavender farmer.

This is one of our fields.

There are probably three, four more of this size.

You can see our bees, purple boxes in the background for our beekeeping.

But you can see how beautiful it looks when it's in full bloom.

But some of your things, your Angustifolias that we showed this slide, the culinary, typically the use for these three cultivars, the Hidcote, the Buena Vista, the Folgate is culinary purposes, cooking with it.

Baking, you can use it in cooking also, but typically I like it in my sweets and cakes and cookies and such.

And that has a pretty good draw.

We have lavender ice cream here. We do lavender lollipops.

And we get a lot of requests from bakeries and such wanting lavender or restaurants locally to us for it.

Some of the tools though, these are sickles that we use to cut and this I typically only use for our oil production when we're going out and being kind of brutal to the plants.

When I'm cutting for the culinary, I'm using scissors and I'm cutting each one by hand, banding them up and taking 'em to our drying shed.

So again, labor intensive, when you're using the sickle to cut them and band them this way.

This is Grosso cut with scissors actually and banded up.

This is for bouquets.

When they're cut with the sickle, we just throw 'em in a basket till we get 'em back up to the still and prep them for the still.

Keep in mind, it takes about 12 pounds of flowers to make one ounce of oil.

So that's where we learned how to make soap (chuckles) with ours.

But here's Buena Vista cut.

The English cultivars do look pretty, there you go, bundled up in baskets.

But you can see there how much shorter they are than their French counterparts, okay?

The French, this is the French cultivars hanging in our drying shed.

We do offer fresh cut bouquets. That's an option.

Some lavender farms will just open and be cut-your-own and allow people come in and cut their plants.

I took slight notice last spring on the US LGA, United States Lavender Growers Association, a correlation to some lavender farmers that lost a lot of their lavender.

They were cut-your-own farms.

The people that are gonna come in and cut your flowers are not gonna care about them like you do and know where to cut them to make them live till next year.

They are a perennial.

They need to be cut properly or they're not gonna come back every year.

Oh (indistinct) and then here are some of the equipment that you might consider if you're gonna add this as a product on your farm, lavender, distilling for oil.

This is our still setup in its old location in the yard before the farm store, but this is our still.

And again this, the yellow color above, is sitting on top of the lavender water.

This is the distilled water that pushes the oil out of the flower and that's what goes through with this process in the still.

And then you separate the oil from the water.

Both products are equally usable.

And then the amazing seed cleaner.

This is what takes our culinary lavender and basically vibrates all the chafe and debris out of it.

And it's kind of incredible what comes off of it.

And the lavender still stays purple. It's kind of neat.

But there is a lot of work in that process alone.

I can spend hours with that machine cleaning our lavender so that it's ready for sale.

So our journey with lavender started in 2010.

We started as the idea of being a lavender farm.

And so all our plants came from the average wholesale nursery until we met with a lavender farmer that said, "You buy your plants from lavender farmers, not wholesale nurseries." And that's where we got educated.

After the four cultivars we started with, we lost two of 'em within the next two to three years.

And then we learned dealing with other lavender farmers to get other plants into our greenhouse that we could propagate and make more.

And all our plants are propagated from lavenders that have lived in our field, so we do that every year.

So that's another option.

You can just become a lavender farmer that grows lavender to make more lavender plants.

That might work 'cause that is a season that literally starts August and we are still working on it watering and taking care of plants until they go for sale in May.

But here's a slide that is in on this.

I don't know if they'll have access to sharing some slides, but this shares a little bit about the parts of lavender and keeping in mind that distillation for the oil is only using this part of the plant.

And that is a very interesting attribute to our farm that brings in a lot of people that like to come and see the oil being distilled on the farm.

So the English lavender, which I believe this is a picture of an English cultivar, I could be wrong, but it looks it, is about 45 pounds of flowers to make an ounce of oil.

And we do it with one of our cultivars called Maillette.

It's an English cultivar.

The other ones that we grow are used for culinary.

And that is to know the difference.

What are you gonna use it for?

So you know which cultivars you want to grow.

So that's a neat thing.

So there is information more about growing lavender also on our website and a little bit about us too.

And that's lavender in full bloom there.

But again, you're gonna wanna purchase quality lavender plants, get some great advice from some of these books that can help you on your journey of knowing the rights and the wrongs of lavender farming.

You don't have to do it all.

We grow it to dry it.

I always tell people to distill it and to propagate our own plants.

So we do a little bit for each season and then we make about 30 different products here at the farm: soaps, lotions, candles, culinary.

So that keeps us...

People are like, "Oh you must like winter.

It's quiet and calm." We are on batch 14 of 40 pound batches of soap that we make because that has to cure before we can sell it.

We do wholesale accounts.

So we work on those also throughout the winter.

We work on, because it's a small business, it's my husband and I, I do the marketing, so we're trying to figure out where we're gonna advertise.

So those are all things that you need to keep in mind.

I know Michele's gonna talk about classes.

What classes are you gonna do throughout the season?

You're getting all of those things ready.

So if you like to be busy all the time, lavender farming definitely will keep you off the streets and out of trouble. (laughs)

And, again, if you're doing another crop, if it works off that season, an alternate season, it would be a really neat additive to your farm.

'Cause people do really enjoy seeing the purple flowers throughout the season.

We also do diversify. We do sunflowers.

We also do other flowers.

We're a certified pollinator garden with Penn State because we keep bees and it's very important to keep the bees fed as long as you can through spring and into fall.

So we do also keep other cultivars or other types of plants around the farm and I do like gardening and trying to find different things to do.

We're adding a little bit more chamomile this year for a tea that we make so that we can start growing our own.

So there's so much you can do with lavender, but there's also some things you can skip if you want and focus and do a really good job with whatever you choose to do with it and your customers will be happy with you.

So we started the journey with bouquets and sachets and now we do, like I said, soaps, lotions, candles, again, a lot of things.

And these are just some of the books that are recommended.

The "Sawmill Ballroom Lavender Farm Guide" will take you to a farm that basically, he talked about, all he did was dried flowers and cutting your own.

He didn't distill for oil and such.

And "The Lavender Lovers Handbook," these are just some books that really have a lot of good attributes if you're considering it and that one has some awesome photos of lavender cultivars in it for you to make some good decisions.

Okay, so I think I stuck to my time the best that I could.

- You did. Thank you so much, Wendy.

And next up is Michele, and Sarah will pull up the slides for that and thank you so much for all the questions and we will answer them after both speakers are done.

I am keeping track of them. Thank you.

- So then I will stop sharing. Right?

- Oh, you're good. - Okay.

- The other slides are up. All done, thank you.

You need to unmute yourself, Michele, sorry.

- Hi, my name is Michele Capron from Lavender Essentials in Derby, Vermont.

A little history on me, I was born and raised in Vermont on a small dairy farm.

I currently live on multi-generational farmland, just acres away from where I grew up.

In May of 2017, my husband and I decided to make a life change.

After visiting a particular farmer's market, we decided that we wanted a different life.

We wanted to farm, we wanted to farm something.

We chose lavender. Why did we choose lavender?

Well, actually, the highest grossing crop you could grow in the US, and at that time, lavender was number four.

We wanted to work the land that we owned, trying to develop a business out of a hayfield and a crazy dream to grow lavender in the very northern most tip of Vermont.

The views from this farm are 360 degrees and they're equivalent to being on top of a mountain.

Now, nevermind it is zone four B here and an area that is so windy there are three wind turbines in a four square mile radius.

Doesn't that sound just like the Mediterranean?

We wanted to become self-sustaining.

We began growing our own vegetables, herbs, foraging, raising hens, meat birds and pigs.

We put 3,000 plants in the spring of 2017, and so it began.

In 2018, we developed 13 value added products.

We attended the US LGA's biannual conference in North Carolina.

It was at that US LGA conference that we learned from many other more experienced lavender farmers that adding agritourism to our farm was likely going to be the difference between earning a profit and having a hobby farm.

In June of 2019, we opened up to the public.

We offered camping. We sold products in our gift shop.

We offered you-pick lavender and experimented with romantic date night experiences.

In August of 2019, our family appeared on the oldest running agricultural TV show on air called "Across the Fence." We were featured as the only lavender farm in Vermont open for agritourism.

After that show aired, public awareness of our farm quadrupled overnight.

In 2020, the year of COVID, our camping was the most popular it has ever been.

As our campers, we placed them one acre apart and we limited the capacity of campers that we had to 10 on a 10 acre property.

In 2021 and 2022, our traffic, our income and expenses have become fairly consistent and reliable.

So here we are in the winter of 2023 and I'm finally able to plan effectively and with confidence, the seasons, the classes, experiences, and the events as well as the financial baseline that we have to follow.

Each year here, we add more and more events and classes and what I call permanent attractions.

I feel permanent attractions are very important because they draw people to your farm when the lavender is not in season or when it's not particularly that fabulous.

My goal with permanent attractions once they're in place is they're very low cost and low maintenance.

For example, we have a birch tree circle.

It is eight birch trees, 25 feet apart.

The birch tree represents life, new beginnings and it's a place for quiet contemplation and it provides shade on hot days.

We have a geocache on site.

A geocache is a hidden item or cache mapped on an app on your phone.

Geocache is a worldwide free scavenger hunt of sorts.

You download the app on your phone and its members follow the longitude and latitude coordinates to find the geocache.

Once it's found, they log in what they found, sign a book, trade some trinkets for the prize for finding it.

Typical things you might find in a geocache are coins, bits of jewelry, rocks, toys, plastic army man, et cetera.

We offer camping through online booking sites Hipcamp and Tentrr, as well as Harvest Hosts.

All of our sites are very simple.

They're a mowed flat area and a picnic table and a fire pit.

We have one site that we do charge more money for due to the view and its unique location.

With the campers, we sell them bundles of wood.

We package it ourselves, and we use reusable plastic firewood bags.

We normally burn wood in our home, so bundling the wood for us is easy.

While we have the campers here, we have the opportunity to offer them add-ons such as s'mores kits, outdoor Jenga rentals, human bumper balls, fresh frozen meat from our own chickens and pigs, or pre-packaged breakfast containing pancake mix, eggs from our chickens, Vermont maple syrup, bacon or sausage, raw milk from the neighbor's farm.

They can also rent a telescope for stargazing or rent a kite for those breezy afternoons here.

After all, we do have a wind turbine.

In 2019, we built a large three circuit classical labyrinth.

It's over 50 feet across and has nearly 300 plants in it.

If this sounds impossible to you, it is not.

We learned how to do this from a free YouTube video.

Lars Howlett is a California labyrinth designer with amazing YouTube videos that will teach you how to draw a simple labyrinth in just five minutes.

Informational placards, we have about 24 of them on the property.

We put them on four by fours cut with plywood backing on an angle.

Each year I print off new placards and laminate them with a home laminating kit.

We put information about our family, the town, the state, what we're growing, interesting facts about our family and the area.

Placards will help move people around the farm.

It will help them see all the corners of your farm.

It will help them spread out and help them stay longer and the longer they stay, the more money they're gonna spend.

If I grow it, I offer it up for you-pick.

That does not mean that everything I grow here gets picked by our customers, but the offer is there.

The more information that's available to your guests to educate them about the plant's properties, the more apt they're going to be to pick it.

So in that respect, we have ground cover signs at the end of each row, identifying the plants and the particular cultivars that we are growing.

Information is really powerful.

If you wanna push you-pick, here's a good example.

Your sign could say, "Wormwood," or your sign at the end of the row could say, "Wormwood, this Chinese anti-malarial herb is used in parts of the world where malaria parasite has become resistant to all other drugs.

It has been cultivated in China for at least 2,000 years, but its development as an anti-malarial drug using its leaf extract was recent and was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015.

It can be prepared as a topical ointment and tincture.

Characterized by its dark leafy fern like leaves and white flowers that bloom late summer to early fall.

Its highly aromatic branches are also used in dried arrangements and crafts." Can you see the difference?

You wouldn't pick wormwood normally unless you knew what it was for.

Educate your customers. You can sell them more items.

You don't have to do all this research on your own.

For example, that very long description came right from the place that I buy my seeds from.

I buy some seeds, not lavender seeds, but I do buy herbal seeds from Richters in Ontario and the herbal description of benefits is on their website describing each cultivar as you shop.

Someone's already done the work for you.

Don't work too hard, just copy and paste.

But for legality, please do not copyright.

You need to give credit where credit is due.

In additional, we acquired a cheap 300 gallon plastic pond.

Excuse me, I'm a bit hoarse.

We buried this ground level, added stones, goldfish, solar lights, air pump and a fountain.

People love to sit by the pond.

It's another reason to get them to stay.

I'd like to just make a quick note of my employee standing in the pond in May in a wetsuit because it was that cold when we were trying to assemble it.

She was a great sport.

We have mowed paths all over our farm.

We have rows and rows of crops.

It sounds like walking trails to me.

If we have rows of crops and mowed paths, now we have walking trails that you can advertise free to the public.

Our state even has a free listing of all the walking trails that are open and free to the public.

We also have a tiny house here that we call the Cozy Cabin.

Recently built for short-term rental, it's 190 square feet.

It's a dry camp with a porta-potty.

We advertise this on Airbnb and our website.

These are some of our permanent attractions.

So now let's talk about the experiences here that we offer.

People want to visit the farm.

Most of the US is completely disconnected with farm communities today.

They want to experience farming.

People tell us all the time, we are living the dream.

They want to be us, that romantic vision of a Vermont lavender farmer.

They wanna hold the chicken, pat a rabbit, feed a calf, pick a sunflower, picnic in the lavender field, milk a cow, and pick fresh mint for mojito.

In the summer, we have a calf on site.

We borrow it from the neighbors.

We put her up in a cute little hutch and a fenced-in enclosure, May through September.

We sell bottle feedings for $10 each.

We feed her three times a day.

The more people, the smaller the feedings, more often she gets to eat.

She's the happiest calf in the county.

I can promise you that.

We name her something clever like Violet, and it also helps our neighbor sell raw milk that she produces as well as the beef that she raises.

Farm tours, in the beginning I really had a hard time with farm tours; I was like, "Tour what?" Until I realized people really just want to hear me talk about the farm, what we grow, the local area.

They really wanna hear you talk about anything if it's your farm.

In the beginning, I did do these tours for free.

Now, however, I don't do any tours for free any longer.

Picnics in the lavender field, we charge $125 for these.

We try to keep our cost of food at $25 or less.

Picnics in the lavender field require laundry and kitchen prep work as well as a half hour in the kitchen prep and a half an hour with set up and cleanup time.

You can make picnic in the lavender field as simple or as complex as you want.

We bought used picnic baskets that we relined and redid.

We use a modified wooden pallet for a table.

We have pillows, blankets, and linens to make it cozy and we offer limited food options.

We offer cold sandwiches, fruit and vegetables, salad, lavender lemonade, cookies, or a charcuterie board or graze box.

I personally feel that these graze boxes or charcuterie boards are the easiest to assemble.

Only offer what you want to do.

If you hate making Caprese salad, then don't offer it.

Don't do anything you don't wanna do. Take it from me.

Food, we have found the number one reason that people have left our farm is for food.

Why let them spend five to $20 down the road when you can take that money from them at your farm?

So here we acquired a catering license through the Department of Health.

It only costs about a hundred dollars and an inspection.

Now we can prepare food in our private home and sell it at the Lavender Farm.

Romantic date night, we have an enclosed gazebo in the middle of the farm.

We offer a romantic date night experience starting around $150.

We offer indoor s'mores, our charcuterie board, and a free mini lavender gift.

The gazebo is outfitted with curtains and pillows, blankets, an indoor fire table and solar lights.

They can watch the sunset from the gazebo and sit by the fire outside and stargaze after dark.

Chef's Choice dinner.

This is a farm to table date night experience.

It's the same as romantic date night except now it's a three-course meal.

We hire a private chef to come to our home.

He cooks in our kitchen and shops from our cupboards with the food from our farm.

We have egg-laying hens, meat birds.

We grow our own vegetables and herbs.

We pick apples, boil our own maple syrup and forage for things such as fiddleheads, ramps and highbush cranberries.

75% or more of that meal comes from right here on the farm.

We always heavily garnish the plates with colorful flowers and herbs that have only been cut hours ahead of time.

We decorate the gazebo with fresh and wildflowers from the farm.

I'm famous for adding unusual bouquet items such as carrot tops, Swiss chard, beet greens, Timothy, rye, pea vines or squash blossoms.

Sunday afternoon tea parties. We charge $25 a person.

Our goal here is to keep this individual's food and cost rate as low as possible.

During tea, it's under $10 a person.

People love tea parties.

I will confess to you that I hate them.

That being said, it's a perfect example of do what you're good at and not what you're not.

My employees love the tea parties.

The public loves the tea parties and they all handle it perfectly.

So I help set up the linens and lace, cups and saucers and then I leave.

I have way much to do to worry about anxiety serving tea and things.

Mind you, I serve all of the date nights and have no problem with this.

Tea is not for me.

Do what you're good at, not what you're not.

Massage at the lavender farm.

We charge $150 for a single and $300 for a couple.

A hundred dollars per person is paid to the masseuse.

Massage is held in the gazebo or in the Cozy Cabin.

We do not hold massages outside due to the unpredictability of weather and the privacy issues.

Photographers, now we all all know that everyone is gonna take pictures of your farm with their cell phones or cameras and that's fine.

So how do you know who to charge?

If a photographer is making money on our hard work and landscaping, then they will need to pay us for the gorgeous backdrop that we are providing.

We charge $25 per person, not per hour, per person or per sitting.

We find that most of our photographers are pretty honest.

I have had a few sneaky ones.

We also asked for the rights to use some of the photos that they take.

After all, they're taking really great pictures of your farm, use them.

Last year we put up an event center.

It is two 20 by 40 metal storage containers on a cement pad joined together with a metal roof that we purchased from Future Steel Buildings.

We sided at the inside and outside for a more rustic burn appearance.

We also built a deck for seating on top of one of those storage units.

The event center can now hold wedding receptions for up to 50 people.

We hold our classes in the event center and it's a great place to duck out of the rain.

We also display large items for sale such as wreaths and wall hangings.

Classes, now these are one of my very favorite things to do.

You don't have to be super smart or have a super special skill to teach classes.

Every single crafty class that I teach, I got the idea from Pinterest.

Pinterest is your best asset for creative ideas.

Classes are most profitable if you are the one teaching them.

This is how I price my classes.

$10 goes to the farm, $10 to the teacher, and your supply cost should have the ability to be doubled or tripled.

Here's an example.

Fairy garden class here is $40.

If I am the teacher, that's $10 for me.

There's $10 for the farm. That's still me.

And our supplies are six to $9.

That cost of supply is nearly double, excuse me, tripled in fairy class.

So if I teach fairy class and 10 people come, that's a hundred dollars for me, a hundred dollars for the farm, that's still me.

Or I could give a hundred dollars to a different teacher.

We choose to try to teach all of our own whenever possible.

That being said, I don't teach yoga or any of the morning stretch classes.

If you have an hour class, you should always plan on two hours.

Set up and clean up will take just as long as the class and here are some commonalities that I have found.

Someone is always going to be late.

Someone is always going to be early.

Someone is always going to know more than you and there's always someone that will need a lot of help.

Do not give very many variations to what you're doing.

It is only going to confuse them.

Remember, they're not the ones that spent hours pouring over pictures on Pinterest, you did.

Always make sure everyone gets to leave with a finished product even if you had to make it for them.

I always have one done as an example and I will make one simultaneously with the class.

This way you are guaranteed to have a finished product to give to any struggling student.

Most of our classes here are BYOB as is the farm.

That being said, our town has no permitting necessary for BYOB.

However, our insurance company does require extra insurance for this.

This year we will have a new feature option at our classes, which are craft projects for children.

Moms are gonna be happier if they need or want to bring their children to class if the kids have something to do.

For $10, we will have a pre-made age appropriate craft kit available to choose for the children.

The Dollar Tree has an incredible selection of crafts for kids and we utilize these for a lot of our kits.

So how do people learn about Lavender Essentials?

Social media is your best friend.

It is estimated that 4 billion people use social media in the world.

The average social media user is spending 2.5 hours a day on social media.

Facebook has an average of 58 minutes a day.

Reporting company, Cisco, reports 82% of all internet traffic is video.

TikTok has 1 billion active members monthly.

This means TikTok is relevant to all of us, whether you like it or not, video is here.

Social media is free, but it does take a ton of work, hours sometimes a day.

Positive reviews are extremely important and referrals are verbal gold for your business.

This is definitely a huge learning curve for some.

The internet has masses of information out there.

Most of it is free.

This is tough, let the young people in your life help you out with the bits of internet craziness that you know you're guaranteed to struggle with.

So how did they learn about us?

We told everyone that would listen.

We wrote up press releases.

We added events to community calendars.

We called radio stations, TV stations, garden clubs, newspapers, anyone that would listen.

My husband (chuckles) would see a car at a gas station with a local TV logo printed on the car, news logo, and he would stop, jump out and go to the traveling reporter pumping gas or buying a coffee in the store and ask them if they'd ever heard of our lavender farm.

Tell everyone, someone is listening, and it helps.

All social media is super important.

We have an active website. We use Squarespace.

For us, it's super easy to edit, and we edit it often.

We have a business page on Facebook where we market the farm and our products.

We have a group page under the business name where we tell people about our farm, what we grow, how we harvest it, tips, tricks and mistakes.

We talk about canning, raising animals, how to be more sustaining, how to save money, like things like making laundry soap, all the stupid things we do and the funny videos of us chasing animals like the pigs and the ducks.

We do have an Instagram page.

We find the results of Instagram are somewhat regional and age dependent.

We also have a fairly inactive YouTube page and TikTok.

We need to do better with our own video content posting this year.

And then there's Pinterest. I am the Pinterest queen.

One of my goals this year is to add Pinterest to our online presence, in my spare time, of course.

I scour Pinterest for recipes, crafts, lavender ideas, class ideas, garden ideas and planting.

Imagine all the people that are on Pinterest looking for lavender ideas.

Pinterest would bring them all to your farm.

Unlike Facebook, your posts and your farm is not buried as time goes on.

Pinterest's best and most well-known feature is its search engine.

It's very fast and accurate.

You should get to know your local community travel center.

On the interstate, we recently just put up a display.

You should call your state's Department of Tourism.

Call the state's Department of Agriculture.

Invite schools to the farm for a field trip.

Call the local garden club.

Garden clubs arrange for tourism lectures on farms every single season.

The state of Vermont has Open Farm Week.

Open Farm Week is nine days where farms that might not normally be open to the public but are now open offering unique farm experiences.

During our first Open Farm Week, we decided to create a 5K Fun Run.

After all, I had run dozens of them in the past.

How hard could it be? It's really not that hard.

This year will be our fourth annual Lavender 5k.

Last year, we added a Mac-n-Cheese Fest to the Lavender 5k; it was a huge success.

The Mac-n-Cheese Fest was our highest grossing event last year.

Anytime that we have an event, we always ask our local vendors to come and display products here during our events.

We charge $25 per vendor.

Last year, I organized a haunted forest called the Lavender Backwoods Scream Fest.

We submitted this event to the local TV, newspaper and radio stations.

We ended up with a reporter coming to the farm doing a small piece on our event.

Our slogan was, why are we doing Halloween in June?

Because it's not cold.

It turned out our first night was the coldest on record in 154 years.

And despite the fact it was 42 degrees on June 21st and down-pouring, we still had 82 people come through.

We used HauntPay as our online booking platform for Scream Fest, as timing ticket blocks can be super complicated.

HauntPay is set up for selling a certain number of tickets per time block.

What is the hardest thing about organizing a haunted forest?

Finding people to be scary in the woods.

That was by far hands down our biggest challenge.

This year, we're gonna add the Wilderness Dash.

Wilderness Dash will be an obstacle course 5k we're holding at the end of September.

It'll be during a full moon and the Vermont fall foliage will just beginning.

We choose to do this event late in the season because the lavender farm will be slowing down to help boost late season sales and revenue as our winter approaches.

Farm Day, this is another part of Open Farm Week.

We have a team of horses come in and we give wagon rides, free games outside, we build scarecrows.

We have chicken races and we encourage a lot of animal petting.

Trick or treats, trunk or treats.

We did this in 2020 during COVID.

We did this a few weekends before Halloween in hopes it was warm and sunny.

After all, this is Vermont.

It is chilly here by the time Halloween comes.

While we have only done truck or treat once, I will tell you this was my experience.

It was a gorgeous day.

It was 68 degrees and tons of people and kids showed up between two and four just as expected.

What we did not expect was a low trunk outcome, which directly led to running out of candy 45 minutes into our two hour event.

We rushed to the dollar store.

We spent $150 to appease the treaters that were so gracious to stay and those that continued to show up.

However, lavender gift shop sales were extremely low that day.

We had a great time, but it was not that profitable for us.

Lastly, just a little bit about the lavender that we grow here.

We grow mainly English lavender, Munstead and Hidcote.

We are going to add Phenomenal, Grosso and SuperBlue this season.

The Intermedias will provide longer showier bouquets than the English lavenders.

Over the years we have struggled with overwintering our plants.

We've experienced a lot of losses over the years.

We've covered all the wrong ways.

Sometimes following bad advice from other farmers, sometimes making our own choices and sometimes it was mother nature.

We now know what works for us and it has been consistent year after year.

We use DeWitt 2.5 ounce winter blanket.

It let's in 50% light and 50% water.

We cover in October and we remove the covers in the beginning of May.

Though with climate change, however, we may be uncovering in April this year.

We use 5,000 feet of row cover and 10,000 stakes.

It is a ton of work.

We could not have lavender in Vermont without covering.

Vermont is not the first place they think a lavender, but once they come to our farm, they will never forget it.

To finish, I wanna give you the best piece of advice that I've heard for a long time.

I heard this at the Thriving Farmer Summit webinar series and they asked, "Are you trying to become a self-sustaining homesteader or are you trying to run a profitable farming business?" I'm gonna say it again, it rings true.

Are you trying to be a homesteader or are you trying to run a business?

Thanks for letting me share my farm with you.

- Thank you so much, Michele.

I mean my head is spinning from all this information, and I will rewatch the webinar recording again because there was just so much information and you can rewatch it again because we will send out the link and we will also post it on the extension website.

There were some questions, so we have about 12 minutes to go and tons of questions.

So I'll start with Wendy.

Michelle, with two Ls, is asking, "My lavender die off here in south central PA.

What varieties should I be planting?" - South central PA, I'm not sure if she can get back.

Is that like...

South central, to me, that's almost me-ish, like Harrisburg.

I'm not sure. It might not be so much the cultivar.

It might be where it's being planted.

I have plants that are in sun and partial sun and the difference in the growth is amazing.

I mean, literally they are 15 feet apart, but it's in the landscaping and the one that is in partial sun is probably a quarter of the size of the one that's in full sun.

So things like that, where it's being grown, might have everything to do with it.

We have a little microclimate on our property where our driveway splits from the other driveway.

It's along a creek bed and I put lavender there for three years.

After the third year I gave up. There was just one plant.

It died every year because of it being solo and that area just not sustaining it.

So I quit. So it might be more the area.

- It all depends. The usual answer.

(panelists cross-talking)

- Microclimates are real, microclimates here, just like Wendy was saying, are here on the farm.

We used to grow lavender around our gazebo.

The gazebo has not a drip catcher around the roof.

We have watched the lavender die year after year after year.

We finally dug it up and planted Russian sage because it doesn't want to grow under the eaves of a gazebo, even though we got a field of it 10 feet over.

It doesn't wanna grow. It's too wet there.

- And come see us, Michelle.

You can come see us beginning of May.

We sell plants and we have a lot of information and like I said, south central PA, she shouldn't be too far from us.

- And Jan is also saying that they have a great experience in Lancaster County with Phenomenal developed for zone four so just FYI.

- We do not grow any Phenomenal here on our farm.

I have no advice for that plant at all.

I grow Grosso, it's its near cousin, so yeah, I don't know anything about that one.

- There is one question about insurance.

So both of you need insurance.

Could you please talk about, because you've added a lot of new activities and, you know, how much does it cost and how do you go about insurance?

- Our insurance is through with our homeowners and such on our policy and we have an LLC and like that's more businessy stuff that I would actually have to get them a number.

- Okay. - I don't know off the top of my head. - I can tell you on my side it's a bit of a nightmare.

Originally, we had homeowner's insurance separate to our farm insurance and Vermont changed the law that if you have a farm, that you have to have separate homeowners in a different way.

Basically, when they found out we were doing agritourism, our homeowner's insurance dropped us.

We picked up another policy.

It was doubled because of the farm being next door.

Because I have so many different pieces, parts to our business, we have fires, we have events, we have classes, we have BYOB and children and animals and wagons.

And we make our own products and we grow things and we sell food.

Our insurance honestly is through the roof.

I'm shy to tell you that it is just under four.

It used to be a a lot less.

I actually watched a webinar with an insurance agent from Vermont, who's now my insurance agent, who told a really sad story about a farm in Maine that had a wagon accident doing a hayride that they weren't properly covered for.

A girl died, they were sued, they lost their farm.

So our insurance is high, but it's not worth losing the farm.

So I'm sure everybody's different.

Vermont is known for having really expensive things, but don't under insure yourself; this is your home.

- [Wendy] Yes.

- And just an additional point again, in PA, we now have a civil liability law for agritourism and there are also new regulations out for hay rides.

So you need to check with the PDA on that.

I'm never tired of saying that because a lot of people don't know.

Christie is asking, "Do you have suggestions for resources for learning how to make soaps, lotions and recipe?" Is it Pinterest?

- I'm not on Pinterest at all.

I've never Pinterest in my life.

I took some safety courses on essential oil with a Dr. Tisserand, so I knew safety concentrations.

Me being a veterinary technician, the percentages of what goes into something makes it good for your skin versus drying you out like a raisin.

So like I learned things that way.

The US LGA offers courses, but we also did a lot, a lot of research.

Soap making books.

One vacation in Zion, sat there on any downtime, looking up soap making, did a lot of research.

- I recommend taking a class.

I took an aromatherapy class online.

It was Aroma Hut. They were out of Florida, I believe.

It was five or 600 hours, and I learned as much from taking that one aromatherapy class about making soaps as I did learning about cultivars from the US Lavender Growers Association.

Education is power.

Don't start making soaps if you don't understand the ratios at all.

That's a whole nother class.

- Read. - Thank you.

- Yeah, read, read, read.

I love somebody that wanted to start a lavender farm and I said, "Well, here's a book," and this and that.

She's like, "I don't like to read." It's gonna be really hard.

And that's literally the answer I got.

"I wanna start a lavender farm, but I don't like to read." It's gonna be tough.

- Wow, thank you.

Lots of questions about startup costs for the special equipment.

Lots of people ask about the seed cleaner.

What's the brand and where did you get it from?

- It is a Fertrell clipper seed cleaner.

But realize everything started, and I'm sure Michele will say the same thing, started small; we did not have a farm store.

We started working out of our tack room.

We had a drying shed.

I would have this heater that would blow like in the garage when I would make candles when it was like 10 degrees.

We did that for like seven years and then we would have a lavender festival every year and then it went viral on Facebook and I swore if we survived it, I would never do it again, and we survived.

We opened a farm store.

So I always say we have the festival in our farm store throughout the lavender season, but it's gradual versus just that one big day that is a huge undertaking, but everything came gradually.

We built, you know, started with...

We didn't jump in.

I watched some lavender farmers where they build the building, they do everything all at once.

We started slow.

That clipper seed cleaner, we probably cleaned our lavender by hand for several years and then when we bought it, it does such a nicer job, cleaner job.

Yeah, so those things can come later.

Get your lavender growing first.

I did see one of the questions, how long does it take?

Lavender is a perennial, it takes three years for a perennial to reach full maturity.

By the second year, you'll have enough to harvest and such, but if you're distilling, you're gonna be waiting probably till that third year.

So yeah, it takes a while.

It's not an overnight success, that's for sure.

- We built our own seed cleaner off YouTube videos.

- Yeah?

Because basically it just vibrates all the debris out of the lavender, right?

- Yep. - It is amazing though, after you do all that to it and it still stays purple.

I said, "It wants to smell good and it wants to stay purple." (chuckles)

- Some were questioning about distilling, the equipment.

Where do you buy that from?

- Some people will do their make their owns on that.

I don't know if Michele did that yet or no.

You grow Angustifolias, correct?

- Right, so when we distill it's not nearly very much oil because your French or your Intermedias are gonna make a lot more oil.

We use most of ours, as far as the distilling, for demonstration and maybe not the so fabulous flowers or the gone-bys, things have kind of gone by or got missed by the you-pick, but we bought ours online.

I don't remember the company, but it's a 55 gallon stainless steel still with a copper reflux.

I think we paid probably $2,500 for it.

- (indistinct) too, but that also didn't come till year probably two or three.

We did sachets and bouquets and dried flowers for a couple years.

You know, we both still have jobs.

My job went from full-time to part-time and my husband has another business.

So it's not our only thing that we do.

- Same here. - You are all very busy.

- And tired. - I could say that.

You were talking a little bit about pick-your-own and what are the difficulties with it, but somebody was still asking, "I missed if you allow pick-your-own.

If so, which variety and do you charge by weight or by stem?" So even if you don't, maybe you have some ideas about it.

- Well, Michele, you do pick-your-own.

I just do we cut them for them and I can tell them the size that we do, but go ahead.

- So we have specific rows that we will tell you you can cut in.

We have potted lavender plants at the gift shop to show you where you should cut.

We charge by the bouquet.

What is a bouquet? We go to the dollar store.

We buy the napkin rings that are like an inch around and we put them right in their basket with them.

We tell them this is a bouquet.

If you come back with a bouquet this big, I'm gonna charge you for four of 'em.

This is a bouquet. We charge $10 for it.

Herbs, we usually charge by the pound or by what we call the fistful, which is we charge, if you got a fistful of mint, I'll charge you four bucks for it.

It's a lot easier than weighing it out.

Makes me much happier.

And our sunflowers, we charge a dollar a stem.

Now if we have multi-headed flowering sunflower, some of you know there's a single head and some have 20, 30, 40 heads.

It's a dollar a stem, not a dollar a plant.

Be specific with that. We're adding more things this year.

We do you-pick vegetables and things.

You-pick vegetables, we do do by the pound.

- Do you have any more Wendy to add to this?

- Just with the cut-your-own, we tried the cut-your-own sunflowers, and we do that.

With lavender, we are with the insurance, trying to keep our insurance company happy by not letting people run around with scissors around our farm.

So we do where we go and cut the bouquets for them.

Usually the people can be right there with me when we do it and such, you know.

But at some point we might visit it again with trying with the insurance, but to keep everything safe, we haven't.

I mean, we have had employees that help us cut themselves.

That's where I get scared to leave somebody that I don't know out there.

I mean, it's crazy. Yeah.

So we cut for people with our lavender bouquets.

- Okay, there are a couple of more questions but we can't answer them because we're at the top of the hour.

I would like to thank our really awesome speakers, Wendy and Michele.

Thank you so much for sharing all of your experience and spending the hour with us.

And thank you so much for everyone tuning in and asking questions.

Again, the recording will be available.

You can revisit everything and please fill out the webinar evaluation survey.

Here's a QR code because I love QR codes and also when you close the webinar, there will the survey link.

It will show up and I don't know if Sarah is posting it again now.

It will show up, the survey link, and we would appreciate if you fill out the survey.

Thank you so much and have a great day. Thank you.