Busy in the field!

My goodness!  What a slacker I've been about blogging!  I have a good excuse though.  Have you ever weeded around 300 lavender plants?  Yes... I have weed cloth out there.  But the little buggers still grow right at the base of the plants.  I don't know how I could keep up with it without the landscape fabric (weed cloth).  It's important that there are no weeds in the bundles when I harvest so I'm going through and cleaning things up one last time before they show their little purple faces.  :-)

Here's how the field looked yesterday.  I have 2 main varieties- half Grosso and half Gros Bleu.  The Grosso is a little earlier than the Gros Blue and it's looking a little bigger right now.  These photos are of the Grosso.
 

Compare this to the field a month ago!  (below)

Here are a few more from this weekend:

The spikes are shooting up and the buds are setting- but nothing is open yet. This is the first time the plants have actually touched. 

I asked DH to stand in back so you could get a perspective on the size.  That's his muddy knee in the back to the left.

The field is almost 3 years old.  This is our third harvest.  We planted 300 little 4-inch plants in the fall of 2007.  I expect to harvest somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 bundles next month.  I now know the meaning of the phrase, "Be careful what you ask for.... you might get it!"

If you're interested in reading more lavender posts, look over to the right for the list of labels (topics) and click on Lavender.  That will take you to the posts I wrote about lavender last July.

Keep watching- I'll be posting updated photos.