Our Lavender

It’s amazing how our paths cross at just the right moment. We know how hectic life can be — filled with uncertainties and so many things coming at you all at once — so we’re glad you stopped by!

We’re a small lavender farm in Florence, Montana with big ideas. What if sharing our lavender with you changes your life in some way? And what if you share it with someone, and they share it with someone, and so on?

Ripples of love and kindness last forever.

Royal Velvet	Folgate	Grosso
This is a traditional English garden lavender that does beautifully in our cold Montana winters. It blooms early in the summer and produces a high-quality oil. Its deep purple flowers are perfect for creating dried bundles and sachets. It’s also become popular in the culinary industry, adding both color and flavor to desserts and drinks.	Folgate is another English lavender ideal for cold climates. It also blooms in early summer, with a violet flower that dries beautifully in bundles. It has a sweet fragrance and a high quality oil. It’s another favorite for culinary use.	This is a French hybrid lavender with fragrant purple-blue flowers. It’s a hardy plant that blooms in mid-summer. It’s considered the workhorse of lavender, with amazing amounts of oil produced from its abundant stems and blossoms. We love our lavender. It's an amazing, versatile plant and we're excited to grow and share it with you!

 

Drying Lavender

After harvesting, we bind together bunches of lavender at the base of their stems. We hang them upside down in a dark, well ventilated shed to speed up the drying process. It’s amazing how well the purple color and sweet lavender smell lasts once the plants are dried!

We then remove the buds for sachets, or process them further to extract the essential oil from the plant.

Steam Distillation

We use steam distilling to extract the essential oils from our plants. This process uses boiling water to produce steam, which is then directed though a container of lavender. As the steam passes through the plants, oil is released. The oil, in the form of a vapor, passes through a condenser. The condenser cools the vapors and returns the steam to a liquid form. Once cooled, the liquid drains into a separator and the oil settles on top of the water. The water is drained and the oil is bottled. The leftover water is called hydrosol. It has a more earthy smell, with a slight lavender fragrance.