Harvest time in San Diego county

After a week of torrential rain, today was cool and sunny -- and our first official harvest day. Probably an unusually late date for a lavender harvest, but that’s lavender farming in San Diego county.  In addition to harvesting the lavender,  we also attempted essential oil distillation for the first time and I attempted pruning for the second time.  Though we made some progress, both need to be improved.

First the distillation.  Mark and I have been looking at distillation systems for about a year now and they are very expensive.  A small tabletop essential oil extractor costs several hundred dollars and the larger ones cost thousands.  So we’ve been watching youtube videos and trying to figure out how we could put something together ourselves. Luckily, Mark is both a talented engineer and had already invested in beer making supplies, many of which we could use for our still so we gathered the supplies over the last weeks and he put it all together.  Here then is an explanation of how this process works (as far as I understand it) along with how we created our own system:

1. The lavender is placed in a pot of water, but somehow elevated above the water.  In our case, we inverted a pasta strainer in the pot and placed the lavender on top.  
2. The pot is placed on a heat source. In our case, we used the awesome outdoor flame source that Mark had used for his beer-making adventures.
3. The pot is then covered and sealed. In our case we used a pressure cooker used for canning to which we clamped a smallish hose through which the steam would escape
4. Once the water starts boiling and the steam starts making its way through the hose, it needs to be cooled so that it will condense and separate the water from the oil.  In our case, we tried 2 things.  First, we tried attaching the hose to a copper coil that Mark had used in his beer-making, and placed it sideways in a tub of cool water.  Attached at the other end of the copper coil was another hose.  
5. This last hose snaked out of the tub of cool water and into a glass separatory funnel. The idea is that the condensed water/oil will separate at this point into hydrosol and oil.  
6. We decided about half-way through that this wasn’t working because the coil was positioned incorrectly and/or was too big so we bypassed the coil and went straight into the separatory funnel.  This ended up not working either, so we are making some adjustments to the coil so that we can stand it up and let gravity help the condensed steam make its way through the coil and into the funnel
7. We ended up with some great-smelling hydrosol but no oil.  We think one of the problems was the cooling -- or lack of.
8. We also realized that we had put too much water into the pot -- the lavender shouldn’t be in the water at all and ours was.

Attempt #2 will take place tomorrow, so we'll see if our adjustments yield different results.  If anything, it was a lot of fun planning and working together on this.  I’m excited to see what happens tomorrow!

The less exciting part of the day was the pruning.  Last year I felt like my lavender pruning was the equivalent of giving a dog a bad haircut so I was determined to do better this year. I got one row harvested and pruned, and although I did better than last year, I still need to improve if these plants are going to look decent for the winter and spring.  

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Over these last few months I’ve also been practicing my wreath making and have improved in this area as well.  The only challenge is how to mail them if I sell them online.  I’m going to try sending a few to friends and family and see how they do -- and then make a decision at that point.  It may just have to be a Farmer’s Market item rather than an online item.  Either way, they're a lot of fun to make and I love giving them away!

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