lavender

We love lavender!

In the middle of the southern Waldviertel, we grow organic lavender and produce essential organic lavender oil. With our English lavender varieties we produce syrup, dried lavender flowers and mazarates.

It began in 2012 with the first experiments in lavender cultivation. As life sometimes goes, we unknowingly planted more than 2 hectares of lavender in 2014 in the first year of a three-year dry season in the Waldviertel. This cultivation failed due to the dry years. We learned from this and, together with the Buhl family, started a new experiment in 2018 on a particularly well-suited piece of land. This worked very well and the Buhl family looks after this field wonderfully with great dedication and diligence. All equipment for cultivation and care was built in-house and has proven to be excellent.

The lavender harvest takes place in July and August and represents the high point of the lavender season for us. A time when we always have visitors in the field. In 2019, Richard König from St. Charles Pharmacy there, actively helped with the harvest and created a video. You can find the video on facebook with the following link:

https://www.facebook.com/robinkoenigmedia/videos/1149500492184904

The heart of the lavender processing is our farm's own steam still. Since 2012 I have been engaged in herbal distillation, a craft that is not so easy to learn. The literature on this is scant, and much of what is described in books has in practice turned out to be plain wrong. After a long research and a lot of refreshing of my knowledge of thermodynamics, I designed the herbal stills together with a distillation colleague and then had them built. The system is designed in such a way that a 200 liter and a 400 liter stainless steel still use a coil cooler separately. This makes it possible to distill even small amounts of seasonal herbs and at the same time to quickly handle the large amount of lavender.

The English lavender is also a lavender fine and yet very different.

The Romans brought lavender to England and cultivated it there. Only from there did he come to Provence, which managed to become famous for it. This is why most people believe that lavender can only thrive in the Mediterranean region. Not even close. Today there are three genetic centers of Lavandaula angustifolia, as the real lavender is called. These are England, France and Bulgaria. Bulgaria is the world's largest cultivation area, real lavender is dying out in France and there are fine small cultures in England. There are around 400 subspecies of true lavender worldwide. The English varieties predominate overall, as new varieties have been developed in the gardens for centuries. We grow 5 varieties of English Lavender and use these varieties for syrup, for dried lavender and for maceration for extracts.

Lavender blossoms are usually dried industrially these days, and this is what the dried blossoms usually look like. We harvest by hand with forged scissors, bind them in bundles and slowly dry them in the kiln in the shade with a draft. The flowers are then carefully and carefully rubbed off by hand and shaken through several sieves to remove small pieces of stems and dry leaf residue. You can see that from the beautiful dark blue flowers, which are suitable both as a tea and as a spice in any form.