| |  | | Pick-Your-Own Lavender Farm and Catnip Marketing II
Answered by: Conrad Richter
Question from: Sue
Posted on: August 9, 2000
Thank you so much for your interesting responses to my questions. I feel now that my ideas are worth pursuing.
I should mention that the property that I am planning to create for lavender gardens is only about 40’ x 50’. Is this large enough for a decent amount of lavender to be grown for my purposes?.
Sorry about that: I overlooked the size of the property. It is small; you might be able to grow at most 2000 plants, probably more like 1500. That is not a huge amount, but it might work for a very limited scale value-added operation. According to our "ProGrowers" information (see our catalogue or our website) the typical yield for a lavender field is about 500-1500 kg of dry flowers per hectare. This translates to about 10 to 30 kg of dry flowers annually starting in year 2. This is too small to sell on the bulk flowers market, so you would need to explore value-added options such as making lavender products and possibly the lavender festival or workshop idea during the flowering season in summer (which would serve more as a publicity generating idea for your value-added products).
Is it possible to receive copies of your newsletters, especially the July 2000 newsletter that you reference in the email? Is there a copy of the minutes from the Herbs 2000 conference available (wish I was there)?
All of the Richters HerbLetters are available on our website at http://www.richters.com . Go to the "Richters HerbLetter" link on the home page.
Unfortunately, Michael Reicher (of Purple Haze Lavender Farm) participated in a panel discussion only and there was no paper in the proceedings.
Thank you once again for your inspiring responses!
P.S. How do I find out more about Agri-tourism?
Hmmm... I am not sure off the top of my head. I know that there are associations that put on conferences on market gardening and I have seen this topic covered there. I suspect that the Ontario Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs will have somebody who is familiar with this and can advise where to research it further.
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