Yesterday (Friday) I went with some friends to the Lavender Festival in Sequim, Washington. I came back with a few sun herbs, besides some home-canned stuff like lavender jelly. The festival is going on through Sunday, but today is a gay pride picnik here in town, & too much other summer stuff to chose between just now, so we're not apt to get back up to Sequim for a second festival day. Anyone in driving distance might like to get there for at least one day though.
The downtown streetfair is good as streetfairs go, but the real joy is visiting some of the eight lavender farms around the town. We went to four of them before we were too pooped to continue. One of them had a first-rate restaurant as part of the farm so we ate there. One of the farms had 40 kinds of lavender, another had 70 kinds of lavenders plus lots of other sun-herbs. The main lavender fields however tended to be Grosso, which are production fields for lavender oil, & there were displays in action showing the process of extracting oils right on the premises.
It was just wonderful to go stand in the middle of a huge field of lavenders in bloom. It almost felt like being in the south of France. Sequim has become the American lavender capital only in the last few years, & what a successful program it has turned out to be to save family farming from displacement by land developers.
-paghat the ratgirl