Over the weekend (25-26 July) we harvested the whole field apart from 6 rows which we left as people were busy picking their own there.
We may harvest what's left there later.
Some of what we harvested went straight into our new still and we were delighted that it worked very well. I think our visitors were fascinated to see the whole traditional process carried out in front of their eyes. We got a good yield of excellent quality oil from this - the first distillation on this scale in Carshalton for probably 150 years.
The rest of the flowers we harvested went off to Norfolk to a commercial distiller - we had booked this earlier as a reserve just in case we had any problems with our own still, but in future we plan to do the whole job here.
Much our lavender oil will be sold as before in 5 ml bottles either direct to customers or through various local groups. The rest will be sold to health food shops and other outlets, and some will be made into a variety of products such as those which were on sale at the stalls during our open days. All the proceeds of our sales go to maintaining the lavender field and taking forward our work of restoring the traditional lavender industry.
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