Not to Worry

WEEDS.  It is almost spring.  You look out on a veritable sea of weeds.  Where are those lavender plants, anyway?  You get out your favorite hoe.  There are so many weeds you marvel at them.  These are the winners – these weeds.  Why don’t I just cultivate the weeds?  They look better than anything else out here.  You return to your hoeing with ‘death-to-weeds’ in every stroke.FIELD RENOVATION.  You look at the old lavender field you tore out.  You have the new plants to put in.  The soil is so wet and sticky you can’t plant.  How is this supposed to work, you wonder.   I can’t plant until the soils dry out.  What a setback.  I thought I’d have these plants in the ground and on their way in April.  It’s already June.PLANT REPLACEMENTS.  How in the blazes am I going to tear out all the DEAD lavender plants and get new ones in before the lavender festival ?  These plants died from drowning, poor things.  But now they’ve got to get out of here.  My pretty lavender fields can’t have DEAD lavender plants in them, can they?In the Pacific Northwest there is abundant rain.  We love the rain.  We curse the rain.  Not to worry though.  In this predicament, here’s what you can do.

Weeds:  There’s no escaping the weeds.  Eat some of them with dinner, sure, but pull or hoe the rest of them out.  Start early.  Pull and hoe after it rains.  The roots come out more easily after a rain.  If you’re removing wild onions, get the bulb AND the bulblets.  (what’s a bulblet?  a baby bulb.  plus, fun word to say)  If you don’t pull the bulb and bulblets you will be rewarded with dozens more wild onions in the same place next year.  I know this for a fact, and have considered whether this might be a better crop for me than lavender…

Most of all, don’t despair over the weeds, come up with a plan for weed management.

1 – Once you’ve pulled/hoed out so many weeds it fills your tractor bucket 14 times, distribute them alongside one of your gardens in need of soil improvement.  Put the rototiller attachment on the tractor and when the soil is ready, till the weeds into the soil.  Voila!  You have removed weeds from point A and returned them to the earth at point B where they will do some good as they decay.
2 – Use weed barrier cloth in wet climes.  Burn a 6″ hole for each plant.  Leave a generous border of the cloth between your crop and adjacent farmland or gardens.
3 – Apply a generous amount of garden sand (do not use sandy loam-may have horsetail seeds in it, a 350 million year old, creeping, rhizomatous plant you don’t want) around each plant.  Garden sand will help retain moisture, reflect sunlight onto your lavender plants and make pulling weeds around each plant much easier.
4 – When walking the gardens and fields with visitors, don’t have any eye to eye contact with weeds you missed, and weeds that came back after you thought you got rid of them.  If you don’t look at them, your guests won’t notice them either.  And whatever you do, don’t stop to pull them.

Field Renovation:  Hold your horses.  Refrain from planting in soil that’s too wet.

1 – Pick up a fistful of it and squeeze.  If you can form it into a ball, or if water runs out between your fingers, go inside and read a book instead.  The soil needs to be loose and moist, not soggy.
2 – Formulate a new calendar that puts planting later in the season.  Go with the weather.  Set up your irrigation equipment for your new planting.  If it looks like your new field is going in closer to summer than spring, prepare to put a LOT of water on this new field throughout the dry period.  Apply at least an inch of water/week.  Put an empty tuna can out in the field when you’re watering to collect water.  Gauge how long you need to irrigate to fill the tuna can with an inch of water.  Water your new planting accordingly.
3 – Show off your new planting to visitors.  Who cares if it’s a work in progress?  Who cares if you’re not even finished planting the field?  People are naturally curious about how, when and why you did what you did.  Why did you choose that cultivar(s)?  Why did you plant vertically instead of horizontally?  Why did you choose weed barrier cloth?  Why did you plant 3′ X 3′ with 4′ between rows?  How much will they grow each year?  How often do you need to water them?  What will you do with so many lavender plants???

Plant Replacements:  New fields and old fields all seem to turn up with some dead plants every now and then.  When there are a few, it seems okay to ignore them.  At some point, you’ll decide it’s time to replace your dead.  Suddenly, with no warning, no blaring of horns, the time has come.  There are 40 or more dead ones in an otherwise lovely field of 450 plants.  Unfortunately, it is coming on summer.  What should you do?  If you ordered your replacement plants along with your order to plant a new field, you are now in a pickle.  You can irrigate your new field just fine.  You DO NOT want to irrigate a few replacement plants in a mature lavender planting.  Why not?  Water is expensive.  You will be watering flowers throughout bloom and harvest that will hamper, if not spoil the flowers for your purposes.

1 – Dig out the dead plants and dispose of them.  An empty spot is better than an old, craggy dead thing.  No one but you will pay any attention whatever to the fact that there are bald spots in your fields.
2 – Locate a sunny spot where you’ll be watering anyway and plant the replacement plants nearby.  Water them before you plant them.  Trim bloom stems off to encourage root growth.  Water your replacement lavender plants along with whatever else you were going to be watering.  Give them an inch of water a week and they’ll do fine.  Just don’t forget to water them.
3 – Come the fall rains, move them into your mature lavender field where they belong.  Top dress with garden sand.  Tell them you’ll see them again next spring.
4 – Next time, plan ahead.  Count your dead.  Order plants to arrive for fall planting – not spring.  Patch the replacements into your mature fields, display gardens and perennial gardens in the fall so you don’t need to worry about irrigation equipment to get them going.

Happy Planting.  Not to worry.