In the time honored fashion of crops everywhere, all of my lavender is ready for harvest. All three hundred plants. ARGH!
We harvest our lavender in bud stage for culinary and craft purposes. What that means is that you want to cut and dry the lavender right when the buds are at peak development. The ideal time is when a couple buds are just starting to open on the plant. Guess what? ALL of my lavender hit that harvest window this morning.
Of course this meant that my carcass was out in the field bright and early this morning, cutting and rubber banding bundles of lavender together for drying. There's another fun element to lavender harvest, I only cut flowers until about ten A.M. Years ago when another lavender farmer mentored me, back when I had ideals and toddlers, she told me to never harvest my flowers after mid morning as the heat causes the oils to disperse from the flowers for the day. Always striving to be a good student, I have followed that advice for the last fifteen years.
So, today found me out in the most smell goodiest of settings, hacking away at my lavender plants. The field itself is a bit interesting, and by interesting I mean a touch unkempt. I use my horses for foliage control. They wont touch the lavender, but they really do a nice job of keeping the grass and such mowed in between the rows.
If all things go well and I can sufficiently motivate my teenage work crew, we should have all the buds harvested by Saturday morning. To celebrate another year's harvest I am going to plop myself into our gigantic hammock and sip iced tea. I'll let you all know how that goes.
And now on to the other subject matter of this post, No Knead Bread. Oh, just oh, let me tell you, I finally got my ratios right. Yesterday's loaf of bread was the most beautiful loaf of bread I have every crafted and baked.
Before I post my recipe and method I am going to go through the whole process one more time, just to be absolutely sure, but let me just tell you all this, it is the easiest and yummiest bread ever. Like, so little effort that I think I could consistently bake bread this way for the rest of my years and never tire of the process.
And on that note I am going to flee, for it is time for my weekly foray into the bowling alley with all the teenagers who live on our road. This week I dug out my purple polyester pants and my dad's super fantastic polyester bowling shirt. One must always wear the right costume for the occasion!馃槈
Ooh! And I have to leave you all with a question, because I love reading your replies:
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's rather fragrant and slightly stagnant in the processing department iPhone.
