The U-Cut Lavender Farm Experience🪻
Are You A Lavender Picker Or A Lavender Holder?
Last weekend my family had to do an airport run. To PDX. That’s the Portland International Airport. What does the X stand for? Nobody knows.
We had to drop my mother, Ingrid Rockwell, off. She’d been visiting and had had enough of the Oregon Coast and wanted to get back to Wisconsin, claiming the Ellsworth Creamery cheese curds were better than the Tillamook Creamery cheese curds.
The nerve!
Getting to PDX from the coast is a bit of a… procedure. Two and a half hours! That’s a lot for me. But, it was Sunday and the traffic was good, so we got there in only two hours and forty-five minutes.
After we had Ingrid Rockwell bundled away through the TSA security checkpoint, we headed BACK to the coast.
But we don’t go straight back to the coast after an airport run.
No way.
The Willamette Valley of Oregon is quite alluring to my wife, the watercolorist, K.L. Rockwell. She LOVES The Valley.
LOVES IT!!
The Willamette Valley has everything she is known to enjoy:
Fancy Pinot Noir
Fancy Pinot Grigio
Lavender🪻
Small Batch Caramel Corn
Art supplies
Me? I could take it or leave it.
It was ninety degrees.
Last weekend, we “lucked out.” The lavender was in bloom. So you know what that meant.
We were going lavender picking.
Maybe you didn’t even know that U-Cut Lavender Farms existed? I didn’t either until last Sunday, but I do now.
Lavender is K.L. Rockwell’s favorite flower. At least that’s what she claimed while we were desperately searching for a lavender farm. More on that in a moment.
The first time I smelled the scent of the lavender flower, it hit my nose as rather pungent, but I’ve come around to it over time. In addition to its odorous odor of goodness; you can eat it, sniff it, create a potion out of it, use it to summon a forest troll, and so much more.🪻
But, like I said, we had to find a lavender farm first. We were doing this thing on the spur of the moment. Fineas Rockwell our son was with us so it was a family adventure.
I’m usually the navigator in the passenger seat. K.L. Rockwell doesn’t trust me to drive ever since I choked on a giant gobstopper while driving along a cliff in Northern Minnesota twenty-years ago.
Finding a lavender farm wasn’t as easy as you might think even though it was in bloom… not that you’re sitting around thinking about U-Cut lavender farms I suppose.
My Google Map was dotted with various lavender farms, but I found one that was called, “Lavender & Herb Farm” (name changed to protect the innocent purveyors of lavender).
K.L. Rockwell loves herbs, and if we could get herbs in addition to lavender, well, that would’ve been the bee’s knees, as it were.
Unfortunately for us, most lavender farms don’t have a website, and in the Willamette Valley hinterlands the 5G is pretty spotty so you have to do your lavender hunting on faith.
After driving for twenty-five minutes we found the Lavender Herb Farm.
We pulled up to the place and found a sign that was cracked in half… but you could still kind of make out the word Lavender. There was also a beat up little shop and a single car in the parking lot. Another sign hung off the side of the building and was illegible.
I shall not cast aspersions on the Lavender Herb Farm, but there was a chance it was a lavender farm had been converted into a meth lab. No way was I knocking on their front door to be murdered by the cartel.
As we quickly backed up a country road, away from whatever the heck was going on at the Lavender Herb Farm, the internet came back. We found ANOTHER lavender farm ONLY forty-minutes away.
K.L. Rockwell asked me to call the Wayward Winds Lavender Farm to make sure they were open. They actually had a website that said they were open, but she didn’t want to drive half way across the valley and find out they were not. This seems to happen to us often.
So… I did the thing that Millennials hate to do the more than anything else.
I made a phone call.
Here’s how the conversation went:
Ring Ring
Elizabeth: Hello, this is Elizabeth.
Me: Hi Elizabeth… (I was briefly confused because she didn’t mention anything about lavender) Is this Elizabeth of the lavender farm?
Elizabeth: Oh, yeah, sorry. This is the lavender farm!
Me: Great.
Elizabeth: Yeah!
Me: I was just checking to see if you have… lavender for sale at your lavender farm?
Elizabeth: Yes, we have lavender.
Me: Like… bouquets of lavender?
Elizabeth: Yes, we’re a lavender farm. But you have to pick it yourself.
Me: Okay, thanks Elizabeth!
Elizabeth: No problem!
Me: Just to double check… you sell lavender, right?🪻
But Elizabeth was gone.
That was one uncomfortable phone call, and my face turned red for asking a lavender farm if they had lavender.
I suddenly became quite reticent at the idea of having to pick my own lavender. I’m not much of a picker, more of a picker watcher.
After a FORTY-FIVE MINUTE DRIVE we turned the corner and there stood “The Wayward Winds Lavender Farm”! Not bad! They had all different types of lavender and the place was buzzing with U-Cutters.🪻
K.L. Rockwell was excited. Fineas Rockwell was worried because bees freak him out.
All that being said, we did find an AWESOME parking spot in the shade and I got out my folding chair. It’d been a long day and I wanted to get some sleep while Kale and Fineas went off to figure out how the whole lavender racket worked at Wayward Farms.
Aside: The Rockwell Family will pay the extra $2 for pre-picked lavender, blueberries, strawberries, bouquets, pumpkins. Whatever. We DO NOT like getting our hands dirty.
Plus, there’s the bees.
But NOT at Wayward Lavender Farm. You HAD to pick your own lavender or you weren’t getting any.
WTF!
You were issued a cutting tool and a very, very fancy holding basket which was handmade by what I can only imagine are Amish craftsmen or craftswomen.
Throughout the farm couples galivanted through the high lavender crop oo’ing and ah’ing at the lavender.🪻
It sure was pretty.
And then I noticed it. And my son noticed it:
Throughout the garden… men were holding these frilly wicker baskets waiting for their partners to wander around the farm, find the perfect lavender, cut it, and then gently lay their kill in the basket.
And these guys looked UNCOMFORTABLE!
Once I noticed I couldn’t not watch. I thanked the Gods that K.L. Rockwell had Fineas to take her around. I hate being out in the sun.
And then, I heard it. I heard a guy say to his partner:
“Hey babe, how much lavender you think you’re gonna’ to pick?”
OMG
If you’re a manly man standing there in your polo shirt just after Church waiting for your significant other who is wearing a sundress to HURRY UP with the lavender, you are in for a long day.
You just have to chill.
It’s a Lavender Farm, man.🪻
So I sat there and watched the scene play out before me. Couple after couple went to the lavender farm stand at the top of the hill, received their scissors and basket, and headed out into lavender fields.
There was always a holder and there was always a picker, and the person holding the lavender basket was always the dude. It kind of seems like the woman would hold the basket and point at the lavender to have her manly dude cut the flowers. But it was the OTHER way round!
Of course, there were also the people like me. The ones who took ourselves out of the lavender game completely and sat in the shade, watching.
We were neither lavender pickers or holders.
Suddenly, Finny was stumbling toward me. I prepared myself.
“Great, he got stung by a bee!” I thought. He gets a certain look about him when he gets a minor injury… But he hadn’t been stung by a bee.
It was something even worse:
He needed cash.
I quickly made my way to farm stand where K.L. Rockwell quickly informed me that they were wrong. They DID take credit cards, you just had to go to a special building where they were selling lavender lemonade.
How convenient!
After making our purchase (which now included lemonade), I looked out at all the beautiful couples on the lavender fields picking the gorgeous flowers and my eyes teared up.🪻
Was I becoming nostalgic for an earlier time?
Hell no! I was having a severe bout of lavender allergy!
We quickly paid and got the heck out of there. For some reason my right eye was much more susceptible to lavender allergies than my left eye. I’ll never understand science, but I do know my right eye is a lavender wimp, and definitely did not enjoy lavender.
Twenty-four hours later my eye had gone back to normal after I heavily abused Visine Allergy Multi-Symptom.
And now we have a bouquet of lavender cut by K.L. Rockwell and held by Fineas Rockwell!
The End!
PS: Ask yourself this simple question: Are you a lavender picker or a lavender holder? Or perhaps you’re like me. A lavender picker watcher.🪻
I am definitely a picker…not gonna trust that job to anyone else! 💜
Thanks for introducing me to the U Cut world of lavender. I must confess that when I used to grow lavender in my garden, I never cut it, I just looked at it. (Does that make me a lavender looker?) Great read of a Saturday evening in Texas. P.S. Your family dynamic sounds like fun. :-)