Lavender drying - time to harvest lavender flowers

• Harvest lavender
• Use lavender
• Dry lavender

Dry lavender is easy to explain and is worth it, even if you really only want to enjoy the pretty Mediterranean plant. The right time for harvesting is very important for some uses, and lavender does a lot more than simply letting the laundry smell fresh.

If the scented lavender flower is the real purpose of the lavender culture for you, you should know when these flowers have the most flavor. You can dry lavender, but you can use the lavender very well fresh until the optimal harvest time.

Harvest lavender

The best time to harvest lavender flowers results from the intended use.

As a bouquet
If you want to harvest and dry lavender for bouquets, the flower stems should be cut when the bottom flowers are just opening.

Culinary
If you want to use the lavender culinary, you should be patient. The flowers of lavender unfold their sweetest aroma, namely, only when they are almost bloomed . Even if the flower panicles already look dried up, they still have plenty of aroma, then they should be used in desserts, lavender sugar and herbal tea.

For seasoning you can also use the leaves. First of all, use the leaves sparingly, as they have a very characteristic "perfume taste". Of course, they can be cut at any time during the growing season.

sachet
If you want to harvest and dry lavender for scented sachets, you should also harvest highly developed flowers .

lavender oil

If you want to make lavender scented oil or if you want to use one of the healing properties of lavender, the type of lavender is crucial. When buying, make sure that you get a real, original, wild (chemically untreated, from specialized nursery) Lavandula angustifolia, only that develops the real lavender flavor. Incidentally, if lumbering was not an exception, the upper shoot of older, woody lavender plants should bring out the most flavor.

Tip: As can be read in the article "Flowering period of lavender in Germany and in Provence", lavender bloom at quite different times. Also, the duration of the flowering time is more than rich in variety, in addition to the preferences of the species and cultivar, so it depends on location and weather. So take a closer look at the flowers.

Use lavender

From a lavender plant you can use the flowers as well as the leaves. Applications for the plant parts are available throughout the house or household.

• The flowers of lavender plants with long flowering styles can be placed decoratively in the vase
• Creative people also make fragrant floral decorations for the home from very short lavender branches
• When lavender branches are burnt in the oven or on the grill, it smells wonderful
• Until the beginning / middle of August the lavender gets its summer cut, you can use the clippings to mulch
• That might even produce a few lavender seedlings, look good next spring
• The fresh clippings yield many lavender cuttings, see article "Share lavender and multiply by cuttings"
• Lavender flowers and leaves can be used in the kitchen
  • All (unleavened) lavender are edible, but the cultivars can be quite unlike real lavender or nothing to taste
  • lavender bought in the pot should be out of the sales substrate for a while (there can be all sorts of chemicals in it)
  • Lavender sugar is when you put lavender twigs in a glass and fill it up with sugar, it can be used wherever you also use vanilla sugar
  • Lavender biscuits are made just as fast, the flowers are simply kneaded into the dough

Note: For all these suggestions you can use fresh lavender. The effort of drying is operated for purely preservative purposes. You can always save it, if you can take the fresh plant right away.

Dry lavender

The freshly cut lavender can sometimes be transferred directly to the dry state in its respective use. The easiest way is to simply set up the bouquet in the vase without water and let it dry out slowly.

Other variants:

• Tie lavender flowers together and hang upside down.
  • very decorative
  • Use rubber band, as the lavender shrinks during drying
  • best to hang in a dark and dry place
• Dry lavender flowers in the oven
  • at very low temperatures (40 degrees max.)
  • destroys valuable active ingredients
• Lay lavender flowers in silica gel, cat litter, washing powder, salt, zeolite
  • all water-attracting materials and drying agents
  • no longer suitable for consumption

Any lavender trim can simply be air dried and used in potbourri / scented sachets or in the kitchen. Use as a kitchen spice opens up exciting possibilities for blooms and leaves, but you should taste the unfamiliar spice in advance