Blog

It is officially “off season.” The farm is closed, in person markets are slowing down, leaves need blowing and snow is around the corner.

Lavender “off season” is simply a shift ‘of busy’ from high volume in person sales to high volume online sales. We even do markets and events all year long. They are quite a bit slower but it keeps us out in the community and from going crazy all winter long.

Fall is Time to Organze the Chaos

In fall, we spend quite a bit of time organizing and cleaning after a whirlwind season. This winter we have plans to build a “shipping station” in the basement. It is currently on our dining room table, previously tucked and organized beautifully in a big tote but now horribly out of control. It will help us keep excess inventory and our shipping supplies all in one area. Paul and I are both excited about this build out!

Winter: So Much Time, So Many Things to Do!

Farm Planning

In the dead of winter, we do a lot of farm planning. Last year that didn’t work out for us as we had “no spring.” We usually start doing outdoor work on nice days in March. We really had no nice days until May this summer, right when other things need our attention like markets becoming high volume and prepping for harvest and processing. This year our list will carry over from last year and double with new ideas. We are crossing our fingers for an early spring in 2026!

Web Development

Our number 1 online issue this past year is that our traffic has grown so much and our website slowed down tremendously. We have already taken care of the issue, just this week, with upgraded hosting and migration of our site. You should now have a better experience with page load times!

Paul and I are also hoping to get to blogging and back to the newsletter soon!

Let’s Make Soap!

Soap is one of our products with an indefinite shelf life. Soap is , in fact, like fine wine: the longer it cures, the better it is! I make a majority of our farm’s soap from January through April. We sell the majority of our lavender farm’s soap from July through December! So daily, in the winter, I make multiple soap batches to fill our curing racks, so I don’t have to in the summer, when we are off the charts busy.

Fall Through Spring is Time to “Open the Suggestion Box”

Fall through spring is the time to open the “Verbal Suggestion Box.” This suggestion box is all the wonderful ideas our farm guests have given us throughout the season. We discuss and prioritize your suggestions all summer long. The best suggestions usually come during the winter markets when we have more time to have meaningful conversations and vibe with our tribe!

We Formulate Everything In-House

We are proud to build all of our recipes in house. We do not use bases or contract out for our products or buy wholesale. Formulating takes a lot of chemistry knowledge, research, testing and literal blood, sweat and tears.

Sometimes we formulate by building on another formulation. For example: our Lavender & Magnesium Dream Cream was built on the same foundation of our Lavender Lotion. The only difference is our water (hydrosol) and oil ratios were inverted to make it a “cream” instead of a “lotion.” We also added a magnesium/hydrosol brine for the cream instead of just hydrosol as we use in the lotion. Easy. We just needed to test for shelf stability and on humans.

Other times we need come up with a completely new formulation. This involves a lot of research and testing. We have some new and fun old fashioned “dual lye” soap products (think grandpa’s shaving brush and pucks) entering the market in 2026. While I have made bar soap with sodium hydroxide since 2015 and I have made liquid soap with potassium hydroxide since 2020, I have never made a “dual lye” soap with both potassium and sodium hydroxide.

We Make Mistakes, Lots of Mistakes

Bringing a product to market, for us, is a long process. We have to first figure out the formulation, make the formulation and then test the formulation before a product sees the light of day. In between all of that, we make lots of mistakes. Winter and off season is always about mistakes! Heck even after being a 10 year soap maker, I still make a lot of soap mistakes. Enough to produce hundreds of bars a year to hold at least one “Ugly Soap Sale” per year!

Sea Salt Soap: First Mistake of the 2025/2026 Offseason

We have a new soap coming to market soon: sea salt soap. The soap will be a traditional “Lavender Blossom style” scented with our farm grown and distilled lavender hydrosol of course!

I nailed the brand new formulation utilizing a new fat (lard) and additive (yogurt whey) that I have never worked with before. The lather can only be described as exquisite and completely different than my other recipes. I made the flagship batch in both loaf molds and individual molds.

As far as the chemistry of the bar goes, I had a sneaking suspicion that the soap would crumble when cutting the loaf mold. I was right. The soap is so hard that it crumbles at the bottom of the bar when cutting (In case you wonder how I always have enough ugly soap for spring sale!) It is a shame because the loaf molds had Himalayan pink salt and Hawaiian lavarock salt.

The individual mold bars on the other hand are pure PERFECTION! They are the smoothest bars I have ever produced. They actually feel like granite stone.

They still have to pass some skin tests and a long cure before they go to market (approx January 2026.)

True Farm-to-Skin Takes Time

Your ideas to research to implementation to testing to tweaking to testing takes time! As you can see with the sea salt soap bar example above, it takes a minimum of 6 months from formulation to market. If we choose your idea or suggestion, it may take over a year to get to market depending on what time of the year the idea is suggested.

Some of the most requested products we have are for body wash or shampoo or shampoo bar. Unfortunately we cannot formulate those without synthetics or detergents. I have not formulated what is called “syndet” (in the formulator world) at the time of writing this blog post.

Coming Soon: How do I “CSA” a Lavender Farm?

I love the concept of the “CSA” (Community Supported Agriculture) that traditional farms can utilize to help keep their farm economically viable during the winter months. I have tried to figure out a way to implement it from a lavender farmer perspective since 2020! I think Paul and I have figured out a way to do something similar to this but with a twist. We will be rolling this “reward program” before Thanksgiving 2025. It will be very different and fun and our loyal farm guests will benefit from the discounts for a year!