Growing Your Own Lavender

Very few floral scents are as popular as lavender (perhaps maybe rose), and it is a fantastic plant that you can easily grow in your own garden. Thinking about adding some lavender to your flower bed so you can have your own supply of lovely blossoms to help scent your home? Well, it’s an easy plant to grow and you won’t need too much gardening experience to get it going.

It’s a perennial, so it comes back each year once you have it established. So make sure you start up your lavender patch exactly where you want it because it will be there for a while. It will grow in a large clump, with straight short-leaved branches reaching up from the center. The flowers themselves are actually quite understated but when an entire clump is covered in the small purple blossoms, it’s very pretty. And of course, the smell is unmistakable.

Choose a sunny spot with well-drained soil to start your lavender, and allow for growing space around it. In a couple of years, it will need lots of elbow room (several feet). Lavender actually does quite well in dry conditions so it makes a great choice if you don’t get a lot of rain in your area. Keep it watered when the soils has thoroughly dried out but you shouldn’t need to worry about it too much. It’s a really low-maintenance plant.

As mentioned, it does fine in dry soil and likes very warm weather. You can have some successful lavender plants in more northern climates, but they won’t grow as large. You’ll have the most success in Zone 5 or warmer. In colder areas, a nice layer of organic mulch over your plants in the late fall will help protect the roots during the freezing winter months.

For the soil, try to get a bit of an alkaline mix (this goes for plants in the garden as well as in containers). That means having a pH that is higher than 7.0, but only slightly so. Aim for a pH around 8, if you are testing it. Add some sand if the soil is thick or heavy with clay. Wet roots are one of the main problems with lavender so you need a soil that will easily drain excess water away.

When it blooms, you can trim off the long spikes of flowers to dry indoors. Once dry, the actual little flowers will come off the stems with a brush of your fingers and they can be used in pot pourri or any sort of scented sachet. You can even use lavender flowers in tea though the flavor can take a bit of getting used to.

Cutting the blossoms off each year is a good first step in keeping your lavender pruned, but you should also trim back a part of the leafy growth each year as well. It keeps the plant healthy and will encourage better blooming each year rather than just letting it explode and get too huge.

If you are worried about your plants getting too large or taking over the garden, you can always keep some lavender growing in a container instead. Just stick to the same tips as above with sandy soil, lots of sun and regular clipping. You may be able to grow a pot of lavender indoors but only if you have a very sunny spot. They generally do better outside.

There aren’t a lot of potential problems when growing lavender. It can be susceptible to mold in really humid weather so arrange your garden to allow for a lot of air flow around your plants. Don’t plant other things too closely to crowd your lavender and hold in too much extra moisture. And then there are insect threats. Thankfully, lavender’s strong scent and high levels of aromatic oils tend to keep away most bugs so you may have nothing to worry about on that front. You are mostly likely to have whiteflies or spittle bugs on your lavender, both of which are easy enough to deal with. A insecticidal soap spray can be used when the bugs get too bad and that should be the only bug chore you have to worry about.

And speaking of bugs, lavender will also attract bees and butterflies to your garden. So if you’re looking to add some additional pollinators to your yard, a patch of lavender will do the trick.

So if you’ve been wanting to try some lavender in the garden but were worried that it would be a lot of work, you can rest easy. It’s one of the simplest plants to grow and you can be almost guaranteed to have some sweet-smelling results in the summer. It may take a few years for it to really take off so be patient.