Aug 10: Edible Gardens pre-tour: Lavender And

Leaving Deanette at her garden to do more pre-tour preparations, Allan and I went north on the Willapa bay side of the Peninsula to “Lavender And”, described as “Commercial-scale lavender production, and abundant personal garden and animals”.

We had been hoping to have a guided tour by owner Patti, but she had not yet returned from giving Lisa a ride home from the last of our other pre-tour gardens, so we wandered freely seeking edible garden beds and animals.

Visible from the road is the lavender field.

lavender field

The field reflects beautifully in the big new lavender processing building.

lavender reflection

At the top of the field is a little building selling some lavender products.

north side of lavender shop

baskets for picking

Garden tours are available at a set time.

tour information

When we had been there on an earlier day to get some preview photos for the edible tour Facebook page, we had not been sure whether the house behind the field and shop even belonged to the property.  This time, we felt free to nose around.  We walked past a field that seemed like it would hold animals but could not see any.

Where are the birds and animals?

Just a few chickens appeared.

Past the house, we found a large fenced vegetable area.

Patty’s veg patch

rosemary and veg

fenced

I like the homebuilt greenhouse.

inside the greenhouse

nice big windows

Allan’s greenhouse view

Allan’s photo

Allan’s squash photo

 

squash flowers, Allan’s photo

Walking east, I realized that the beautiful big property went all the way to the bay.

more veg by a huge bay view outbuilding

A road went around the big green pole building and next to it lavender grew above the bay’s grassy verge.

lavender with a view

lavender bed curving along the bayfront

It occurs to me as I look at these photos that if Patty had been guiding us, I might have asked why the house was low down, without a view, instead of being up on this ridge to watch the sun rise over the bay.

lavender and caged tree

looking back (southeast) at the lavender curve

Coming around the big pole building, I got a good overview of the house, greenhouse, and vegetable area.

looking west

This time I walked behind and below the vegetable field and found a slope planted with squash.

south slope

looking east

This looks to me like bundled compost ingredients.

I still wanted to find the animals and so I went to the south side of the animal enclosure fence.

At first, the animal yard still looked empty.

Finally I saw a couple of goats, rather far across the field, and Allan on the north side.  I called to him to get some photos as the two goats were closer to him.  While I walked around to the north side, a whole herd of little goats and some ducks emerged from a lean to.

saying hello! to Allan

goats galore

more chickens appeared

a tribe of goats

cute kid

The goats were difficult to leave, but we had one more garden to see, Biocharm Farm east of Ilwaco, and I still needed to do the last minute pre-tour touches on my own garden.  It was a good thing we had started at ten A.M.!