Starting Your Lavender Patch

Starting to plant lavender in your garden can be an exciting, albeit sometimes daunting, task! Unfortunately, there is often misinformation and hazy details around what is best for new lavender plant owners, so here are some easily digestible facts and tips to follow.

Lavender plants greatly prefer sandy soil that doesn’t get too wet. Planting your new lavender in potting soil and watering it deeply for the rest of its life will have the opposite effect from what you wanted!

While it is important not to over-water your lavender, baby lavender plants do require watering. We recommend watering your baby lavender plants every other day or when the soil is dry right below the surface. More mature lavender (even baby lavender when it's later in the season) should be largely left alone, allowing it to rely on natural rainfall to meet its hydration needs.

It is also important to note that there are many different varieties of lavender. Your location heavily affects which lavender will grow best for you! Looking up lavender growing zones and finding a reputable map (we recommend information that the USDA supplies) will allow you to easily determine which types of lavender you can successfully house in your garden.

Now you have your lavender planted and watered. Great; what next? Weeding around your lavender may seem like a small action, but it makes a world of difference. At Mousse Hill, we use landscape fabric, which we burn circular holes in to help reduce the number of weeds that grow in our lavender patch, but it is still imperative that we take the time to weed each individual hole. If your weeds get too big, they will soak up too much water and nutrients from the soil and block your baby lavender from the sun, reducing its ability to grow healthily. Young lavender is fairly fragile in these early stages of its life, so it’s necessary to do everything in your power to give it a boost. As the season progresses, your lavender will need less helicopter parenting, but it's still important to remember that the first year of a lavender plant’s life is the most delicate!

Depending on where in the United States you live, you may want to look at covering your lavender plants during the winter. This is largely unnecessary in warmer climates, but an especially harsh winter can be harmful to lavender plants of all ages. Covering plants does not guarantee their survival, but it gives them a better chance against the elements!

Your first year with new lavender plants will probably not yield many sprigs of actual lavender. This is completely normal! Plants that live a fairly long life, like these, take a while to establish themselves in their new home. In the first couple of years, you will see decently large increases in the number of flowers produced by your lavender plants until they eventually start to stabilize their flower production level. 

Happy growing, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!