Yesterday (Friday) I went with some friends to the Lavender Festival in
Sequim, Washington. I came back with a few sun herbs, besides some
home-canned stuff like lavender jelly. The festival is going on through
Sunday, but today is a gay pride picnik here in town, & too much other
summer stuff to chose between just now, so we're not apt to get back up to
Sequim for a second festival day. Anyone in driving distance might like to
get there for at least one day though.

The downtown streetfair is good as streetfairs go, but the real joy is
visiting some of the eight lavender farms around the town. We went to four
of them before we were too pooped to continue. One of them had a
first-rate restaurant as part of the farm so we ate there. One of the
farms had 40 kinds of lavender, another had 70 kinds of lavenders plus
lots of other sun-herbs. The main lavender fields however tended to be
Grosso, which are production fields for lavender oil, & there were
displays in action showing the process of extracting oils right on the
premises.

It was just wonderful to go stand in the middle of a huge field of
lavenders in bloom. It almost felt like being in the south of France.
Sequim has become the American lavender capital only in the last few
years, & what a successful program it has turned out to be to save family
farming from displacement by land developers.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com