You Gotta Have Faith
I never, ever would have imagined myself as a person who watched the weather at least twice a day. It's so difficult to describe how stressful winter is for a farmer. Both Jerry and I have farmers in our families, and have both heard them go on and on about the weather. I always wondered what the big deal was. I mean, you can't change it. It's kind of like a trainwreck though, when it's awful, it's hard to look away. Somehow it seems like if you watch it closely enough maybe you WILL be able to change it!
The thing that is so incredibly hard is that we put our hearts and souls into the field. We added to the soil to get it just right, made raised beds to help with drainage, planted each of those little lavender babies by hand, watered them just enough, and covered them for the winter. Then we just have to let go and have faith that they will make it through the winter! There is absolutely nothing else we can do. There are days that I really question our sanity. What were we thinking? Did we really order another 1000 plants before even knowing if these will make it? Did we really launch a website and develop a product line before knowing if we will make enough lavender to distill our own oil this year? Really?
At that point it's time to step back, take a deep breath and remember all the things that got us here. All the things that lined up and pointed us in this direction. From being able to buy 20 acres instead of 5, to losing our jobs, to using lavender as our wedding flowers, it all just seems as if it was meant to be. We were able to create a product line and launch our website before the holidays last year, months before we had planned on it, and have gotten support from people near and far. Things are really going better than we could have dreamed.
When all is said and done, the only thing we can do is to do our best. We have done everything we could think of to protect our lavender babies, and down deep, (under a foot of snow), we truly believe that this was the path we were meant to go down. When we have our first harvest this summer, we will look back on these months and wonder why we were so worried.
Thank you to everyone who reads the blog! Your support means so much!