In the house where Kelly Schauff grew up, her mom Cindy Cappel always hung lavender plants on both sides of the front porch. Today the mother-daughter duo harvest from 500 lavender plants at their farm in southern Campbell County.
Schauff and Cappel take care of the fields themselves. Schauff said it’s fun for them to do together, hang out on the weekends, and catch up. When they first planted lavender, it was for the beauty of it, not to start a business, but it has rapidly grown into something more.
The fields first started as a Mother’s Day gift in 2018.
“I’ve always liked lavender,” Cappel said. “I said a row of it would be nice just to pick from, and you never know when you’re going to need it. But she ordered 50 plants for Mother’s Day for me.”
Needless to say, it was more than she was expecting.
“I think we’ve loved doing it together, but it’s like a happy accident that it can be enjoyed by so many other people, too,” Schauff said.
As spring ends, four weeks of the “U-pick” lavender season at The Lavender Field begins. From June 10 through July 2, people can buy tickets to visit the fields at 3629 Smith Road in California.
Their first season open to the public began in 2020. They started by selling tickets to ensure they didn’t have too many people show up at once.
“It’s a good thing we did tickets because it was like the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come,” Schauff said. “By the end of the two weekends, we were like, what just happened?”
The plan was to have people come to cut their own bundle of lavender for $10, but Schauff said once people got out to the farm, they were asking what else they offered.
When visiting the fields now, you can shop for products they make with their lavender, like soap, bath bombs, and lavender syrup. Schauff said they don’t let any part of the lavender go to waste, even making lavender fire starters out of the plants.
There are different kinds of lavender across the 500 plants, like the English lavender, which serves a culinary purpose, and phenomenal, which is more fragrant.
“The phenomenal have really long stems,” Schauff said. “They’re really pretty and fun to cut, and then some of these other plants are the English lavender, so they have a shorter stem, but they’re more to be used in culinary, like in teas and making lavender syrup, simple syrup.”
In addition to the lavender plants, The Lavender Fields also have a hive of honeybees. According to Schauff, the plants attract lots of bees. She said avid beekeepers would plant lavender for their bees; in their case, they got the hives to pollinate the plants. They also use them to make their lavender honey.
Schauff said she hopes to sell their products in the future to local restaurants for things like cocktails. They do currently sell items at the BrownDog Marketplace in Cold Spring.
The U-pick lavender days at the farm bring the rest of Schauff’s family together. She said it requires a lot of coordination, so her family comes to help park cars, and her son and his friends run the lavender lemonade stand.
Since opening it to the public, Schauff said her favorite thing about their U-pick lavender season is seeing and meeting all the people they draw in. She said people from as far as West Virginia have visited the farm.
“You would have to be here to see it, but literally, this whole place fills up with cars,” Schauff said. “You get all of these people who are just so happy to be here, and they are all just so nice.”
