SEQUIM — Here in the trademarked Lavender Capital of North America, we’re three months away from the total herbal immersion called the Lavender Festival — but people are acting hungry already.
“Our Facebook page had 700 visits just this week,” festival director Scott Nagel said Tuesday.
Interest in the festival “seems like it’s earlier than it’s ever been,” he added. “These last several weeks, it’s started to rev up,” with people calling, e-mailing and visiting www.LavenderFestival.com.
The 14th annual celebration of all things lavender will run from July 16 through 18 in Sequim and on six nearby farms. Admission to the 150-vendor Fir Street fair is free, tickets to the farm tour are $15 per person, and prices vary for the many other activities.
Among this year’s new events is a free concert by the Beatles tribute band Creme Tangerine on Saturday night, July 17, at the James Center bandshell next to Carrie Blake Park, 202 N. Blake Ave.
This is part of Nagel’s plan to enhance the evening attractions, while drawing a mix of travelers and locals to the 2010 festival.
For the past two summers, he added, people from metropolitan Seattle, the Kitsap peninsula and British Columbia have been taking “staycations,” or less-costly, closer-to-home trips.
With interest intensifying earlier this year — Nagel said he doesn’t usually see big waves of inquiries till late May — he said it’s either because the economy is improving, past festival-goers are planning to return, or both.
Farm tour
The farm tour, however, is smaller this time, with two longtime participants, Angel Farm and Port Williams Lavender, opting out of the festival circuit.
Angel Farm on Old Olympic Highway is changing its focus, said co-owner Cathy Angel.
She and her husband, Leeon, still run a wholesale lavender business out of their barn and have a stand at Pike Place Market in Seattle. But they’ve added goldenseal, a medicinal herb, to their operation.
“Life is good. We’re doing great,” but “we wanted to bring some balance to our lives,” Cathy Angel said this week from their winter home near Tucson, Ariz.
“We just decided, as much fun as it was, it was too much work to only open for the festival.”
At Port Williams Lavender, “we’re scaling back and doing some reorganizing on the farm,” co-owner Michael Shirkey said.
He and his wife Susan will open their lavender fields to the public during June, July and August — just not on festival weekend.
The farms on the 2010 festival tour are, traveling from east to west, the Sunshine Herb and Lavender Farm, Purple Haze, Cedarbrook Lavender & Herb Farm, Jardin du Soleil, Olympic Lavender Farm and Lost Mountain Lavender.
At Lost Mountain a few miles southwest of town, farmer Barbara Hanna is busy with one of the big spring tasks: tackling the weeds in her 3-acre field.
New growth
She’s also watching new green growth appear in the rows of lavender plants.
When the lavender-tourism season starts in June, “it’s like the water faucets turn on,” Hanna said.
Families, seniors, road-tripping women friends, couples — they all come for the scents of herbs and mountain air.
“The festival is the pinnacle,” she said, “but we’re really busy the whole time,” from Memorial Day in May to Labor Day in September.
“The farm’s not going to look perfect every day, but people understand,” Hanna added with a smile.
The mild winter of 2009 and ’10 looked like it might yield an earlier lavender bloom. But now, she said, temperatures — and plant progress — are at their usual levels.
And at Cedarbrook, Washington’s eldest herb farm, people have been asking about buying lavender plants a little early this year, said co-owner Marcella Stachurski.
But as always, May is the month when the live plants are ready.
“Mother Nature,” Stachurski said, “is still on her own time line.”
For more information about the 14th annual Lavender Festival July 16, 17 and 18, see www.LavenderFestival.com, search for Sequim Lavender on www.Facebook.com or phone 360-681-3035 or 877-681-3035.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.