SEQUIM — Your eyes are telling the whole blooming truth if you think you see less purple in the Dungeness Valley’s lavender fields as this weekend’s Sequim Lavender Festival and Sequim Lavender Farm Faire approach.
Unseasonably cold and wet weather has set back the valley’s lavender crop, lavender farmers said, but there still should be plenty of the fragrant, purple U-cut bud to go around for the thousands of visitors expected when the valley celebrates lavender Friday through Sunday.
“It will extend our shoulder season. We’ll be great in August,” Mike Reichner said with a hearty laugh as he looked over the various shades of lavender rows near the gifts shop at his Purple Haze Lavender Farm on Bell Bottom Road.
U-cut lavender will be “acceptable” to most folks, he said, but he recalled that this time last year, lavender was in full bloom.
“It was totally eye-popping,” he said of Purple Haze, the valley’s first lavender farm, established 15 years ago.
The farm was already busy with early visitors Wednesday regardless of overcast, moist weather conditions in what the Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce aggressively promotes as “sunny Sequim.”
Mike Greenhaw, who co-owns Martha Lane Lavender, said his crop of Folgate variety will provide the bulk of his U-cut crop for the festival.
“Folgate will be our savior,” Greenhaw said at the farm off Kitchen-Dick Road where he and his wife and business partner, Julie Ingram, have lived and worked in between their jobs with Boeing since they moved there to grow lavender in 2005.
“I drove around and found there’s really not a whole lot of purple around like last year,” Greenhaw said.
Martha Lane Lavender was recently certified as organic lavender, and Greenhaw said he is ready to retire from Boeing, where he is a manager, to totally focus on the placid, tree-lined farm at the end of Martha Lane in Carlsborg.
Moisture, cool conditions and a lack of sunshine did in some of the lavender plants at valley’s most easterly farm, Sunshine Lavender.
“We lost some plants,” said Carmen Ragsdale, who co-owns the farm with husband Steve, president of the newly formed Sequim Lavender Farmers Association.
The farmers association is putting on the inaugural Sequim Lavender Farm Faire, featuring their farm along with Reichner’s and four others, and is based at Carrie Blake Park.
She said bad weather will have minimal impact on their overall yield, and “we were replanting anyway.”
As for the overall lavender bloom, she said, “It’s behind.”
English lavender at the farm off U.S. Highway 101 and Guiles Road is in strong bloom, she said.
“All we need is a day or two [of sun], and the plants will say, ‘Hello,’” she said, smiling behind the cash register at the farm’s gift shop.
Besides U-cut, the farm will also have up to 4,000 plants for sale in Sunshine Lavender’s greenhouse.
Jeff Lundstrom, owner of Nelson’s Duckpond & Lavender Farm off Hooker Road in Carlsborg, said his crop was “extremely late.”
“Most of our crop is not ready for U-pick,” he said, adding that business otherwise was “good so far” at the farm, 73 Humble Hill Road, which has been a member of the Sequim Lavender Growers Association since 1998.
The growers group is producing the 15th Sequim Lavender Festival, based downtown this weekend.
Lundstrom, too, lost some plants to the atypical weather.
“I think all of us lost a little bit,” he added.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.