In our yard, we have a lavender mound:
It’s in full bloom, as you can see. The bees go nuts for it. If you were an ant living on this mound you would go deaf from all the bee noise. (Actually, can ants hear? Well, the bees are loud regardless.) And why should the bees have all the fun, is what I’m asking myself. So I decided to dry some. (Some lavender. Not some bees, yuck.) This involves many loooong minutes of standing on the mound and sloooowly snipping individual stalks, thinking bee thoughts so the bees don’t take offense to my thievery. I don’t mind bee stings much, just like I don’t mind going to the dentist much, but still. Given the choice, I will pass. Which is why I haven’t been to the dentist in like two and a half years, but that’s another story.
Anyway! A long time later I have a tiny bunch of flowers:
I don’t really know how many blooms you need to make things, or even what kinds of things I might want to make with dried lavender — bath salts? cupcakes? — so this is really just a trial run to see if drying even works for me. Or that is what I’m telling myself to justify my pathetically small harvest.
Now, Martha Stewart says to put the flower heads even with one another and then cut the stems to match, but it’s way easier to make the stem ends be even and let the flowers be any height, like so:
F* yeah, Martha Stewart! What do you even know?
I am pretty pleased with my progress until I remember that, oh yeah, Martha Stewart knows everything. And if there are gaps in her knowledge, they are definitely not in the dried flower arena. So batch number two gets tied correctly:
We’ll see who wins this round, Ms. Stewart. We’ll see.
Then I hung them in my basement (no photos of this, because flowers hanging like dead men in my filthy underlit basement make less engaging photos than flowers out in my sunny yard) and now I just hope for the best. Which I guess, in this scenario, is a flower-flavored dessert of some kind. Well, that can’t be as unpleasant as it sounds. Fingers crossed!