Roller-coaster ride for lavender farmer

McLelland and her two adult sons immigrated in June 2015 to take over Lavendyl Farm, nestled under the hills on the western edge of the Kaikoura flats.

“I did a Trade Me search for a B&B or a coffee shop and this place popped up,” she says.

The property is something of a tourist attraction in the area, offering everything from garden tours and a wedding photography venue to a two-unit bed-and-breakfast, a cafe, and a shop with a variety of lavender-based products such as tea and lavender soaps, as much as possible made and packaged onfarm.

“I love doing this because there’s a huge variety of stuff involved in it – making the products, talking to customers, running the B&B, being able to make scones and shortbread and stuff for the shop,” McLelland told Rural News.

“It’s been a huge roller-coaster. But we’ve come to know a lot of people in the lavender industry. We’ve had so much help from the lavender association.”

The farm covers nearly 3ha, about 2ha planted in lavender. There is also a small derelict vineyard she intends to convert to lavender.

The farm grows at least 50 varieties, but many are only specimen plants. Of the main crop lavenders, about four angustofolia varieties (also known as English lavender or true lavender) hold their colour so are popular in flower arrangements but can also be used in edible products.

Another five or six varieties are known as the lavendins. A high camphor content makes them inedible, but useful in body products, shampoos, soaps and fragrances.

Alasdair (22) hopes to train as a pilot, but McLelland says her younger son, Douglas (20) sees his future in running the farm.

“Having done a year, we were all set. We learned a whole lot of lessons in year one. We were all set to put them in place for year two. We’d started, we ordered a whole load of stuff for making all this [the shop merchandise] and then the earthquake struck.”

However, with Kaikoura cut off the tourists are staying away and McLelland had many B&B bookings cancelled. Researching markets would normally be a winter job, but McLelland says she is making the most of the quiet season.

“We’re taking advantage of it being quieter to look at export opportunities.”

Meanwhile, quake damage to the property is mostly limited to sticking doors in the shop building and cracked concrete foundations in the distilling shed.

McLelland is critical of Civil Defence’s policing of access to Kaikoura in the first weeks after the quake, when an engineer she had asked to come from Christchurch to inspect the distillery boiler was not allowed to join one of the early army convoys over the restricted inland route.

She believes Civil Defence was needlessly scared of possible liability under new Health and Safety regulations, when their concerns could have been met simply by having people sign indemnities.

However, the boiler is usable, after being okayed by a local marine engineer, although McLelland believes it may yet have to be replaced along with the distillery shed itself. “The boiler’s sitting at an angle, but it’s still working.”

Distillation involves piling cut flowers into a steel basket which fits into a pressure vessel which is then fed steam from the boiler. The steam picks up oil from the flowers then runs through a water-cooled condensing tube to be collected as condensate with the oil floating on top.

The oil is decanted then spends a night in a freezer so any remaining water turns to ice and can be filtered out along with impurities such as insects and plant fragments.

McLelland says the yield can approach 20ml of oil per kg of plant matter, although rain just before harvest can wash oil off the plants and high temperatures can evaporate it, resulting in yields as low as 6ml/kg.

The bulk of the water collected at the still becomes a by-product called hydrosol.

“It retains some of the lavender oil so it has a lavender smell. So we sell that as a linen spray.”