Ex ull farmers, Judy and Roger Pratt have traded in the cattle in Northland to tackle lavender in Kihikihi. PHOTOS: BRIANNA STEWART
FROM the smell of cattle to the scent of lavender, Roger and Judy Pratt have found a non-retirement project that is well and truly keeping them busy.
After being bull farmers up north for some time, the couple decided to retire to Te Awamutu.
But they didn’t get along well with the “R” word – or lifestyle – and when they saw Alphra Lavender go on the market they knew what their next move would be.
Now their days are spent dressed in purple, right down to the sequined hats, tending to plants and leading tours.
Through the summer the flowers on their 10,000 plants bloom.
Photographers flock in from around the country for the opportunity to get the perfect shot in the purple fields and tourists visit by the busload for a cup of coffee and a seat under the shade of a tree.
Then as the flowers turn, the manual work begins.
LUCKY Flowers are sold from Alphra Lavender to Waikato florists for use in their arrangements.
Roger said for the florist he works with in Hamilton, he has to cut the flowers and get them there on the same day to give her the longest period possible to work with them.
Each year the couple harvests their crop to extract its oil for Judy to make into products sold in their farm shop.
“One thing we’re lucky with lavender is the oil isn’t really there until the flowers start dying off, so we get all the benefits of people coming and seeing all the flowers and when they’re starting to go off, we process them,” Roger said.
The lavender is harvested at the end of February when flowers and stems are about 10 inches long, Roger said.
TEA HARVESTER A Japanese tea harvester is used in the process, with cuts made to the sides and then the top, then the lavender is put into fadges and brought into the shed.
Roger said the lavender sits quite dormant for much of the year and has a growing period of about three months from spring until early summer.
The plants come up quickly with flowers and then die off, making it all a once-a-year operation.
“Usually we’ll prune the plants right after harvest which is say, at the end of February.
“You can prune in the middle of winter, but we tend to get the job over with and we find the bushes have had one big shock.
“They’ve had the flowers cut off them and they’ve had the pruning done and that’s it, they can recover for the next year until they flower again. And that’s working for us.
“We do the whole operation more or less at once.” A fair bit of science went into innovating the extraction process, using heat, gas, and water.
All the lavender sits in a vat within a sealed system and is steamed at a high temperature, which releases the oil.
The first time Roger and Judy did it, following the old practice, someone would sit and manage the gas and in response the water.
“And we have found a much easier way of doing that,” Roger said.
“We don’t even have to touch the gas now, we control the temperature – and it’s extremely important we get the temperature right – with two taps.
“And we’ve found we don’t have to touch the gas. So we put the gas full on and if we need to cool the system we use water.”
Two taps are attached to the system at different heights, with steam exiting the bottom one as water and the oil rising to the top.
CONDENSER “It goes through a condenser, and we cool it down really quick.
“It goes into another little vat and of course water being heavier settles on the bottom, and it pushes the oil to the spout at the top.
“It sounds complicated but it’s like any complicated thing – once you learn how to run it, you’re fine.”
During bottling, there is another opportunity for any excess water that snuck through in the first round to be siphoned off by Jude.
“We’ve got to get that last drop out of there so it’s pure.
“We can’t sell it and we can’t do anything with it unless it’s pure.”
But Roger said excess water was not expected to be an issue this year with the new process of not fiddling with the gas.
While they’ve experimented in the past couple of years to improve their way of operating, things didn’t always go so smoothly.
TEETHING ISSUES Roger said there were some teething issues at the beginning of their taking over the property, mainly surrounding the fact neither of them knew much at all about lavender.
“It was like being dropped in the deep end, but we soon learned how to swim.
“We knew nothing about lavender, but I’ve always been interested in growing plants, so the principles of horticulture is in my head anyway.”
Working with lavender was a stark difference to working with bulls, Roger said, but one thing that always remained was the early starts.
“You’ve got to get up early to get your work done because there’s a lot of work to do.”
