When life gets stressful, one of the oldest tried and true remedies comes from the calming scent of flowers. Lavender is at the top of that list, and when it’s an entire field of lavender it can waft our troubles away with both the sight and aroma. Petaluma residents can see and enjoy such a visage on Chapman Lane where the Lavender Bee Farm has been enchanting locals and international guests for many years.
JoAnn and Richard Wallenstein own the Lavender Bee Farm where JoAnn grew up. JoAnn’s parents bought the property in 1947 shortly after she was born.
“My mom and dad raised all their own products like the vegetables and the chickens,” she said. “We had a chicken ranch in the ’50s with about 5,000 chickens here on Chapman Lane.”
JoAnn said a lot of her memories of growing up on the farm are centered on the 4-H projects she and her sister worked on and presented at the local fairs. Those projects included raising sheep, and JoAnn also had a horse project. That led to her being a member of the Petaluma Riding and Driving Club as well as the drill team.
They were members of the local Wilson 4-H club and that legacy continued when JoAnn raised her own family there.
“My daughters both had dairy projects,” she said. “They were in the replacement heifer program where they raised dairy calves and sold them at the fair. So that was two generations right there at the Petaluma and Santa Rosa Fairs. We had a really wonderful time. We have wonderful neighbors and we’re still here on Chapman Lane.”
Beginning of the farm
JoAnn and her husband, Richard, inherited the farm from her parents in 2000 and considered planting something that would beautify the place, like grapes. But then she discovered something even better. She learned that lavender was drought tolerant and gophers aren’t interested in it. They put in 500 lavender plants and now they maintain around 3,000. Richard had also decided to try his hand at keeping honey bees, and they loved the lavender. The combination of lavender and honey led to the start of a local business that would be simply enchanting and wildly popular.
They harvest the lavender in July and bring it into the barn. JoAnn said it’s a lovely site.
“We cut the lavender plants into bouquets and we hang them upside down to dry,” she said. “It takes about 3 weeks to dry and then we take it down and we make our products out of it. The smell of it is very intoxicating.”
The bees would undoubtedly agree with her.
“JoAnn and I observed how well the bees liked the lavender, and the honey was just a very rich, creamy honey with a slight floral taste,” Richard said. “And to me, it has a little bit of a caramel taste at the finish.”
They maintain a store on the property with their products. It’s a small operation and only open by appointment, but they have many repeat customers who visit regularly. JoAnn said that’s what keeps them kind of busy.
“A lot of people that don’t use sugar like using the honey for medicinal reasons,” she said. “The lavender honey is kind of special. It’s a light honey with a floral taste at the end. That’s what happens when bees are in the lavender. You get the lavender honey.”
They sell the honey in glass jars ranging from 9 ounces to a quart, as well as offering honey sticks and all kinds of little honey bee items. The shop is laden with lavender bunches, bouquets and sachets, lavender-infused sugar, culinary lavender and lavender essential oil. They sell a soap they have locally made with goat’s milk and their lavender and honey.
JoAnn makes beeswax candles to sell in the shop as well as a moisture bar and a popular lotion bar made from virgin olive oil and beeswax.
“It’s a gardener’s bar for your hands and your heels,” she said. “The virgin olive oil that I put in with the beeswax softens it, and it’s very, very smooth. It’s like a bar of soap, but it comes off like a lotion. It’s a lovely product, it really is.”
They also sell gift baskets with an assortment of their products and do custom baskets as well.
“There’s all kinds of lovely things,” JoAnn said. “All of the products we grow here, and we don’t use any sprays or pesticides.”
They also sell their products through their website. Rivertown Feed, the Tea Room Cafe and the Petaluma Seed Bank all sell their honey.
They used to sell their products at local farmers markets and were part of the Sonoma County Farm Trails. They’ve also done many festivals around the county over the years, like the Petaluma Art and Garden Festival and the Healdsburg Lavender Day Festival.
They also used to host group tours where they gave talks about growing lavender and keeping bees. They hosted events like birthday parties, bridal and baby showers and small wedding ceremonies.
They even had a camel named Mel, who was a big hit during the tours and events.
“He was a big mascot for the farm,” JoAnn said. “Lots of school children have visited and although they enjoyed the tours they were especially delighted to meet Mel. We’ve had a wonderful time sharing the farm with many, many people.”
Growing lavender
When they started they were one of the few local lavender farms but now JoAnn noted that there are quite a few around the county. She said it seemed like a good time to slow down and simplify things.
“My husband and I are trying to cut back a little bit and enjoy our later years,” she said. That includes enjoying their growing family with grandchildren, a great-grandchild and another great-grandchild on the way.
Even though they’re slowing down and doing fewer events there’s always going to be plenty of work to do. JoAnn pointed out there’s always something that needs to be fixed or tended to on a farm. This past year the lavender harvest needed more of their attention.
She said that much like any farmer will tell you, every year is different and that has a lot to do with the weather. She said the lavender was definitely impacted this year.
“We had so much wind in our area that the season was probably cut back by three weeks,” she said. “The plants were in beautiful bloom and then they got that wind on them and the heat dried the flowers really quickly so that was a short season this year.”
Richard said that lavender season is over nowm and they’re starting the end of the season pruning of the plants.
“This prepares the plants to go into autumn and winter, and they won’t require any further attention until next spring,” he said. That’s unless it doesn’t rain, but even then they just need to turn on their automatic drip irrigation system to water the plants.
Making honey
Overall their operation is a lot more streamlined than it was in the beginning. Back then the most time-consuming work happened when they were extracting the honey and processing it using antiquated equipment.
“We had a hand crank extractor and we were doing it in a small structure,” Richard said. “The bees would smell the honey, and they’d cover the whole outside of the building, and they would be all at the window wanting to get inside. But now we have a more secure area where we do that, and we use stainless steel extractors.”
He said processing the honey is really a lot of fun.
“I love putting my finger in the fresh honeycomb with honey in it and having a taste of that,” he said. “It’s a real experience. I’m not on the scale of a commercial beekeeper, but, you know, we have enough to provide for ourselves and our family and actually quite a bit more for the general public. We sell out almost every year. I enjoy managing the beehives, observing the bees and seeing how they survived in their colonies and in nature. And of course, the delicious honey.”
In the beginning, Richard was a member of the Sonoma County Beekeepers Association and said he learned a lot from their knowledgeable members. He said he’d recommend the organization to anyone interested in keeping bees.
When colony collapse disorder began happening, Richard kept an eye on his bees to keep them healthy without using medication or chemicals of any kind. Instead, he uses a very simple approach.
“I mostly just try to keep the bees in a good clean hive, a good environment with sources of clean water for the hives,” he said. “I don’t feed my bees any other substances other than the honey and the nectar and pollen that they collect. So it’s kind of up to the bees to stay healthy. I’ve been very fortunate for the most part.”
“Part of it is keeping your fingers crossed because sometimes you just don’t know why they leave or what keeps them healthy,” Richard said.
He said it’s also important to keep the hives dry so that the bees are comfortable.
“Bees like to have an inside temperature hovering right around in the high 80s to 90s,” he said. “You want to try to manage a hive by not letting it get overcrowded so they have enough room to thrive and for the queen to lay her eggs and enough frames to store the pollen and their honey.”
Richard said he usually has between 80 to 100 hives. He gets most of his bees by doing swarm removal for locals and said he captures around 25 swarms per year.
“People will call and a lot of them are very interested in watching me capture a swarm, although I like them to be at a safe distance because I don’t want anybody to get stung,” he said.
When they are captured and in their hives, that’s when he enjoys sharing his hobby with others, including helping them get over their fear of bees and getting stung.
“We had a fellow from Kenya come here one time, and he was the president of the Beekeepers Association in Kenya,” Richard said. “It was just so nice to talk to him. Where he lives in Kenya, they have the Africanized bees which are a really violent bee and extremely aggressive. I was walking him around our beehives and he couldn’t believe it. He said he could never do this at home.”
Sharing farm life
Richard said they know they’re fortunate to be doing what they love in Sonoma County where there are so many supportive agri-tourism organizations like the Farm Trails, the Farm Bureau, Sonoma County Tourism and the Petaluma Visitors Center.
“They promote small farms and give us an opportunity to share this with lots of visitors,” he said. “It’s not just about making money, it’s about sharing our experiences with people.”
That great promotion attracted the Culinary Institute of America who brought people to the farm and a PBS channel from Delaware who visited and filmed commercials there as well. The exposure has attracted visitors from all across the country and from around the world who came to visit the little Lavender Bee Farm.
“Over the years, we’ve had some great attention out here and it’s just been a wonderful experience,” Richard said. “When we first talked about this, neither one of us ever thought that we would have all these great experiences and meet all these people during these last 25 years, you know, it’s just been absolutely wonderful.”
Go to lavenderbeefarm.com for more information and to order products online. You can also call Richard and JoAnn Wallenstein at 707-789-0554 to arrange a visit to the Lavender Bee Farm store.