Lavender is easy to propagate and enriches any garden with its colorful and fragrant flowers. We explain to you what you need to pay attention to when propagating lavender.
Lavender is an attractive plant for bees and other insects. Lavender flowers are rich in pollen and attract bees with their scent. The pollinators thus ensure the reproduction of the plant and are in turn rewarded with nutritious pollen as food. However, you can also propagate lavender yourself through cuttings.
Propagate lavender with cuttings
This step-by-step guide explains how to propagate lavender with cuttings:
- Cut off unbranched and flowerless shoots in late summer or early spring.
- Cut these shoots to a length of about ten centimeters and remove the lower leaves.
- Fill a growing tray with one part sand and one part growing soil (available for example at Avocadostore**) and moisten the mixture well. Insert the cuttings vertically into the soil up to the leaf base. Spray the cuttings with water and cover the tray with a translucent cover or foil. This will keep the humidity inside high.
- Place the seed tray in a warm and bright place in the garden and aerate and water the cuttings regularly. Make sure the location is not too sunny.
- By winter or during spring, the cuttings will form roots. Then transplant the rooted cuttings into individual pots.
- From then on, the young plants usually grow quickly and sprout. Prune the young plants several times and cut off the shoots. This will help the lavender to branch better and remain more compact. Note: If you have planted your lavender cuttings in late summer, you will need to keep them in a frost-free and bright place over the winter.
- Cuttings from late summer can be transplanted from the pots into the bed in spring. For spring cuttings, you should wait until early summer to transplant them into the bed.
Make sure your lavender is in a consistently sunny location. In addition, it can cope well with drought, but it will quickly die in waterlogged conditions. Therefore, plant the lavender in a well-drained and chalky soil from which moisture can drain away easily.
Use lavender
Lavender has many uses. Here are a few uses:
- The lavender scent will liven up your room and keep away pesky clothes moths in your closet. Just put some dried lavender in a cotton bag and hang it in your closet. You can find instructions for lavender sachets here: Lavender sachets: How to make them yourself
- You can also use lavender as a spice in the kitchen. It is suitable, for example, for some soups or sauces and as a decoration on salads.
- Lavender is especially fancy in cakes. For example, lavender goes very well in apple or pear pie.
- You can also brew lavender as a tea. Because of its calming effect, it is often added to sleeping or sedative teas. You can find a recipe for a lavender tea here: Lavender tea: effects and how to make it yourself.
- The essential oil contained in lavender has analgesic and relaxing properties and is therefore often used for physical ailments