The best time to harvest lavender for oil distillation is June and early July. I of course did not buy my still in June, but in May, too early to get any fresh crop. But I really wanted to distill SOMETHING in my new setup, and so went on line to find dried lavender flowers. I ended up buying a pound from Lavender Fanatic which turned out to be fine flowers without detectable “junk”.
I was able to put 8 oz of material into the still at one time (dried this is really light) and followed the steps I wrote in my previous post on Essential Oils. I learned something new using really material in the still column. When you are cleaning the still after each run, make sure to blow through the output tube to insure there is no material stuck in there. I did not end up with a plug, but realized that since there was no blow-off valve for the still, making sure the steam always had a way out just made sense.
As I had bought a pound of dried flowers, it took two runs at 8 oz each to complete this first batch. The total time in the shop was bout 3 hours, including setup, 2 runs, tear down and cleanup.
The output of lavender essential oil (LEO) that I got from the 16 oz of flowers was 15.4 ml. Given that my normal use of this oil is with a carrier oil at a ratio of 6 drops LEO to 10 ml of carrier oil, this goes a long way. In a later post, I will talk about what I use my LEO for and at what concentrations.
