Lavender farms find a home in Minnesota

“Go south on Cedar and I’m the first dirt road on the left. Boom! You’re in the country.”

That’s how Marie Schuhwerck directs visitors to the Lavender Barnyard. Her labor of love is a field of purple with specks of white and a “spicy-floral” smell wafting through the air. Guests come to pick blooms, take photos awash with color, rent the farm for private events or just lounge among the plants after getting a “Tranquility Pass.”

When you ponder fields of lavender, you probably don’t visualize Minnesota. France and Bulgaria are the major lavender-producing nations, but farms like Schuhwerck’s are making a name for themselves — in part because lavender is having a moment.

“Even Starbucks and Caribou both had a lavender drink on their featured menu,” she said. The plant is known for medicinal purposes, the longevity of its perfume even after being picked and its myriad applications.

Schuhwerck, however, didn’t set out to be a lavender farmer.

The Milwaukee-born, self-described “city slicker” acquired a green thumb after she settled in Farmington with her husband, Marty. For almost a century, the land owned by the Schuhwercks used to be a cattle farm. But much of the land went unused.

Schuhwerck saw an opportunity. “This is prime real estate,” she said to herself. “There’s got to be something I can do with it.”

Google was her first step. She researched crops for small farms. “Lavender just kept hittin’, and kept hittin’, and kept hittin’, and I kept scrolling past it, ‘cause I’m like, ‘Nope, it’s not supposed to grow here.’ ”

To grow lavender in Minnesota and have it survive the winter seemed like a gamble. But her experiment, which began in 2019, has paid off. She bought whatever plants that garden centers like Bachman’s had, and launched her lavender farm with about 250 plants.

Schuhwerck started “the big push” for visitors in 2022. “I figured the whole field should be full,” she said.

In 2021, she harvested 15,000 stems — everything planted by hand. Her farm easily pumps out 10 times that now, she said.

If lavender did not end up succeeding, her second plan was to nurture hops, which she knew were able to grow in Minnesota, for beer-making. “Technically speaking, we’re supposed to be too wet and too cold for lavender to survive,” she said, but practice discredited theory.

She’s been growing five varieties of lavender and just added a few new ones that she hopes will give the farm alternating shades of purple, white and pink.

Each year, she blankets the lavender with a “special Agfabric row cover,” which protects the plants from freezing and allows in some light and water, she said.

Using her plants, the Lakeville Brewing Co. crafted Lavender Moon Witbier, and the White Bear Meadery produced Valkyrie’s Kysse. Schuhwerck makes and sells her own products, too, including sachets and bath salts.

Visitors also buy bundles of dried lavender (u-pick is done for the year) and the farm is also open to events like photo sessions ($50 per hour).

Schuhwerck, a board member of the U.S. Lavender Growers Association — Minnesota is part of the North Central Region — also consults newbie farmers on how to ensure that lavender flourishes amid chilly Midwestern winters. If everyone does their part, her dream of having a state road map, with many lavender farm pit stops, may come true.

But she hopes to keep Lavender Barnyard an intimate experience. “If you come out here and do U-pick, I’m going to come out and bug ya,” she said. “If I had 300 people walking around, this would not be the same place. People like the personal contact of it. That’s one advantage I have over the bigger farms. It’s really the tranquility.”