By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
What do you do when you’ve bought an old tobacco farm, but tobacco is no longer selling the way it used to?
If you’re Jeremiah and Cindy Littleton, you do the next most obvious thing – you start growing lavender. Well, maybe not obvious to you or me, but to people with the analytical, engineering backgrounds of the Littletons it made sense. They talked with extension agents, analyzed the type of soil they had, and decided that lavender was going to be their first crop to experiment with.
“I said, ‘Let’s buy a few plants,’ and she bought 108,” Jeremiah said with a chuckle. “So, we had to get to it.”
It worked, and they’ve now grown their plot to include 207 plants.
“Lavender likes poor soil and good drainage,” Jeremiah continued, “The beauty of this particular farm, it’s really sandy soil along Rocky Branch. It’s really well-draining sandy soil. There’s a lot of sandstone runoff right through here. So, for that reason it worked out great. We decided to experiment and it’s going pretty good.”
With them both working day jobs in engineering, he explained, they could afford to take the risk and look into alternative crops like lavender.
“We wanted to do a couple of things,” Jeremiah explained. “We like lavender. Who doesn’t? And (secondly) we’re kind of experimenting for the county. We want something to replace tobacco. And we’d seen an article where they’re growing lavender on old strip mines in West Virginia. So, we thought, if you can grow in on a strip mine… come on!”
Because lavender prefers more alkaline soils they tilled limestone – another locally abundant resource – into the soil as they prepared their fields. They also bought a varietal that is more suited to our local climates.
“The particular variety that we grow is a hybrid,” Cindy added. “It’s been bred to withstand humidity a little bit better than some of the more traditional varieties.”
The lavender they grow is distilled into essential oils, or dried for use in potpourri and sachets. They make use of the old tobacco barn to hang and dry their lavender, which is then processed. Though lavender can also be used in cooking, Cindy explained that the variety they grow is more suited for perfumes and essential oil than for culinary use. She said that growing food grade lavender is something else they are looking at though.
“We do want to start planting a couple of English (lavender varieties), it has a better flavor for culinary use, and kind of experiment with that,” she said.
It’s experimentation, they explained, that they wouldn’t have dreamed of before the pandemic.
“Covid has had some pluses too,” Jeremiah noted. “I mean, remote work has changed a lot of things, so it’s helped us a lot.”
Though the couple are still currently based in Louisville, because they can now work remotely they’re in the process of relocating to Grayson. They plan to live there while they run the farm and work to restore the original cabin on their Elliott County property. Like with the changes to work life, it’s a change in lifestyle born from the pandemic and the associated reevaluation of values. Neither Jeremiah nor Cindy were ever really “city people,” they explained, even though their jobs with an engineering firm required them to live there. They travelled as much as possible, with a dream of hitting 50 countries by the time they turned 50.
“Then covid hit and it’s like we can’t go anywhere,” Cindy explained. “We were kind of going crazy, and we started actually going out to Carter Caves a lot, and spending time out there, just to get away from the city. We’re not city people at all. And being in Louisville, you’ve got to escape that.”
So, Jeremiah continued, picking up the story, they started looking for property in the area and a friend mentioned the property that the couple would eventually purchase and christen Whippoorwill’s Holler. It wasn’t on the market, but the owner was interested in selling.
“We came out here, and of course it was all overgrown,” Jeremiah said. “You could just barely see the cabin. It was all overgrown and everything. So, we spent the night in the barn, camped out in the barn, and we just fell in love. We were kind of on the fence, like, ‘Hey, is this going to mess up our travel plans?’ If you get a farm, you’re kind of stuck to the farm. We love it, but we’re on the fence. We don’t know what to do. And all of a sudden, the whippoorwills started singing, and we were sold. That’s why she named the farm Whippoorwill’s Holler.”
As for their travel plans?
Jeremiah noted that they were at 24 countries at last count.
“We got to play the game to over 20. Not near 50. I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
But they both seem okay with that notion. Especially on those warm summer nights, when the scent of lavender is on the breeze, and the whippoorwills sing.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
