While it may be the middle of winter, Joe Adams, a farmer and owner at Full Circle Lavender Farm in Maple City, is still keeping busy with work tied to the property. The colder months provide for much needed downtime to craft new products, which could be anything from lavender-infused jams to candles, before the busy growing season starts up again in the spring.
The family owned and operated business, established in 2022, grows five varieties of lavender with 2,500 plants total. Joe’s parents, Sally and Steve, originally bought the 32-acre property in 2020 as it had always been a dream and goal of theirs to move and find land in Leelanau County.
Soon after his parents relocated to Leelanau from Traverse City, Joe would follow as well, adding that he planned to stay temporarily in April 2021. As he immersed himself more and more into the work at the farm, Joe said he fell in love with the place and the potential it offered, and made the decision to settle in the area rather than move again.
When the Adams family moved in, there was an old hops field in place of where the lavender fields are now. It wasn’t high on their priority list of tasks to complete, but when Joe’s neighbor, Mike Shimek of Bohemian Lavender Farms, reached out asking if he needed anything cleared out before putting his bulldozer away for the season, he took him up on the offer. Shimek ended up clearing out the entire hops field and removing old hops poles, making way for a new growing plot.
With the land cleared, Joe asked Shimek about growing lavender and what the process would look like. Joe explained that they didn’t want to grow anything conventional that would need to be planted every year or that required a lot of herbicides or pesticides and was considering lavender. After having the Shimek’s over for dinner one night, they were able to talk more about planting lavender in the field, and with their support and offer to help, the Adams pursued their new passion: Planting and harvesting lavender.
“They (Shimeks) said they thought the area could support those (lavender) farms, so that was kind of my in for it. They helped me get the plants and Mike came over with his tractor… He gave me a bunch of advice along the way and still continues to. Our spread is about two acres now, it’s not completely filled in, there’s walking paths and grassy areas.”
Full Circle’s farmstand first opened last spring, offering products like lavender sachets, dry bundles, culinary flower buds, lavender hydrosol and essential oil rollers. They have since added lavender strawberry jam and lavender infused honey, both customer favorites, and are working to put out other flavors and products over the next year.
A couple years ago, Joe said he planted about 50 strawberry plants on the property, which all produced fruit, but not enough to sell to the public. He said this summer though he wants to expand his strawberry footprint further, and is hoping to grow enough not only for his family to eat, but to share with neighbors and use for their strawberry jams.
Besides crafting new lavender items, Joe’s fulltime job at Oryana keeps him busy in the winter, and is also one of the retail locations where people can buy some of their lavender products. In addition, he said they typically have products available at Lakeview Hill and Farm Market and local farmers markets, but they are looking to expand to a few other retail places as they continue to establish themselves as a business. All year-long, people can also stop by their place in Maple City to pick up various products for sale at their workshop.
Although tending to lavender doesn’t require as much work as other crops, Joe said he loves being outside in nature and enjoys being able to work in the field. He was first introduced to commercial horticulture about a decade ago when he worked at a greenhouse in Kalamazoo that focused on flowers and bedding plants, but the family lavender field has been his largest horticulture job yet. With the help of family, friends, and neighbors, they’ve been able to cultivate the land and transform it into a budding business.
“I always enjoyed growing things and tending to the earth…” he said. “We all banded together for the harvest this year and got it done in a pretty decent amount of time and I’d say by and large it’s a family affair… We’re thankful to be where we are and do what we do and we’re grateful to have good neighbors on both sides of us because they definitely helped us out a lot with the lavender setup.”
Going into year four in the lavender business, Joe said it has been and will continue to be a learning process, but there are important lessons he’s learned from the field over the few years. The first being it’s better to start small and slowly expand your crop, noting that his plot of 2,500 plants was a bit ambitious for a first time farmer.
“I knew this is what I wanted to do and I knew the space that I wanted to fill in, so my learning curve was probably considerably more steep than most people, but that’s the way I did it and the way it shook out,” he said. “For anybody else interested in it, I would start small and see how it goes and feel it out because it takes about three years for lavender to really come to fruition, especially with the distilling side of it, so you got a little bit of time to figure stuff out.”
Another important lesson he’s learned is that while lavender grows well in Leelanau soil, it’s not native to the area, so weeding needs to be kept under control to have thriving plants. The lavender at Full Circle is grown in open ground, so many hours of hand weeding has been part of the growing process for their plants.
“It’s better to be realistic about the goals you set and allow yourself enough time to complete those, because if you’re only doing everything at 70% then none of it is good,” he said. “That’s one thing with my products, I spend a lot of time on them and try to make them to a point where if I saw it on the shelf, I would want to grab it and feel good about it for the price that it costs.”
