Watering Lavender and Co-Growth
I have a Provence Lavender plant on my back porch in a container. It’s been growing nice and wide and is wonderfully fragrant. The dogs seem to leave it alone even though they enjoy sniffing it.
The big thing with Lavender is that it’s a Mediterranean plant — it’s used to growing in well-drained soils with minimal annual rainfall. Lots of lavender growers here in Texas brag that they don’t water their crops except when there are drought conditions present, and then they might throw some water on them once or twice a year…
Since my plant’s in a container, and I live in a hot, relatively dry, WINDY area of Texas, I wasn’t sure that I could get away with the “not watering” thing .. the plant did seem to put on a spurt of growth every time I water it, so something must be making it happy about getting water. How do you figure out a watering schedule for an evergreen plant from an arid area?
I happen to have two other mediterranian plants in containers — a Cyclamen and an aromatic rosemary herb in a small container. The latter two are used to the same sort of arid climate, and prefer well-drained sandy soil as well, so it’s not too much of a stretch to keep them grouped together (although they are in a protected area of the backyard so that the dogs don’t eat the Cyclamens, which is poisonous.)
My watering schedule for the Lavender has become simple. When the Cyclamens looks peaked but the rosemary doesn’t, I water the Cyclamens and splash a little on the Rosemary. When both end up looking peaked (as they did yesterday when I got home), I water all three (Cyclamens, Rosemary, Lavender) heavily until they drain out the bottom.
So far the Lavender seems happy. I’m still crossing my fingers that it’ll bloom this year, as it’s getting quite large, but I don’t see any signs of it forming buds or flower stalks. Regardless, it’s pretty and it smells amazing and is one of my favorite container plants.
I used to grow a ton of rosemary and other desert-lovers in our garden in SoCal. What I found there is that so long as the soil drains well, you can water as much as you like. The more you water, the more green, lush, and bloom-y they’ll be. They can do fine without the water, but will thrive with it.
We had drip irrigation that went on every night for 15 minutes and provided a lot of water. Then, the plants spent a hot, dry, sometimes very windy day living between concrete slabs (sidewalk and pool). They were like monsters. Huge. So I wouldn’t worry too much about over-watering, if it’s dry and your pots are draining well.
I have tried 3 times now to start rosemary from seed; has yet to do anything and it’s been about 3-4 months. However, I’m glad I found this post because I’ve killed every seedling of lavendar I’ve started and couldn’t figure out why. I was watering them on the same schedule as everything else and I guess I was just soaking them to death? I’m going to give it another shot starting tonight and not water them as often once they start spouting.
Thanks!