I was amazed at how well my lavendar without any fertilizer or special support. I started my lavendar by seed in my basement. It was grasso lavender. I transplanted some small plants outside in a raised bed facing west and some on the south side in dirt along the side of the house. This summer was very hot and drought like. The lavender bloomed after the second season after being planted and has bloomed all summer. One thing lavender likes is dry soil. I may water it once a week.
ecoinallways.com

Where are you ecolady? I'm in CT..that's been my experience as well. It's along the driveway where only lavender, cornflowers, blackeyed susans and native plants do well. All heat lovers.

Seeing this thread's title on the main forum page continuously for the past month or two reminded me that I should go look at the lavendar I have out in one of the garden beds. I had promised my daughter that I would bring down a plant for her group's garden and went online to check to see if dividing a plant would be in order. (It isn't.)

I had started about 8 plants from seed a few years back. (8 plants germinated from a pack of seed. No variety listed on the packet except "English Lavendar".)

I found an excellent series on growing and propagating lavendar on Youtube (in the Expert Village series.) What I found was:

1. I was lucky to be able to get them to start from seed.
2. Everything else I did was wrong.

I set the transplants out far too close (about 12" apart, planted them in a bed that didn't receive full sun and didn't prune them at all, much less annually as is required. The grower in the video said a common problem is the plant gets old, woody and leggy and the best remedy is to pull it out and replace it. Sigh.....

Anyway, what I did do was take a bunch of tip cuttings and now have a couple flats of cuttings in Pro-Mix. If a fraction of them root, I will be happy. I did not have rooting hormone available, wasn't sure about the chemicals in it and didn't have time to run around looking for it, so I dipped the stems in honey, which I've read is sometimes used as a natural replacement.

The old plants are now mature at 3 years old and I could have been looking at a huge crop of lavenar cuttings this past year, but what I had was a small, though nice-looking little patch of struggling plants. Though it wasn't encouraged, I pruned back most of the plants to just above the woody stems and I'm transplanting them to give them sun and space. We'll see how they fare.

Live and learn.

Wayne

I have yet to have much permanent luck with lavendar here in Virginia. It grows fine until the summer humidity hits, then fungus abounds. I'm thinking of perhaps trying it in a deck container next season where it can be assured of better air circulation.

I went back and looked through old seed orders and found the lavendar that I had been neglecting was only 2 years old, not three, so it is not as dire as I thought. The plants are smaller than they should be but totally stunted as I believed.

Wayne