(5/21) The three-day long Lavender Festival, held annually at the Willow Pond Farm in Hamiltonban Township, will once again feature plant and lavender product sales, food prepared by a professional chef, and vendors.
The festival will be held June 15 through June 17 (palavenderfestival.com).
The event, held at the 145 Tract Road farm, will also be providing a half dozen lectures each day on growing lavender and its medicinal and cooking uses along with four daily workshops. More than a dozen venders are expected to set-up to offer their
wares.
Admission is $8 for attendees over 12 years of age. This year, more than 3,500 individuals are expected to attend the festival.
This will be the last year that the event will be a three-day festival. Beginning in 2013, the hosts will be cutting it back to one day to be held on the Saturday before Father’s Day.
Tom Wajda, who runs the event with his wife Madeline, said, “We founded the festival about 11 years ago, and pretty well pushed it along while we were younger. None of us are getting any younger and next year we’re cutting the event back to one
day.”
The event has been held at the Wajdas’ Willow Pond Farm, located at 145 Tract Road, since its inception more than a decade ago when it was founded in 2000.
“The Lavender Festival will go on this year as it has in the past, as a three-day event,” Wajda said. “It was decided to do one more three-day event in order to go out with a bang, not a whimper.”
“The concept (the Lavender Festival) was our idea,” Wajda stated. “We thought that it would be a great plant to introduce in the area, and we wanted simply for people to enjoy themselves for a couple of days.”
While he and his wife are the backbone of the success of the event, they do not operate the show by themselves. “Manpower takes about 30 people a day to provide,” he noted. “We have a lot of volunteers to go out and help us.”
Attendance at the annual event generally brings in about 3,000 people during the three-day weekend. “We draw from a 50-mile radius, and from other states such as Florida, Ohio, Michigan and New York,” he said. “It’s a very well-known event.”
He described that the colonists introduced lavender, which is native to the Mediterranean, to the American Colonies for primarily medicinal purposes.
For additional information regarding the Lavender Festival, visit the event web site at palavenderfestival.com, or contact the Wajdas at (717) 642-6387.
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