Our family friend from southern France likes to distill lavender with a home contraption and recently shared some pictures and a few notes about how he does it. Translated into English, this is the gist of what he said:
The row of lavender in the picture produced 0.5 liter of lavender oil and it took me about 22 hours of work. To get one liter of oil, I would need 120 kilos of lavender.
My first step is to cut the lavender and then spread it out to dry. My second step is to separate the lavender flowers from the stalks.
My third step is to distill the oil from the flowers.
The distillation part does not require any moving around, but you still have to be there during the distillation process.
My homemade distillation setup is made of three pieces: a steam generator, a condenser, and a propane tank.
Keep in mind that the process for obtaining oil is different than the distillation process for obtaining alcohol.
