The Lavender Apple

The Lavender Apple lies at the end of a one-lane private dirt road in Millville, in Cache Valley. Two fields hold more than 2,000 lavender plants. Beside them stands an orchard of more than 80 apple trees, many of them vintage varieties, and the owners say that with both on the place the name “just fits.” In bloom the rows are white and amethyst, bumblebees work the flowers, and the Wellsville mountains rise across the valley.

Beth and Blake Downs own the farm and run it with their six children. At harvest the family cuts the lavender by hand in small bundles, distills the oil right after picking to keep it fresh and strong, and hangs the rest of the bundles to dry. After the 2026 festival they spent a week distilling and drying English lavender. The crop goes into more than 40 products made in small batches at the farm: essential oils, lotions, soaps, lip balms, sachets, bath salts, sprays, rice bags warmed in a microwave, and a culinary line of lavender buds, simple syrup, sugar, and honey infused with lavender, made from Cache Valley raw honey. A few years ago the farm also began infusing the flavors of its vintage apples with its culinary lavender. The Downs do their own packaging and marketing. Blake has another job, fixing wheels. “Eventually we want the farm to become our full-time job,” he told the Herald Journal in 2024. “That’s the dream.”

Beth was not sure she liked lavender when the family bought the place. She knew it only as the artificial scent in soaps and candles, and she did not care for it. Standing in the rows in July 2025, she told Utah Public Radio, “Lavender is just something that’s really healing. A lot of people are drawn to lavender itself. And this place is quiet, it’s away from the main city, and I think people are drawn to it.”

Yoga between the rows

U-pick runs from mid June to mid July, and the farm fills those weeks with small gatherings. In 2026, sunset yoga sessions ran from June 16 to July 7 on the grass between the lavender rows. Participants brought a mat, blanket, or towel, and the farm warned anyone allergic to bees to stay away. Children ages 7 to 11 spent mornings at Lavender Woodland Daycamps. On July 8, 2026, the farm held its first date night for couples, at $40 a couple. The evening offered sunset in the lavender, lavender lemonade, dessert from LeCroissant, and a talk by Dr. Wally Goddard, a marriage and family educator. Each ticket included a copy of his book Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage.

The festival the weekend after the Fourth

The farm’s largest days come on the weekend after the 4th of July, at the Lavender Festival and Artisan Market. The 2026 festival, the fifth, ran July 10 and 11 from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., with free admission. The farm lane cannot hold the crowd, so most visitors park free at Millville South Park and walk through a hay field to reach the farm. Closer parking off Canal Road costs $5, collected by attendants at the field entrance. “The parking fee is to cover the cost of maintaining the road with so many cars driving on it,” Beth said in 2024.

Some 30 artisan vendors set up along the fence line around the fields, and visitors pick up scissors and cut their own bundles. The horse-drawn wagon rides are free. The 2025 music lineup included the Utah Old Time Fiddlers, a yodeler, and a professional storyteller. Notices for 2026 promised lavender ice cream from Aggie Ice Cream, and one visitor wrote afterward of baklava, hammocks, and “FREE horse rides (even Grandma wanted another turn).” The family makes fresh squeezed lavender lemonade from its own plants, and for the 2024 festival it planned 900 gallons. “So people better come by and get themselves some lemonade,” Beth said that year. The festival stays open to dusk so the crowd can watch the sun go down over the fields.

In 2025 a booth run by the Compassionate Entrepreneurs Club, a group started by a close friend of Beth’s, sold handmade lavender wands to raise money for small business loans in Uganda. The club’s members include the Downs children. That year’s money was meant to help a young man open a store selling staple foods. “They could just come,” Beth said of visitors. “They don’t have to even spend any money and have a great experience. Or they can get themselves some lemonade and sit in the apple orchard and enjoy the beautiful day.”

The festival began with a homeschool class. Beth was teaching it, and her students had a project to make something and sell it at a market. When the local markets did not work out, she decided to create one herself. The first Lavender Festival and Artisan Market opened June 25, 2022, with 30 artisan vendors and free horse-drawn wagon rides. The attendance figures come from Beth and vary by telling. In 2024 she told the Herald Journal that the 2023 festival drew about 4,000 people, double the first year. In 2025 she told Utah Public Radio that the first festival drew an estimated 2,000 and the 2024 festival around 10,000.

The second festival, July 7 and 8, 2023, carried the theme “It’s good to be alive.” That February one of the Downs sons had gone through a life-threatening medical crisis, and Beth and Blake were unsure whether to hold the event at all. They held it to mark his recovery. “Life is precious,” Beth said. “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and realize I didn’t try something new because I was scared.” The 2024 festival was called “A Joyful Harvest.”

A torch and a crème brûlée

The lavender itself came from France. Peggy Nelson was living there when she first experimented with it. She remembers feeling elated during a cooking class when she used a small torch to finish a crème brûlée. “It kind of opened my eyes to lavender. I fell in love,” she told the Herald Journal in 2013. She and her husband, Mike, planted the fields in 2009 and started the Lavender Apple brand. “It was their love of France,” Beth Downs said later. “They remodeled the house to look like France. They just loved that culture and everything about it. So that’s what they were trying to recreate here.”

Peggy began by selling fresh lavender at the Logan farmers market. “The first year I started growing lavender and people asked me, ‘well, what are you going to do with it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know; I just love lavender.’ I didn’t think of it really as a business,” she said. By 2013 she had about 700 plants, mostly grosso, a French hybrid considered to have the strongest and longest-lasting smell. She bought the perennials from a farm in Washington state. “It grows pretty well every year, considering we have the harsh winters and the rocky soil,” she said. Her culinary lavender was hung upside down to dry and then kept in the freezer. The apple and the lavender went together into jelly, syrup, and caramel apples. Her family teased her about it. “I do have a son who says, ‘did you put lavender in this?’ and I always say ‘no,’” she said.

In 2011 she moved her jelly and pie making into the Utah State University kitchen incubator in Logan, because state rules would not allow her to produce commercially at home. “Even though my dogs don’t get up on the counter,” she said, “I had to find a kitchen, and someone told me about Utah State’s kitchen.” The old equipment pleased her. “It’s just the kind of kitchen maybe my mom would have gone to when she was at Utah State. It seems like the same plates and the same bowls are still there.” Over the following years the farm’s booth went to the Downtown Salt Lake Farmers Market, the winter market at the Rio Grande depot, and the Christkindlmarkt at This Is The Place Heritage Park. In 2013 Peggy also mentioned the idea of a lavender festival. She said it might be tricky, since the property could be reached only by a one-way street.

Swedes at the mouth of a canyon

Accounts of the land’s beginning differ. The farm says John and Hanna Nelson immigrated from Sweden in the early 1900s and bought a large plot at the mouth of a canyon in Cache Valley. Peggy Nelson told the Herald Journal that her husband’s great-grandparents bought the property in the 1890s. For generations afterward the Nelsons kept the orchard and farm.

In 2021 the Nelsons wanted to retire, and no one in the family could take over the business. The Downs were then living in what Beth called a “regular neighborhood” in Hyrum. Drawn by the fruit trees, they bought the farm on a whim and became its first owners outside the Nelson family and the second family to live on the property. Apart from Blake’s time on a ranch as a boy, they had little farming experience. They started with about 1,000 lavender plants. “This is a whole new world to me,” Beth said in 2023. “It’s very different from our old life. It’s really good, but a lot of hard work. I thought I knew how to work hard before we moved here.”