When I saw this picture, all I could think about was crop rotation, the practice of planting different crops in different portions of your field and switching off between them each growing season. This year, this farmer is growing wheat in one field and lavender in another. Next season, he might switch the two, or he might have a third field which is laying fallow this year, i.e. one that has grass or clover in it, so next season he’ll grow lavender in that field, wheat in the field where lavender is growing now, and leave the wheat field lay fallow.

The big reason you do this is to allow the soil to replenish itself from season to season. The more I try to explain it, the more tangled up I get, and we only have six minutes, so here’s the Wikipedia article on it.

I grew up in…