| All she knew, as fine Karoo dust settled on her desk, was that she had to find something to do. "I had to have something to be passionate about," she says. "I couldn’t sit in the farmhouse all day, waiting for the sound of the bakkie coming home."
She waited six years for the perfect solution. In addition to igniting passion, the new business had to fulfil four other crucial requirements: it had to suit the Karoo environment; it had to be grown locally and dried because of the Karoo’s distance from any marketplace; it had to be waterwise; and it had to be something the Kroon’s children could do with their mother. "I am a passionate mommy first," says Annemarie, "so any business had to allow me that priority." The new business also had to be labour intensive as the farm is home to 10 families, almost all of them had only one family member employed.
She tried a few projects before she started looking at lavender, and wondering why it wasn’t grown commercially in the Karoo, where the climate is so similar to its native Mediterranean. No-one grew lavender on any scale in the Karoo because no-one had ever tried to.
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