Monthly Archive: March 2017

At least in our USDA zone the peonies are ready for SPRING! Happy Spring to all gardeners in the northern hemisphere as of 5:28 am today. We wish you and your peonies a wonderful 2017 growing season!

So what do tree peonies do in late winter? Well in this case they either pray for snow or an early spring! The lonely old fashion snow fence stands bleakly barren of any snow drifts. Seems like when we put up various snow fences strategically around our gardens and home, snowfall is null in void and of course a few years ago when we didn’t put up the snow fence we had drifts up the peak of our garage! This particular tree peony is one of Roger Anderson’s Japanese tree peony seedlings. Japanese tree peonies seem to fare the best of all the tree peonies that we grow in this USDA zone. Yes dear tree peony lovers we will offer some of Anderson’s tree peony seedlings in a few years. We are growing them from seed so it takes a few more years to propagate tree peonies.

Our formal peony garden or labyrinth as some like to call it, looks rather bare amidst the cornstalk mulch and boxwood’s. The former owners of our farm use to have an Alpine Currant hedge properly manicured that looked spectacular. Since our farm was unoccupied for almost a year before we moved in, this formal garden was amass with every conceivable weeds and grasses. I have to be honest here as I went to a local farm chemical distributor to ask if they could suggest a way to rid the Alpine Currant of the grasses that took over the hedge. Oh sure was the response so it was off to the hardware store to pick up a hand pump sprayer. Well friends, that was the last time we would ever see the Alpine Currant hedge in our formal garden! Not only did it kill the grasses, but it also killed the Alpine Currant even though I used as directed and it said ‘will not harm shrubs’! Man was I sick and this formal garden sat bare for almost 6-years as I couldn’t get a grip on what I had done. To me this confirmed the fact that we will not use any chemicals on our farm! Thankfully we have never used any chemicals on the peonies and now after experiencing the formal garden debacle, last fall we planted 80 new herbaceous peonies in our formal garden.

There’s gold in that there hill for the intersectional/Itoh hybrid and herbaceous peonies! What may seem like a small hill in our north field is actually the cow manure from a year ago that we are composting for applications in our peony, hay and pasture fields. The key to composting at this scale is the fact that the manure from our fertilizer production team needs to winter over one-year in order to kill any weed seeds that may have passed through. We have used the term ‘sustainable, chemical-free peony grower‘ many times in the past but for those of you new to Swenson Gardens,  let me explain. All  the fertilizer, micro-nutrients and micro-organisms applied or generated in our peony fields are organic, chemical-free and mined minerals. All the hay and pasture used for feed receive the same treatments so we know what goes in and what comes out! Our passion for growing peonies this way has been an educational experience to gardeners who may or may not use chemicals. Why apply or use chemicals on peonies since they have already been growing without chemicals for thousands of years? The answer is speed and shortcuts! Why hand weed when you can spray? (Like paragraph two above!) Why use chemical fertilizers that sterilize the micro nutrients and organisms in the soil? Convenience or is that what you are being told by an expert who sells chemical fertilizer? Did grandma or grandpa have experts in 100+-year old farmsteads that still have peonies growing there today? I doubt it! Being a small, family owned peony grower, we cannot compete with the large chemical induced peony growers of the world; however, we can affirm our philosophy with like minded gardeners who choose to purchase their chemical-free bare-root peonies from us! We try to keep our pricing competitive but knowing the labor costs for hand-weeding our fields, maintaining our fertilizer production team and applying mined minerals, we may cost more. If your looking for ‘cheap’ peonies, you may be better off buying them elsewhere. If you are interested in buying sustainable, chemical-free bare-root peonies that are more vigorous and disease resistant than the ‘cheap’ peonies, welcome to the Swenson Gardens peony family!

I should have introduced our new social media and blog theme in the last post called ‘Life on the Peony Farm’. For those of you bloggers, this use to be called ‘peony farm jottings’. This new theme will be featured in our blog on a regular basis and on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Like and share us on our social media sites as we give you a taste of life on our peony farm.

For those of you new to our blog, Elvis Lee on the left, is our new herd sire (bull). Patriot on the right, is Elvis Lee’s first offspring. Though Elvis Lee is only 2 1/2-years old, he is very protective of his family. All our cows are like family to us as they play an integral part in our sustainable, chemical-free peonies operation. Patriot is just a love child! Not only is he a sprinter as he runs around the loafing area at full gait, but he will run to the gate to meet us as he loves to be petted and scratched under his chin. Even Elvis Lee is mellowing out and becoming more friendly by allowing us the scratch his back. Oh what a life!

Though the Purple Martin houses are down and shut for a couple more months, I had to bring out my new camera body for some pics today even though it was only 12 degrees outside. Yes photography friends it was time to move up to full frame. Sorry for the noticeable watermarks, but we’ve found some of our pictures on other sites and had to do something to stop this. All three of these pics were taken with my new Sony A99 mk2. WOW what a camera! Very easy to move up from my Sony A77 mk2 and oh my what joy to be able to see the full palate of colors! Since this body will shoot up to 42mb, had to turn it down to its lowest setting in order to upload our max on the blog of 8mb. The color saturation is amazing and can’t wait to run around our peony fields in bloom! The lens used on these pics is the Sony 70-400mm F4-5.6 G SSM. Takes quite a distance to shoot wide open but even at 250mm the colors just popped with diffused sun. Since this lens is very heavy, I always use a Monopod to stabilize the perfect shot. ALL the photos on our blog and website are shot through glass and never ran through Photoshop or Light Room in RAW. We want to provide the most true to natural colors of peonies and life on the peony farm pics as possible!

What a crazy week on our peony farm! This photo was taken from our front porch during a tornado and thunderstorm warning on March 6th. With a major cold front slamming into the 60+ degree temps in early March, needless to say we quickly ran to the basement after taking this quick shot and warning sirens going off around us. Since we moved here, we’ve seen two tornado’s. One to the north and one to the SE of us, but thankfully no touchdowns and subsequent damage. We always ask, ‘how many storms has this house been through since being built in 1901’? At lease for us in our tenure here, way too many as of late. In Minnesota, we have a phrase that ‘if you wait 20-minutes the weather will change’. Well the next morning we had 1/2″ of snow on the ground and temps that touched 0 degrees this week. No hail damage here from this storm, but 4 miles west of us the ground was covered with shovel-able hail up to 4″ in diameter! Again, what a crazy week on our peony farm!