Chemical free peony grower and world class hybridizer of new peonies.

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!

Another winter with limited snow so far for the peonies! As you can see in this picture, the only snow we have remaining as of now are the drifts. With warmer then normal temps expected again this week, what should be white color on the ground is now brown. Most of our precipitation this winter was rain which still provided moisture to the ground because some of the frost has left. For those of you in USDA zones 2-4 that planted new peonies last fall, did you mulch are peonies? If you didn’t and you do not have any snow to insulate the ground, might I suggest to mulch them now? With the warmer daytime temps (thawing) and colder nighttime temps (freezing), some newly planted peonies may be forced above the ground. Mulching will prevent this from happening until this spring when the nighttime temps are warmer. Once the peonies have made it through their first USDA zones 2-4 winter, mulching does not have to be done.

Greeting friends! Its been awhile since I posted. I hope your winter is going well and for those of you in USDA zones 7 and 8a, I imagine your peony soldiers are showing growth above ground level. As Becky had posted earlier, yours truly had sinuses surgery about 10-days ago. For those of you who have had this done, I now know that the recovery is a bear. Thank you for those who have kept me (and Becky) in your thoughts and prayers as this has not been a pleasant experience. Thankfully Becky has been great taking care of me. Although it appears as of late that she needs to run to the local organic grocery store and is very willing to help out at church activities? Not sure what that is all about? I keep saying this too shall pass (recovery that is) and in a few weeks my sinuses will be better than before! Two milestones were achieved within a week whereby I could smell and taste again! My, my I forgot how good organic fried eggs taste! Can’t wait to smell the peonies this spring!

Life on the peony farm has a new member to the fertilizer production team. Meet ‘Patriot’ who was born a few days ago. He is a long legged Dexter and his mom is ‘Daisy’. This is ‘Elvis Lee’s’ first offspring and he is so proud! You can see Elvis Lee lumbering towards us in the upper left corner of this picture. Always the protective dad which is paramount to the success and safety of our herd. Patriot is a ‘red Dexter’ like his father. Red is one of the most sought after colors within the Dexter’s so its father like son. Daisy by the way, is a dunn Dexter. We have high hopes for many red colored offspring from Elvis Lee. Our former herd sire (bull) Buford, gave us a few red’s and dunn’s, but most of his offspring were black in color. All of the fertilizer production team members are doing great this winter, but they and the peonies are anxious for spring!

The peonies are blooming on our 2017 website! Hi gardening friends, Becky here. We just launched our new 2017 website moments ago. Enjoy your visit whether you are a returning customer or new peony enthusiast. Keith will be back on the blog in a couple of weeks as I had the pleasure of accompanying him to another one-day surgery procedure. Nothing too spectacular other than opening up his sinuses that have plagued him over the last few winters. Say a prayer for me as I attend to his needs, well for him too! Thanks again for stopping by and enjoy our 2017 website for some amazing peonies and especially our intersectional/Itoh hybrid peonies!

The peonies updates are finally done on our end and off to our very capable webmaster to do his thing! Hard to believe that seven weeks of photography during the bloom season, cropping a few hundred of the almost 3,000 photos taken, editing and proofing are now down to a CD. This time of year is fun to go through all the photos and try and pick the ones that look nice for the website. This year we kept our web designers homepage as is after all the positive feedback we received last year. We asked her for an easy to navigate page and wow did she do her magic. Yes it costs a lot of money to retain her, but she has been designing our site since we first started. She is an national award winning designer and can’t thank her enough! Our webmaster will update us on the 2017 launch date when more facts are available. We can’t wait to show off some of our peonies to you!

And who thought only peonies had fun in the winter snow! Almost four inches of snow fell today and the fertilizer production team had fun both inside the barn and in the loafing area. We still can’t believe these crazy adult cows who love to sleep and stay outside when its snowing. All the young ones though prefer to stay in the barn. Bessie aka ‘crooked horn’ the black cow on the left, is ever so watchful of her calf born this fall on the right. She makes sure her calf stays almost in the barn instead of coming to meet Becky when she took these pictures. Our matriarch cow Daisy, just Daisy for her, doesn’t like going in the barn and would rather stay out in the snow. If only the peonies were awake to thank the fertilizer production teams for hanging in there during a snowstorm until they wake up in the spring!

For us up here in the north country, the peonies are sound asleep! That doesn’t mean we have been though. We are assuming early February, 2017 for our new launch. Of course that may change so will update as more facts are available. Though the ground is fairly white with snow outside, we sure could use some more! Happy New Year gardening friends! We wish you a healthy and peaceful 2017. Oh and Happy New Year to all the peonies too.

The Swenson Gardens 2016 newly planted peonies are now mulched! Redd was supervising the event and is recommending all peony gardeners in USDA Zones 2-5 to mulch your 2016 newly planted peonies as long as there is 2 to 4 inches of frost in the ground. We use chopped up corn stalks but pine boughs, straw and wood chips will work as well. Mulching is not to protect them from frigid temperatures. Mulching is to prevent heaving of the roots in late winter and early spring from the freeze/thaw events. Sleep well PEONIES and will see you in the spring!