We are pretty much in the heart of peony season! We’ve just had our Peony Workshop (more on that to come soon) but I wanted to post a little bit about the state of our peonies. It’s been a very unusual spring, weather wise, and also a very educational spring for me as a peony grower !
We had a very consistently cold winter, which the peonies love! However, in April we had record breaking heat of 91 degrees! Four days later we had a frost and the very next night we had a hard freeze (we measured 22 degrees in our field). This was basically a perfect storm of awfulness for our flowers (really, anything growing) as the heat pushed the plants to quickly develop, the frost weakened the plants and then the freeze did them in.
Because of this, up to 60-70% of our peonies experienced bud blast. Bud blast is when a bloom quits developing due to extreme stress from weather or disease. The bloom is usually the size of a pea and turns brown as in the above picture. We lost whole rows to bud blast!
Something else interesting happened as well. Our corals developed normally and looked great, but I noticed that some of the outer petals turned brown really quickly. Normally, corals change color as they age quite a bit but it’s more of a move toward parchment, not brown. My best guess on this upsetting development is that the outer petals were damaged by the freeze. Therefore, I pulled the corals from sale because I would hate for someone to pay for a coral only to have it look like the above in a day or two!
Ultimately, the plants will be fine, it’s just this season that the buds will have been lost! While I find it so sad that we won’t have a field full of blooms, I’m actually thankful for the blooms we do have. Our state’s farmers were devastated by this freeze, fruit farmers have reported 90-100% loss on peaches and apples to the tune of 300 million dollars statewide. Our peonies do not provide our livelihood but rather are a supplement. Frankly, with climate change and the rolling back of environmental protections, I’m very nervous and scared for farmers futures!
