The story of Swenson Gardens began with a passion for peonies. Wright County award-winning farmers Becky and Keith Swenson inherited their fondness for the flower from their grandparents. When the couple bought their first house in Delano in the ‘90s, they agreed that peonies should be planted in the front garden but were looking for something beyond the classic pink or red variety.
Their search for unusually-colored peonies led them to Roger Anderson, who was known around the world as a prolific peony hybridizer. He not only sold them purple peonies for their front garden, but he later became their mentor as the Swensons began to think about starting their own business, eventually leading to Swenson Gardens’s birth.
After studying under Anderson, the Swensons began to hybridize peonies for commercial sale. Hybridization is the process of breeding two different types of plants or animals together to create a new variety. Becky says it’s “part art, part science.”
In addition to searching for new colors, the company is also looking to create hybrids that bloom unusually early or late, to help home gardeners
extend their peony season. Other desirable traits might be really strong stems, beautiful foliage or new colors. From the beginning, Swenson Gardens has been a chemical-free enterprise.
The flower business is only just beginning to embrace some of the changes that other types of farming have been adopting over the last few decades. The Swensons are ahead of the curve not only in their large-scale chemical free commercial growing operation but also in the way protect and nurture the soil on their farm.
The Swensons keep a small heard of cattle known around the farm as the Fertilizer Production Team. The FPT is the source of the composted manure that is the beginning of their soil augmentation program. Cover crops are used to control weeds and put important nutrients back into the soil and the soil is rarely tilled. Weeding can be pretty labor intensive.
They currently have about 8,000 plants, making Swenson Gardens the largest chemical-free grower of peonies in the world. In the fall, the farm ships bare root across the country and all over the European Union. The bare roots aren’t ready for shipping until they are three years old and are more expensive than some of the potted plants found at big retail outlets. However, the Swenson Gardens website warns that some of those plants may not be true-to-name and will have weak, slow growing root systems.
Rarer and unusual varieties of peonies can cost as much as two to three hundred dollars a piece, and some collector-type hybrids sell for as much as $1000 per piece and more.
Peonies are clearly a passion and an avocation for many people. So much so, in fact, that sometime after the flowers begin to bloom about mid-May, the Swensons play host to Peony Field Days. “In past years, we’ve had as many as 2,000 visitors here across the four days,” Becky says. There will be about 200-250 varieties of peonies in bloom.
According to lakeminnetonkamag.com. Source of photo: internet
