Peonies | Growing Tips & FAQ: Garden Home VLOG (2019) 4K

[Music] welcome to the show today we are doing a lunch and learn at moss mountain farm and i have about 60 friends from around the country here with us so we're doing a live studio audience it's going to be a lot of fun very much like dr phil except we're going to be answering not your personal issues and questions about those but we're going to be talking about flowers and plants which are much less complicated and so today i thought what we would do in this lunch and learn at moss mountain farm we would talk about one of my favorite perennials and that is the peony they are just coming into flower here and i thought that i would dismiss some of the issues and myths about peonies and also maybe give you some some tips that will help you grow them um first of all how many out there love peonies raise your hand oh my gosh of course everybody does it's like mom and apple pie right one of the wonderful things about this most luxurious plant is they came to us from china this is considered the national flower of china and they are uh this is these are all herbaceous peonies very different than the uh the tree peony which blooms on a woody stem these are herbaceous meaning they die all the way to the ground and they come back the next the next year from herbaceous growth so all of these blooms that you see here which we have lots of varieties these were tubers that were planted just last year all right so yeah they're really extraordinary and we i cannot believe the number of blooms we already have from these what's wonderful about the peony it is a true true perennial these things will come back in gardens for up to 75 80 years so if you get them planted correctly they're going to come back year after year now some of the things that are important to learn about peonies we often get questions why are my peonies not blooming well the there are three reasons typically why one is that they're in too shady of a location they really prefer full sun or at least half day sun to flower the other is you may be trying to grow peonies in the wrong part of the country peonies like it really cold the colder the winter the better that's why our friends in minnesota can grow some amazing peonies while down here in zone 8a we struggle a little bit so the um and if the further south you go the less likely you're going to have you're going to have success with peonies the other thing that is that keeps peonies from blooming is often people plant them too deeply so when you plant them you'll see the little red eyes on the tubers in this part of the world we only put a half inch of soil over them i've seen people put three and four inches over them they'll put up foliage but they will not bloom so just keep that in mind when you're when you're trying to grow these gorgeous flowers now what is um i love to grow them to cut so this past year as i mentioned we planted 360 tubers okay yeah i know i got kind of crazy so i've planted 10 tubers of 36 varieties don't ask me to recite all their names because there's so many of them uh and most of the peonies there are you'll find that there are a lot of peonies that have french names all right it's because there was a lot of hybridization going on in france in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries the 1930s and 40s in this country was kind of the peak of peony craze and you see a lot of them coming out of the 30s and 40s and if we think about our grandparents and great grandparents they they all had peonies growing in their gardens um now all of our peonies come from gilbert h wild and son gilbert h wildenson is in reeds missouri they have been there producing peony since 1885 and probably has one of the largest collections of peonies in existence the files there go back to 1885 where they brought in their first peony tubers from europe and began growing them but they grew them as cut flowers all right the cut flower industry at the time was where they were making their money and then they eventually began to sell the tubers and then over time they began to sell iris and then day lilies and now they sell all kinds of perennials so make sure you get one of their catalogs or go to their their website it's really a great nursery um one of the things that's so interesting to me uh is that is is that people have a love of flowers they want them in their home and what's interesting to me is how peop their attitude about it they think they they that flowers are too luxurious to buy in the grocery store they won't really buy flowers and i'll i will buy flowers but i prefer to grow flowers and i love to cut whatever's blooming it could be the lyre leaf sage that's in flower right now or even the philadelphia fleabane daisy and some of the wild things and mix them together and we're going to talk about that just in just a moment about how to mix things together and think about what's blooming now what's working in the garden one of the things that's so interesting we were i have to tell you a story i was giving a talk a couple of years ago and this this woman in the audience said she raised her hand and she said well you know you've got all these they got acres and acres of flowers it's easy for you to cut flowers and have them in your house all the time you know most of us don't have that much room and we don't have a place for that that many uh to grow that many flowers to cut and i was like wow you know what do you say to this i just told her i said well look all you need is a good pair of clippers and a flashlight go in your neighbor's yard and get them you know well the audience loved it she didn't think that was a very good good response but you know growing your own it does you know and it doesn't have to be peonies it can be anything zinnias i mean i like growing all kinds of things that will bloom and you can cut and bring into the house so you can't really tell the aroma of this but it's really very very fragrant this one is one called myrtle gentry and myrtle gentry is probably one of the most fragrant peonies and i want to just talk about that for just a moment when you go through you start looking at the hundreds of varieties of peonies some of them are more fragrant than others all right so two of the most fragrant that we've discovered they always stand out is myrtle gentry and dr alexander fleming those two are extraordinarily fragrant so if you're looking for fragrance those would be really great ones to have you can see some of the flower shapes here these are what are called doubles but the earliest flowering peonies are typically the singles where you have a a single um group of stamens often very golden and beautiful and then others uh you will have the stamens aren't quite as pronounced but they have a single ray of flowers that line the plant i mean a single row of petals that line the plant all the way around and then you get the doubles like these and this one is one called carl rosenfield which is a very easy one to grow and easy to find and another one that i like very much is this one over here that many of you may find is one called sarah bernhardt when i say you may find she's very common not a common flower but just look at the size of the bloom on that and easily found probably the most popular peony in the world is sarah bernhardt and of course she was a late 19th century early 20th century actress and had this flower named after her the peony is a plant that you we we have dedicated a bed a large area to them in the summer they tend to die back particularly here so you get the beautiful foliage through the spring after they bloom we cut the seed pods off of them because we don't want energy going into producing seed what am i going to do with those and then we will just leave the foliage until it dies back naturally but in mid-summer it starts to really look a little a little tattered and so what we want to do is we want to mask that so if you go down and you look at our peony display you'll see that it is bordered with russian sage and what will happen is this russian sage will grow up to about three feet tall bloom all summer long in lavender color and mask the dying peony foliage right now the russian sage has been cut back it's very short it's just now emerging and the peonies are on the stage doing their thing so the russian sage does not block the view of the peonies so that's a good combination to sort of hide that foliage whether you have a large garden or a small garden so that's a good good companion plant let's go back to this notion of cutting peonies and bringing them into the into the house in the old days and even today for shipping peonies what you'll find is that these things are really tough uh flowers um the they are often cut in the marshmallow stage and you can see that this plant has a really robust bud on it about the size of a large marshmallow it's just just beginning to get a little soft like a marshmallow but it's not open at all cutting them like this they can be boxed dry with a few of the limbs stripped like this packaged and shipped and that's how they were able to do it at gilbert h wild in the 1880s to actually box these up like this they'd be shipped up to the kansas city market they recut the stems put them in water and that will flower and they can hold them up to several weeks that way so they're they're a delicate looking flower but they are definitely a tough tough flower all right now let me pause there and see if there are any are there any questions that you all might have about peonies yes my name is robert turner i'm from glen rose what ph soil do they grow best in robert that's a great question peonies typically like um sort of a neutral soil uh you know if you look at ph seven is neutral so in that six and a half slightly acidic that's what we have here and they do really really well um so you just get there they're you know they can take a slightly alkaline soil as well but um around neutral is ideal thank you sir yeah and the soil is also really important to think about because what you want is a really rich soil when you when you plant these uh because they're going to be there for a long time and once you plant them you do not want to move them peonies uh aren't typically fussy but if you start moving them they become very fussy so figure out where you want them plant them there and leave them alone and they will be there for decades they will outlive you yeah all right so we've talked a little bit about um the soil we've talked about let me just mention fertilization we're here at moss mountain farm everything is organic so we use a lot of our good old barnyard manure to feed them we put it out in the late late winter early spring before those little peony buds begin to come we put it on everything but there's nothing better than good old chicken litter to put on your your garden and we take it out of our poultry houses and also the sheep manure as well and put it around them and they emerge they're already at three feet tall now and with lots of buds so you can see they're enjoying that feeding now what i'd like to do is is take a take a moment and talk about some companion plants that we like to use with the peonies i like to look around the garden think what is it that i really need in the way of other companion plants that would work with these to do flower arrangements there's nothing more beautiful than just a simple vase of of of peonies and here you can see this one has that wonderful pom-pom in the middle this is another flower form so we've seen a double this is a semi-double and then you can see uh and then we've we've we've talked about some of the uh the the ones with the large stamens in the middle but just a simple vase like this and keeping the water clean is really all you need to do we've had i cut one last week that was in the marshmallow stage and i wanted to see how long it would last with no additives to the water just changing the water out every other day and this was it's on day number 10 and it is in full bloom it's not in full sun it's in the house but i started with the marshmallow stage here just to see how long it completely opened just as they did in the old days and has probably get another day or two out of it before it starts dropping its petals so it's really very good um so um going back again to the fertilization because that will really improve the size of the the blooms um if you look at some of the peonies and you want really large blooms you will notice that you get side buds so you go you're a single large bud and you'll get tiny little buds on either side if you want big blooms if you want this to be really large what you want to do is cut the two side buds off like that and that'll make a really large bloom of course feeding them well that produces really big big uh big flowers like uh benjamin franklin said early to rise early to bed plant like heck and fertilize so uh that's the that's the motto you want to follow to make them bloom all right now what we um have here is just a vase and i'm going to show you some of these companion plants that i like to use blooming at the same time are these amazing alliums um how many how many of you have grown these before this is allium schubertii yeah it looks like a magical wand or it's a starburst but isn't that a fantastic flower okay these dry beautifully it's a great companion plant for peonies you can have them growing near them and you can see the contrast of the flower shape is just really really amazing so we like to use these use these alliums and arrangements so i'm just going to drop a few of these in here and just show you how how beautiful and simple these arrangements can be i'm going to add a few more of these sarah bernhardt's in here and i brought in a couple of these alliums to show you this is an edible onion the flowers of the edible onion here and i like to group those together i mix it up you know so whatever's out there i'll use them for the last couple of weeks we've been using collared flowers we let the collard greens bolt because the our friends the pollinators like the flowers so i'm going to add these and you can see i've kind of grouped these together i'm going to use those in the side here there's the allium and what i need here is uh just a little bit of additional color it's another plant that everybody should be growing and enjoy this is the smoke tree who knows the purple smoke tree isn't that beautiful and you can see it's called the smoke tree because of its bloom is very ethereal almost like a puff of smoke on the tree so i'm going to use the foliage of this in here the red is a perfect accent for this pink just a few stems of that worked into it get a little bit more here my motto is too much is just enough you've probably seen that with our daffodils um i've planted 450 000 blooms but i mean bulbs not blooms bulbs i'm going to put some of this in the front here a little bit of that and then what we'll do is we're going to add just a little bit of this i like textural contrast and this is a miscanthus grass it's just really wonderful to have some of this around and this color echo that you're going to get with this striped green and white grass is a echo with that green onion that we put in there and we'll add one more color of the peony use one of these and let's get one more of these alliums what the heck let's live large put it right here in the front so there you go what do you think home grown right here all right so you know this you saw how long it takes people just kill me they go i don't have time to guard and i don't have time to do a flower arrangement it took three minutes you know how busy are you you know come on so anyway this is the kind of joy that i get when i can go out into the garden and gather up a few things and come up with these combinations so the peony is kind of a classic love growing them but then i start thinking what else is going to flower at the same time and i'll go around neighborhoods and i'll go oh that's blooming i don't have that maybe i need to come back in the middle of the night and get some or you know maybe i integrate a few of those in the garden near it and so there's always always looking for things to go out and gather and bring in all right let's answer some more questions yes how about you i'm linda powell from lawton oklahoma and peonies attract ants when you bring them in what do you do well that's a very good question uh we have a lot of fans in oklahoma and thank you for coming to see us here at moss mountain farm um that we get this question a lot because what happens um let's pull one of the peony buds um up so you can i can demonstrate but um on typically before they open uh you will see in this stage here of ants on top this is a totally green bud and you will often see ants dancing around the peony well the peony secretes a sweet little substance a sap that the ants adore all right and so what what what i do is just i'll cut them and then i'll take a bucket of water out into the garden and again i like to cut them as i described earlier in that marshmallow stage that's how you get the longest life you can out of them but once the once the peony opens uh there's less of that that sweet substance for the ants of the big blooms you rarely see a lot of ants on the big open blooms it's on those buds and so what i do is just dip them in water drown the ants and stick them up you know back in my basket or to the side and just kind of let you know live and let live is kind of my attitude with them yeah and you can spray the the peonies if you want to with uh some kind of uh insecticidal soap and that will help take care of the ants if you know if you're an antiphobe yeah very good question thank you all right other questions um hi alan i'm pameron from dayton ohio and i have another pest question i've had peonies for years and years and years and within the last couple years i have a lot of chipmunks that get down in and start eating the roots of my peonies do you have any suggestions oh my goodness those ground burrowing rodents they are hard to get rid of do you have a cat well you know one of the things that's so interesting we've had a lot of questions about moles and voles and chipmunks and things that will eat these and if you seriously if you have a cat and you have a litter box and you will pour the litter box once it's full and you need to dispose of it around the garden this will cause them to leave they'll go over to your neighbor's garden because these animals are smart and they sense a predator i think it's really hard to protect the peonies in some cases what we've seen is a little wire poultry wire not the hexagonal but tiny wire where you would dig down and kind of put a ring around them it's a lot of trouble but once they find them and start eating them it's very challenging yeah very good good question hi alan i'm judy krager from long grove iowa and do you recommend cutting the foliage down i when it turns brown and it gets funny bad looking i like to cut it is that judy that is absolutely the thing to do once it turns brown just cut them back even if it's in august you go gosh we have another full month and a half of warm weather just cut them back that means the plant has already gone dormant right and so the the idea of doing companion planting like with the russian sage is that the sage comes up and sort of hides that right so that's a good good companion to consider but um but what you want to do is to leave the foliage as long as possible because that regenerates that tuber to bloom heavily the other thing you want to do is you want to in the early stages of planting a peony is that you want to cut the stems very short so in this case you we've got a stem here that's almost two feet long and really because we just planted these i should be cutting these with just a couple of leaves at the top and cut very short stems the reason for that is you see how much foliage i would leave on the plant every one of those leaves is helping restore and build starches in that tuber through photosynthesis and so the more the foliage you can leave on there early on when you've planted your peonies the bigger the blooms are going to be the next year yeah good yeah very good good great questions yeah thank you so um are there any other questions that we can answer from the audience all right with that said i do want to talk a little bit about some of the other companion plants that we've brought in this gorgeous thing is a wigilia i know it sounds like a skin disorder but it it really is quite beautiful this has if you can if you could see this spray this long spray of tubular flowers this plant has also variegated leaves so someone goes well why would you want to plant this plant because it only blooms once well give me a break i mean this plant is producing all these flowers i mean i could only put up generate that much energy to produce this many flowers once a year but what happens with this particular variety is that you've got a beautiful variegated leaf on it so it makes a foliage plant in the garden it's deciduous it's going to lose its leaves in the in the winter but this is a a beautiful spray covered with these pink tubular flowers so again another great companion shrub to plant with your peonies another one that i want to point out is one called uh beauty bush or colquitsia we love to cut this was just about to finish up you can see the pale pink tubular flowers on this this one is called dream catcher and when it leafs out in the spring it has a beautiful chartreuse leaf which is absolutely incredible and love to cut that chartreuse color and use it in arrangements so think about colquitzia what a name i mean how can you remember that so beauty bush all right colquitzia and then um of course the the roses they're just now coming into bloom many of you went around the gardens and saw the rose collection that we have the early roses bloom with the peonies and they're a great combination to have and this is a a knockout type this one's called rainbow i know a lot of people have been concerned about rose rosette and i might just take a moment and talk about rose rosette this is on rose bushes where you see this very distorted foliage that comes out deep clusters of dark red foliage that that is a sign that the rose has rose rosette and if it has the virus there is no saving it and it should be ripped out and it should be burned like a heretic put put put on a funeral pyre and burn because it is carrying a virus that will spread to the next rows into the next rows into the next rose and what carries the virus is a tiny little mite that you cannot see with the naked eye and what we recommend people do and this is what we do here at moss mountain farm is that we cut our roses back in the winter the mite lives on the tips of the faux of the stems in the winter so we cut all our roses back we make sure we snip all the tips we burn those tips or we put them in a plastic garbage bags and put them in the dumpster and then what we do is we spray with a insecticide i mean a dormant oil which will suffocate any of the eggs of the mite or pupa any and also gets rid of a lot of fungus so horticultural oil very organic very green and just watch and if you begin to see some of this distorted foliage coming out on your roses you need to get rid of it there's no saving it and those mites will carry it over to the next but roses are a wonderful companion plant you can see just the color color here of this one this simple knockout it's got a slightly apricot color to it which i think is really lovely yeah very good well that's all we have for today thank you for joining the show and thank you for being here you and our live audience and for asking great questions at this first lunch and learn live studio at moss mountain farm and we hope you'll come back soon [Applause] [Music] hey if you like this video comment below and subscribe to my channel [Music]

Channel: P. Allen Smith

Views: 776,415

Keywords: growing peonies, Peony Origins, Peony planting tips, peony growing tips, peony shapes, peony faq, Peony History, peony varieties, arranging peonies, companion plants for peonies, cut peonies, Garden Home Vlog, p allen smith garden home, p allen smith, p. allen smith, moss mountain farm, perennials garden, garden home, gardening tips, garden tips, gardening ideas, gardening (interest), perennials flowers, perennials plants, companion planting, diy peony arrangement

Id: Yo_l0uDe2LY

Length: 29min 22sec (1762 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019