Starting a Peony Farm

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Home & Garden, Education, Leisure, How To

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Planting peonies in a half acre plot can provide a lifetime return. Here, Karen Gesa of Midsommar Farm discusses how she started her peony operation, from sourcing plants to plotting the landscape. Epic Gardening Shop Homepage: https://growepic.co/46cH3z8 Botanical Interests Shop Homepage: https://growepic.co/476OjxY Book Collection Page: https://growepic.co/46824uL EG Homesteading Book: https://growepic.co/3QB5b97 Learn More: 11 Tips For Beautiful Peony Blooms This Season Connect With Karen Gesa: Karen Gesa (pronounced Jessa) is the owner of Midsommar Farm, a part-time 1/2 acre peony farm in northern Virginia. Karen is passionate about spreading the word about this business model as she's found it to be a great income with minimal investment of time, money, space, and know-how. Or, if you're not interested in selling, how to create a private peony cutting garden and fill your home with fresh bouquets all spring. Instagram Facebook Website Karen’s Book Shop the Store As an exclusive for listeners, use code THEBEET for 5% off your entire order on our store, featuring our flagship Birdies Raised Beds. These are the original metal raised beds, lasting up to 5-10x longer than wooden beds, are ethically made in Australia, and have a customizable modular design. Shop now and get 5% off your first order. Get Our Books Looking for a beginner's guide to growing food in small spaces? Kevin’s book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening, explains the core, essential information that you'll need to grow plants, no matter where you live! He also wrote Grow Bag Gardening to provide you with specialized knowledge that can bring you success when growing in fabric pots. Preorder Kevin’s newest book Epic Homesteading if you are looking to turn your home into a thriving homestead! Order signed copies of Kevin’s books, plus more of his favorite titles in our store. More Resources Looking for more information? Follow us: Our Blog YouTube (Including our Epic Homesteading and Jacques in the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	After yesterday's episode I myself may have been convinced to start a peony farm.
0:18.6	Maybe in the little test plot here in the epic homesteading backyard, we have Karen Jesser,
0:22.4	back on the show the owner of
0:23.8	Midsummer Farm which is a part-time half-acre peony farm we talked
0:28.0	yesterday Karen about kind of the inception of of that
0:35.0	I kind of want to explore, let's say someone's just actually convinced they're like,
0:36.0	you know what, I only needed to listen to eight minutes yesterday and I'm ready to go.
0:40.0	How would you begin? Assume someone doesn't even know what peonies are at all and they just want to get into it.
0:47.0	Where would someone start if they've got some land?
0:50.2	Yeah, well one of the things I love about them and this business model is that you don't need a whole lot of know-how they're really forgiving their perennials
0:58.8	So it's it's really quite easy to get started, but to answer your question, I mean, if you had,
1:05.0	let's say an eighth of an acre backyard,
1:08.4	that I think I did the math for when I was looking into this,
1:11.4	that you could fit about 100 peony if you went just around the perimeter fence or something you know
1:18.0	So let's say you had a hundred peony plant just going around your fence
1:22.3	Whether or not you wanted some landscape fabric to kind of keep the
1:25.9	weeds down that would be up to you. It's kind of optional. But you would need the
1:30.6	plants and a pair of clippers and like a shovel and then you need to wait.
1:35.3	That's the only kind of tricky part they are not able to harvest from for the first few years.
1:42.1	So they need to get big enough to harvest from. Yeah. So can you buy
1:46.3	them at such a size where you could skip that or no? You can. Yeah you can. They're just more expensive and they're usually
1:54.2	potted and so it's just a bigger expenditure. Sure, yeah, so if you're
	...

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