Imagine, if you can, hundreds of people coming up your driveway each spring, money in hand, eager to buy your flowers. Some buy up to 40 bunches, and most buy five to 10 bunches—at $9 per bunch.

That’s the typical Memorial Day weekend at Sunnydale Spring and Peony Farm in Valley Center, Kansas, owned by five members of the Jackson family. For more than 50 years, the Jacksons have been supplying peonies to people in the Wichita area who observe the tradition of putting peonies on the graves of their loved ones. Now, increasingly, they are supplying peonies for weddings and parties as well.

With about 2.5 acres of mature peonies, the Jacksons sell between 2,000 and 3,000 bunches each year. All are sold locally. And most are sold right on the farm.

Not that the peony business is easy. The relatively simple marketing is the result of decades of hard work and months of backbreaking labor each year. But it’s rewarding enough that the whole family keeps doing it year after year, and one of the couples enjoys it so much that they have started their own flower farm separate from the family business.

“We’re trying to get this going so in five years, Randy can semi-retire,” said Debbie Jackson as she walks through the extensive gardens behind their house, which is just down the road from Randy’s mother Wilma Jackson and the peony operation.

Wilma inherited the peony business from her father, Harold Fryar, who bought the farm in 1953. The 160-acre farm had one acre of peonies, about 3,000 plants. At that time, many Kansas farms had a few acres of peonies that farmers sold in full bloom to decorate cemeteries on Memorial Day. That traditional use for peonies declined, though, as people started moving around more, usually far from their family graves. Although it’s common to find peonies planted around old farmhouses throughout the state, the acres of plants have disappeared from most farms.
But Sunnydale Spring kept their peonies and expanded their acreage, as Harold’s daughter Wilma Jackson and then her two children, Randy Jackson and Nancy Harimon and their spouses, joined in the business. The biggest boon to the venture was the discovery that peonies will keep for months in cold storage if picked at the right stage. The Jacksons built a big cooler with wooden racks labeled by color, where wrapped bunches of peonies are stored lying flat and sold directly from the cooler. The cooler can get down to 38 to 40°F— they would prefer it to be a bit colder, but they’ve had problems with the coils icing at lower temperatures. When the peonies are brought out of storage, stems are recut and placed in water, and the flowers will open fully within a day with very little if any reduction in vase life.

The cooler has allowed the Jacksons to sell their peony harvest over a much longer season, usually through the end of June. The result is that they have an incentive to harvest every stem and get it bunched, wrapped and in the cooler. And with 2.5 acres of peonies, that means a lot of picking in a short amount of time.

“We start picking around May 6 and our main picking happens in seven to 10 days,” Debbie Jackson says.
Picking at just the right stage is a skill that develops with experience. The correct time to pick is often described as the “marshmallow stage” when the expanding buds are as soft as a marshmallow. On a warm spring day, the buds can develop so quickly that flowers that weren’t ready at 10 in the morning will be ready at 4 in the afternoon. As soon as the peonies are cut, they are taken to the barn, sorted and bunched into 10 stem bunches,then placed in a BOPP polyethylene sleeve, with the cut stem ends sticking out the bottom and the top of the sleeve folded and stapled shut.

The single biggest question the Jacksons get about their peonies pertains to ants. People believe that peonies always have ants on them. “We see a lot of ants when we are debudding in the spring because the buds are tight and have a lot of sap on them,” Debbie said. “But by the time we’re picking them, there are very few ants. And if there were the cold storage would take care of that.”

Debudding is probably the most difficult part of peony production. Each stem produces a terminal bud and several side buds, which must be pinched off in April to allow the main flower to get big. Peony plants are just the right height that reaching down and debudding them can cause some serious back strain for adults. The Jacksons have solved the problem by hiring several groups of homeschooling families to debud the plants.

“The children are lower to the ground,” Debbie says. “If we can keep them out there an hour at a time, we can get a lot accomplished.”

Peony plants will live for decades—some of Sunnydale Springs’ original peony plants, started in 1917, are still producing. Wilma says she has counted up to 60 buds on some of those old plants.

But the oldest plantings are a mixture of varieties, which makes picking them less efficient. The newer plantings are more orderly, so the pickers can move quickly down the rows of those that are ready and come back with armloads of flowers.

One of Debbie’s favorite varieties is Coral Charm, which is an early variety, 36 inches tall with semi-double coral-peach flowers. “Florists really like them,” Debbie says. She is also trying to increase her stock of Red Charm, another expensive variety that has deep red ruffled petals.

Other varieties that Debbie recommends for cut flowers: Monsieur Jules Elie, a pink bomb type; Reine Hortense, a pink double; Shawnee Chief, a red double; Snow Mountain, a snow-white bomb type; Madame DeVerneville, a white double with red flecks.

More flowers
Randy and Debbie Jackson have been expanding their own flower business, Chisholm Creek Flowers, named for the creek that runs through the farm. They now produce a wide variety of flowers over a long season. They sell at the Old Town Farmers’ Market in Wichita, which provides about two-thirds of their revenue, and to florists in their area.

Outdoors, in the field behind their house, they grow lots of larkspur, zinnias, sunflowers, celosia, tuberose, Asiatic lilies, solidago, salvia, and other summer annuals. The soil is naturally very dense clay, but Randy and Debbie have worked a lot of compost into their flower beds. They have had great success with some more difficult flowers including the giant eremurus and spuria iris.

They also have two unheated 20×50 hoophouses where they grow more delicate crops. One big surprise has been the success of calla lilies in the hoophouse. Both the white flowers and the big speckled leaves are popular. The hoophouses are also used for Bells of Ireland and lisianthus.

Randy and Debbie are looking forward to spending even more time in the flower business, now that all three of their children are out of high school. Both continue to have jobs in town — Randy for the Farm Credit System and Debbie at a tax preparation firm.

“We continue to try different flowers to see what grows well in this area and to try different ways to market our crop,” Debbie said. “It’s definitely a learning curve, but one we truly enjoy. Our biggest challenge is deciding whether to keep the operation at a level we can handle on our own or expand to the point where we need to hire outside labor.”

The Jacksons can be reached at peonyfarm@aol.com.