Brad Fluetsch has been growing peonies at his home in North Douglas since 1992 and they do really well. So well, people have asked to buy them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve turned down people wanting them for their weddings. My wife doesn\u2019t want to sell them out of the garden. They\u2019re hers,\u201d Fluetsch said.<\/p>\n
Over the years, their peony garden has grown to about 75 different plants of various types, including the white Duchess de Nemour, Bowl of Cream and Henry Sass, the pink Sarah Bernhardt and the vibrant red Felix Supreme.<\/p>\n
A few miles farther out on North Douglas Highway and a 20-minute squishy walk toward Gastineau Channel will take you to Fluetsch\u2019s other plot of the large, fragrant flower \u2014 and these he has every intention of selling.<\/p>\n
Fluetsch is a financial analyst and has spent time thinking about alternative ways to use land.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you start looking at raspberries, blueberries and other agricultural crops, and you wonder, \u2018What\u2019s the value of this?\u2019 There\u2019s nothing that comes close to the value of peony revenues per acre,\u201d he said while walking around the plot last week. \u201cAnd the other thing about them is, once they\u2019re established, they\u2019re maintenance free. You have to come out and feed them and trim them up and stuff, but they\u2019re not demanding plants at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
A peony flower wholesales between $2 to $5. Depending on the type of peony, Fluetsch is projecting between $60,000 to $120,000 of revenue an acre.<\/p>\n
Fluetsch and his wife Kathy Dye started Rainforest Peonies in August 2014. Their partners are Frank Bergstrom and Pat Belec. After logging six acres of land along the channel, Fluetsch and his partners planted 300 Sarah Bernhardt peony roots from Holland last October on a fraction of an acre. Another 600 more roots will be planted this fall.<\/p>\n
Sarah Bernhardt is the \u201cmoney standard of the peony,\u201d Fluetsch said. Big and light pink with a peppermint smell, Sarah Bernhardts are sought-after for weddings. Peony farms are already established in other parts of the state, like Kenai, Mat-Su and Fairbanks, and Fluetsch is hoping to continue the trend in Southeast.<\/p>\n
According to the Alaska Peony Growers Association website, Alaska peonies tend to bloom when there are no other peonies available to the market. A bloom period of late June through August and into September \u201cmakes it possible to supply these highly desirable flowers to markets when there is little direct competition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even though Fluetsch\u2019s crop already started blooming around June 20, Rainforest Peonies doesn\u2019t plan to have their first commercial harvest until 2019. It\u2019ll take that long for the peonies to mature and get to the right sellable standards.<\/p>\n
\u201cInch-and-a-half to two-inch ball, 32-inch stem, clean leaves,\u201d Fluetsch said. \u201cThat\u2019s pretty much the only thing the distributors will want. They only take the very, very absolute best.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peonies are harvested as closed balls, before bloom, and the ball should feel soft, like a marshmallow. Fluetsch said it only takes one petal to come out for a peony to go from commercial grade to non-exportable.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs soon as we harvest them, they\u2019ll go onto a refrigerated container and the plan is to take them by skiff over to downtown in 150 stem boxes,\u201d Fluetsch explained.<\/p>\n
From there, they\u2019ll go to the airport and flown on a midnight FedEx flight to Anchorage where they\u2019ll be distributed down south. For the lesser quality stems, Fluetsch said he\u2019s hoping to sell to local bed and breakfast businesses.<\/p>\n
The peonies are planted in rows of raised beds, a mixture of dirt that was at the site and sand, covered in black plastic. By 2019, each of the original 300 plants could produce 10 stems.<\/p>\n
\u201cI expect to see a solid row of green with big pink balls sticking up,\u201d Fluetsch said.<\/p>\n
Until then, he\u2019s been cutting the blooms off to make sure all the energy goes back to the roots.<\/p>\n
After the planting of 600 more roots this fall, Rainforest Peonies could have up to 9,000 stems in 2020.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we doubled this planting area, that means we\u2019ll have 1,800 plants and 18,000 stems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
At this point, Fluetsch is targeting 3,000 plants per acre, which is a conservative amount; other farms have upwards of double that per acre. With six acres logged, there\u2019s still plenty of potential left. He said he wants to also start growing white peonies, which fetch more money on the market.<\/p>\n
While a multi-year wait for peonies to become marketable may seem long, Fluetsch is a patient man.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou plant it, you wait your five years and then you have an annuity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
And Fluetsch isn\u2019t worried about the demand going away.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs long as there are weddings, I have a market.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact reporter Lisa Phu at 523-2246 and lisa.phu@juneauempire.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brad Fluetsch has been growing peonies at his home in North Douglas since 1992 and they do really well. So well, people have asked to buy them. \u201cWe\u2019ve turned down people wanting them for their weddings. My wife doesn\u2019t want to sell them out of the garden. They\u2019re hers,\u201d Fluetsch said. Over the years, their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":6161,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-6160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6160"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=6160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}