By Jacqueline McDonough

Homer Independent Press

Summer may be in full swing, but some growers in the Homer area are facing the repercussions of cold temperatures and low snow cover last winter. Many have reported significant winter losses of their tubers and bulbs, meaning fewer blooms for the peony market or in local gardens. 

Alaska Beauty Peony, a co-op of peony farms, announced last week that last winter’s weather caused a delay in growth as well as widespread rootstock death that is projected to result in a loss of 25 percent of their stem production. The farms emphasized their commitment to fulfilling all existing orders, with bridal boxes and subscription orders prioritized, although they will not accept new orders until Aug. 11, depending on availability.

“I think I’ve had about 15 percent just dead roots, and then in some plants 10 percent lost production,” said Allison Gaylord, executive director of the cooperative. 

She spoke as she scoured her Willow Drive Gardens fields for promising buds for a local wedding the next day. Most of her peony plants, though behind schedule, looked vigorous, but several rows had plants with just a few stunted stems or nothing at all. She snipped a stem with an appealing bulge of a bud.

“We’re totally scrounging… I’ll put this in water and hope it opens for the wedding tomorrow. We’ve had a few emergency wedding calls, and we’re just trying to get everybody flowers,” she said.

Gaylord considers it the worst winter she’s had in 14 years of peony farming at her 800-foot elevation farm. Instead of 10 or more stems, cold-affected plants grow only one or two stems, and those plants might need eight years of recovery before regaining commercial production levels, she explained. Most farmers cannot wait that long and must consider replanting.

Rita Jo Schoultz, co-owner of Alaska’s first commercial peony farm, Alaska Perfect Peony, attributes the disparity in amount of winter kill to several factors: differences in location, variety, maturity of plant, drainage and winter weather. The four acres of peonies on her 25-acre farm in Fritz Creek experienced a 20 percent loss, but she has heard that other peony farmers between Homer and Anchorage have seen a 40 to 70 percent crop loss this season. 

“If you look at the advertisements, you’ll see that peonies are hardy to 30 below. Well, that’s not always how they work out,” Schoultz said.

Schoultz has spent 60 years in Alaska, the last 20 growing and promoting what she calls “the second most popular flower in the world after the rose.” She has done much experimentation in fields and high tunnels, learning from and teaching other peony farmers. She called this year’s growth “topsy-turvy,” with some later varieties maturing early and earlier varieties coming later. While she admits last winter was very cold with little snow, she pointed to certain peony fields she has where the plants are thriving and doesn’t know exactly why some fared better than others. 

“There are definitely microclimates. This to me is clear,” agreed Gaylord. “I mean, there’s six farms that lost one variety, and then I walk through Rita Jo’s fields, and it’s fine. That was really interesting for me.”

Microclimates aside, the general Homer area saw many below zero days last winter. According to monthly statewide climate summaries from the Alaska Climate Research Center, December’s average monthly temperature in Homer was 9.3 degrees Fahrenheit, lower than normal for the city.

January continued the trend, with an average monthly temperature 4.5 degrees below normal, although that figure belies how frigid it was during an early cold snap. Jan. 8, 2026, broke the local record for that particular day, rising from an overnight temp of 1 to a balmy 12 degrees. The average of -5.5 over the course of Jan. 8 beat the record set for that day in 1952. February was 1.8 degrees lower overall than normal, and by the time March treated cold-weary Homerites to 11.8 degrees below normal monthly temps, the damage on bulbs, tubers and subterranean root systems had happened.

This extreme cold was coupled with a lack of protective snow cover. The Alaska Climate Research Center reported that December in Homer was extremely dry, with gardens receiving 11 percent of normal precipitation compared to the 30- year average. January and February also were below average. 

Snow cover can vary greatly depending on aspect and elevation, but publicly available data from the National Water and Climate Center’s McNeil Canyon monitoring station reveal that by the first day of 2026, only four inches of snow was on the ground, one of the lowest amounts on record. Normal snow depth on New Year’s Day over the last 30 years has been around 1.5 feet.

Daniel Fisher, the Alaska Snow Survey Program Manager for U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, would not call last year’s snow pack on the lower peninsula unusual but said “it was a low snow year without a doubt.” 

For long-term monitoring purposes, his agency maintains two snow telemetry sites, at McNeil Canyon and one to the north at the Anchor River Divide, and coordinates monthly measurements at three other nearby sites throughout the snowy part of the year. 

Although the NRCS snowpack measurement is more descriptive of water content than actual snow depth, Fisher said that sites in the local area reached one quarter to one half of the average peak snowpack by the spring. 

“Homer Demonstration Forest had its seventh lowest year in 50 years, and Bridge Creek had its third lowest year in 55 years,” Fisher said.

Perhaps the Alaska Snow Survey Report, published by the NRCS this spring as a retrospective on 75 years of snow surveying in the state, summarized it best:

“The winter of 2025-2026 in Alaska was a doozy. Unrelenting cold. Extraordinary wind in the ordinary gap locations. And snowfall distribution that seemed unfair … These are the winters that weed out the people that are on the fence about a life in Alaska.”

Peonies have not been the only plant affected by the cold and dry winter. Kyra Wagner, manager of the Homer Soil & Water Conservation District, explained that the lack of snow cover combined with the length of the cold spells allowed frost to penetrate as far as 8 feet down in the city, much deeper than the 4-foot freeze depth that locals normally anticipate. As a result, she has been getting a lot of phone calls about unhealthy trees.

“One side effect has been that native spruce trees have been super stressed. They’ve been showing more susceptibility this year to needle drop, rust and spruce bud worm,”  Wagner said.

Louise Ashmun, who gardens in Homer at around 400 feet elevation, reported that perennial flowers in her plots came up three to four weeks late, looking particularly “sparse” and blooming on much shorter stems. She estimated that 25 percent of her perennials, such as bleeding hearts, creeping phlox and primroses, came back in reduced numbers, and another 20 perent did not come back at all. These no-shows included clematis, Shasta daisy and dianthus.

Francie Roberts, another Homer lower bench area gardener, noticed similar delays as well as losses of normally hardy plants like sorrel, coltsfoot and strawberries. She reported losing about 80 percent of her fall-planted garlic. 

“Folks who live and garden at higher elevations (1,000 plus feet) had fewer losses despite much colder temps for a longer period,” Ashmun said, reflecting on discussions with other members of the Homer Garden Club. “They speculate that because they got more snow cover than at lower elevations their plants were better insulated.”

However, not all higher elevation gardeners were that lucky. “Brutal” is the word Kathy Dubé used for last winter’s conditions at her home at about 1300 feet near McNeil Canyon. Besides having her plumbing pipes freeze below her house, she estimated she lost 95 percent of her spring bulbs, like daffodils, crocus, anemone, grape hyacinth and tulips. Hundreds of bulbs did not survive the deep freeze and low snow cover.

“It was very discouraging since this was 12 years’ worth of developing the flower beds. But that’s gardening!” Dubé said. She noted that some flowers did flourish, like shooting stars, columbine and monkshood, as well as native chocolate lily and fireweed.

Unlike many hobby gardeners, commercial peony farmers will have to reckon with the financial ramifications of this past winter. Alison Gaylord believes there may be 83 varieties of peony being grown in the local area, but “they’re all these oddball varieties that I think are just not Alaska hardy.” Her plan is to re-assess which varieties make sense on her farm and go from there.

In the Alaska Interior where deep freezes are more common, Gaylord says farmers will insulate their peony tubers by putting straw over their fields. 

“But that’s a lot of labor and expense, and then, you know, you gotta remove it all, it makes a mess,” Gaylord said. 

Some Homer farmers do a top dressing with wood chips, sand or compost; others modify their drainage or the width of their beds to withstand a cold snap. Gaylord even knows of one Sterling farmer who tucks peonies in for the winter using concrete welding blankets. However, all of these solutions cost time and money.

This is complicated by the lack of a federal emergency program for cut flowers, as horticulture does not qualify for the crop insurance or relief programs that food farmers can apply for. Schoultz has been advocating in Washington for flower growers since 1983, and she hopes to make a case for financial assistance for flower farmers after this difficult year. 

This April, peony growers learned that they could apply for USDA Disaster Relief appropriations funding through the Alaska Division of Agriculture to bounce back from rootstock losses caused during the winters of 2023 and 2024. These were years when peony farmers further up the peninsula and in Fairbanks were hit hard. Schoultz and Gaylord both hope that this program can be extended to 2026 to help Homer area farmers.

“Just to replace 200 plants, it’s 15 bucks a root plus the cut time — the labor to dig these out and put new ones in — it costs about 6000 bucks to replace 200 roots, which is not cost effective. So the folks that are older are probably not going to replant. It’s just not penciling out,” Gaylord said. One grower she knows in Anchor Point had 4,000 peony roots but now is down to a couple hundred. He told her that he makes more money on cabbages, so he’s not replanting.

“A lot of folks are giving up. A lot of people got into this late in life after they retired from their first career, and 10 or 15 years later with this [winter], some lost up to 90 percent,” Gaylord said. 

She knows some will downsize their operations, and others will sell to a new generation of farmers who are enthusiastic to start. She laughs at the image of peony farming as wandering in fields of many colors under bluebird skies. Her daily outfits are as likely to be Grundens fishing gear on rainy days or insulated coveralls for work in the 34-degree refrigeration units.

“Folks are excited about [farming], and I don’t want to diminish their excitement by any means,” Gaylord said. “But those of us who have been doing it for a while have just seen a lot of pitfalls. It’s high risk because of the weather, it’s high risk because of freight challenges, market changes, COVID, tariffs, so it feels like we’re constantly pivoting. We have managed to, but it’s not for everybody.”

The cold and snowless winter did not discourage Rita Jo Schoultz, who will continue some of her marketing and advocacy activities for the Alaska peony industry. However, the octogenarian and her son Shannon are planning to step back at the end of this season from the peony harvesting and sales that have consumed most of her daylight hours for the last 20 summers. 

“It’s been fun, I love to teach, but my son and I are tired,” she said.

For a more in-depth look at snow pack and winter temperatures on the lower Kenai Peninsula, a good summary can be found in the Alaska Snow Survey Report released this May by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.