GREEN BAY — The backdrop at Corey Behnk's gardens is great (Lambeau Field!), but it's the green and gold on the other side of the fence along Lombardi Boulevard that really grabs your attention.
Yellow coreopsis flowers, fennel and dill for swallowtail butterflies, horseradish to spice up Green Bay Packers game-day Bloody Marys, fresh mustard greens for salads, lemon verbena for tea, goldenrod, grape vines, feverfew, 300 onions, 48 ​​hard-neck garlic cloves, peas, honeybees…
And that's just a partial list of the starting lineup.
The drivers zipping down Lombardi Avenue and the 80,000-plus fans filling the stadium are unaware of the growing and pollinating that goes on behind the white fence. Nothing is visible from the street, except for the giant sunflowers he plants one after another so they can pop out over the fence during training camp and the season opener. He calls them “Lambeau sunflowers.”
Even Behnke himself has days when he can't believe what he's created in just a few years.
The Cheesehead TV and LiveX co-founder never gardened in the 23 years he lived in New York City. When he bought a home on Shadow Lane in Lambeau's backyard in 2016, it was a dream come true for the Green Bay native and Packers fan, who commuted back and forth to New York for the first four years. When he and partner Rachel McCutchen expanded their New York-based production and broadcasting company, LiveX, to downtown Green Bay, they made the house their permanent residence.
The 2020 backyard looked like every other Shadow Lane backyard: large, open, with enough grass to host a tailgate party. Behnke admits he wasn't sure what to do when he first put up his raised vegetable beds. But he was soon clearing planting areas with a lawnmower, hand-cutting paver edging, ordering more beds, and creating a strategic, colorful maze of native plants, ornamentals, herbs, fruits, and vegetables to feed both himself and pollinators.
He joined the Gardeners Club of Green Bay, where he enjoyed the socializing and exchanging plants and knowledge (his garden is one of six private gardens featured in the club's Garden Walk on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.). He completed the University of Wisconsin Extension's online Master Gardener training program. He became a regular at Stone Silo Prairie Garden in Ledgeview, where owner Justin Kroening helped him satisfy his craving for native plants. He attended small local plant sales to get his hands on the best tomato and vegetable varieties that could be grown in Wisconsin.
In other words, he went all in.
“I'm not surprised, but it's kind of crazy. I don't do things half-heartedly. I'm a Type A personality,” he said. “I love it. I can't believe it took me this long to do this. I just love how it makes me feel and being out there.”
Milkweed, marshmallows, peppers, pollinators, and a little chaos
He grows everything from raspberries, rhubarb and heirloom strawberries to cucumbers, turnips, carrots, Swiss chard, peppers, potatoes (in pots) and corn. In February, he started three varieties of lettuce from seed in a cold frame. This year, he plans to try two beds of almond agaricus mushrooms.
“You'll see, but you'll just have to try and fail,” he said.
He quickly realized that growing his own food wasn't just about saving money, but about growing better-tasting produce. Commercially available crops are grown for shipping and storage, not flavor, he says. He can taste the difference in everything he grows, like the roasted “filler kraut” cabbage and steamed artichokes he shared with McCutchen for a recent dinner.
He uses white Vita vinyl raised beds with built-in compost baskets to fertilize his plants directly, a technique known as African keyhole gardening, and mixes pollinator-attracting plants with edible crops.
“I always say to people, 'If you're not going to have flowers on your vegetables, what are you doing?' You have to have something for the insects. You're gardening for the insects,” Behnke says. “People are so worried about insects, but you need flowers for pollination.”
The large pollinator garden, 20 feet by 30 feet, is filled with host and nectar plants, about 80 percent of which are native, and is home to honeybees and 17 species of butterflies, as well as lacewings, hoverflies, wasps and hornets.
“Host plants and nectar plants are like restaurants or hotels. They're giving them a little home so they think, 'This is a place I can live in and this is a place I can leave my kids in,'” he said.
He welcomes with a carpet of plants including rattlesnake master, lupine, giant coneflower, boneset, meadowsweet, hyssop, comfrey, Rocky Mountain bee plant, asters and “Magical Moonlight” buttonbush, too many to mention. Borage is one of his favorites, and he says it's underused as a great companion plant to vegetables.
He also grows milkweed to help dwindling monarch butterfly populations.
“Many people don't know that Wisconsin has 12 species of milkweed, six of which are very difficult to grow,” Behnke says.
His garden contains eight different types of weeds, including common weed, swamp weed, hawkweed, purple grass (an endangered species in Wisconsin) and butterfly weed.
“It's kind of like, you make it and hope they come,” Behnke said of attracting butterflies of all kinds.
His gardens also have an element of “chaos” – what he calls plants that suddenly appear the next season, reseeded in unexpected places – which he lets grow as “natural events”.
But don't be fooled: His garden also goes into a lot of thought and research. He planted milkweed along a north-south axis because he knows that's where monarch butterfly larvae and eggs will grow. He tracks the nectar available to pollinators from March through October to see where the holes are, paying particular attention to the beginning and end of the season when flowers tend to be scarce.
Plus: 'It's an obsession': Darryl and Judy Johnson's stunning garden in Allue is a 29-year labour of love
He also has a penchant for oddities you wouldn't find in most gardens.
He has six marshmallow plants, a perennial herb whose roots ancient Egyptians made marshmallows from long before people started putting Kraft Jet Puffs into s'mores, and he grows sea kale, which was hugely popular in European restaurants back in the day.
Behnke likes to dig into plant history to see how they were used hundreds of years ago.
“We're actually pretty ignorant about plants,” he says, popping a borage flower into his mouth. “The more we learn about plants, the more we realize we don't know what we don't know.”
Green Bay Packers employees visited, and so did the rabbits.
Gardening in the shadow of Lambeau Field is not without its challenges. Most of Behnke and McCutchen's neighbors rent homes on game days, which means their backyards are empty and undisturbed for much of the growing season. That's great for quiet gardening, but it also has its drawbacks.
“I don't know if you all know this, but Shadow Lane is rabbit haven because no one else lives there but us. Everybody rents, so there's no rabbit pressure,” Behnke said. “We had Rambo hawks, and they did a lot of damage.”
During Packers season, Behnke and Cheesehead TV co-founder Aaron Nagler will be streaming from a corner of the house's top patio, which offers a beautiful view of Lambeau as well as the gardens.
“The funny thing is, people say, 'Show me the yard. Can I see Corey's yard?' It happens all the time,” Behnke said.
He's made some gardening buddies through Cheesehead TV: former Packers offensive tackle David Bakhtiari and head coach Matt LaFleur have visited his backyard, and Packers staff members have come to look at the garden.
Behnke is always eager to add and try new things, and there's still plenty of room on the lawn to turn into a garden. This year, he created a buffer garden to highlight the lawn as a separate space.
“My girlfriend says we have to leave the area open because everyone has to play cornhole during the tailgate party, and I'm like, 'Let's just do cornhole once,'” Behnke said.
“The answer to most things about gardens is that we need more plants.”
Check out his garden and others on Saturday's Garden Walk
The Green Bay Gardeners Club Garden Walk will be held Saturday from 9am to 3pm, rain or shine, at six private gardens in Green Bay area neighborhoods. Featured gardens include:
Jason Switalski, 1369 Cherry St., Don and Mary Carlson, 2776 Canyon Bluff Road, Corey Behnke, 1213 Shadow Lane, Tim and Terri Verhasselt, 2889 Vercauteren Drive, Darryl and Judy Johnson, 240 Lazarre Ave., Steven and Lauretta Lambert, 1147 Porlier St.
Tickets can be purchased in advance at Larry's Bellevue Gardens and McAllister Landscape Supplies and Gift Shop for $15. Tickets on the day are $20 and can be purchased at any of the host gardens. Cash or check only. Ticket sales are limited to 750 people. Children under 10 and pets are not allowed. A portion of proceeds will go back into community gardening projects.
For more information and descriptions of each garden, visit gardenclubgreenbay.weebly.com
Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and features writer for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 orkmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com Follow her on XKendra Meinert.
