GREEN BAY - As awesome as the backdrop to Corey Behnke’s garden is — it’s Lambeau Field! — the green and gold on the other side of the fence along Lombardi Avenue is what really gets your attention.
Yellow coreopsis flowers, fennel and dill for swallowtail butterflies, horseradish for spicing up Green Bay Packers game-day bloody marys, fresh mustard greens for salads, lemon verbena for tea, goldenrod, grapevines, feverfew, 300 onions, 48 heads of hardneck garlic, peas, bees ...
And that’s just the starting lineup.
Drivers whizzing by on Lombardi and crowds of 80,000-plus packing the stadium have no idea that behind the stretch of white fence a whole world of growing and pollinating is going on. None of it is visible from the street, except for the giant sunflowers he succession sows so they can poke their heads over the fence for training camp and the start of the season. He calls those his “Lambeau sunflowers.”
Some days it’s hard for even Behnke to believe what he’s created in a few short years.
The co-founder of Cheesehead TV and Live X never gardened during the 23 years he lived in New York. When he bought a house in 2016 on Shadow Lane in Lambeau’s backyard, it was a dream come true for the Green Bay native and Packers fan, who commuted back and forth from New York for the first four years. When he expanded the NYC-based Live X, a production and broadcast company, to downtown Green Bay, he and his partner, Rachel McCutchen, made the house their full-time residence.
The backyard in 2020 looked like many others on Shadow Lane — big, open and with a lot of grass for hosting tailgates. Behnke admits he had no idea what he was doing when he put in his first raised bed for vegetables, but it wasn’t long before he was using a sod cutter to carve out planting spaces, laying paver borders by hand and ordering more raised beds to create a strategic and eclectic maze of natives, ornamentals, herbs, fruits and vegetables that feed both him and the pollinators.
He joined The Gardeners Club of Green Bay and loved the socializing and swapping of plants and knowledge. (His is one of six private gardens featured on the club’s garden walk from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday). He completed the online master gardener training program through the University of Wisconsin-Extension. He became a regular at Stone Silo Prairie Gardens in Ledgeview, where owner Justin Kroening has helped feed his appetite for native plants. He hit up small community plant sales to get the best varieties of tomatoes and veggies to grow in Wisconsin.
In other words, he went all-in.
“I’m not surprised, but it is kind of crazy. I never do anything half-ass. I’m a Type A (personality) so ...” he said. “I love it. I can’t believe it took me this long to do it. I just love how it makes me feel and to get outdoors.”
Milkweed, marshmallow, peppers, pollinators and a little 'chaos'
He grows everything from raspberries, rhubarb and native strawberries to cucumbers, turnips, carrots, Swiss chard, peppers, potatoes (in pots) and corn. He did three varieties of lettuce from seed in cold frames in February. He is giving two beds of almond agaricus mushrooms a shot this year.
“You know how it is, you’ve got to just try to fail,” he said.
He quickly realized growing your own food isn’t about saving money, it’s about growing better-tasting food. Commercial food is grown not for its flavor, but its ability to be transported and to last, he said. He can taste the difference in everything he grows, like the roasted “Filderkraut” cabbage and steamed artichoke he and McCutchen had for dinner the other night.
He uses white Vita vinyl raised beds with built-in compost baskets to directly feed the plants, a technique known as African keyhole gardening. Pollinator-attracting plants are mixed in among the food crops.
“I always tell people, ‘If you’re not putting flowers in your veggies, what are you doing?’ You have to create things for insects. You’re gardening for insects,” Behnke said. “People are so worried about insects, but you need flowers for pollination.”
A large 20-foot-by-30-foot pollinator garden is filled with host and nectar plants, about 80 percent of them natives, to support not only bees and 17 species of butterflies but also green lacewings, hoverflies, wasps and hornets.
“The host and nectar plants are really like restaurants and hotels. You’re trying to give them a little home to be like, ‘Hey, you can live here. You can put your kids here,’” he said.
He rolls out the welcome mat with rattlesnake master, lupine, giant coneflower, boneset, meadowsweet, hyssop, comfrey, Rocky Mountain bee plant, asters and “Magical Moonlight” buttonbush, to name a few. Borage is one of his favorites and often underused as a great companion plant for vegetables, he said.
He also has milkweed to help out the declining populations of monarch butterflies.
“A lot of people don’t know there’s 12 different native milkweeds to Wisconsin. Six of them are hard as sh-- to grow, by the way,” Behnke said.
He has eight of them in his garden, including common, swamp, showy, purple (endangered in Wisconsin) and butterfly weed.
“It’s a build-it-I-hope-they-come kind of a thing,” Behnke said of attracting all kinds of butterflies.
There’s also a dash of “chaos” in his garden. That’s what he calls plants that reseed and pop up in an unplanned spot the next season. He lets them grow, because “nature did it.”
But don’t be fooled, there’s also a great deal of thought and study to his garden. He planted milkweed on a north/south axis, as it has been shown to result in more monarch caterpillars and eggs. He tracks the nectar he has available to pollinators from March through October, so he can see where the holes are, paying special attention to early and late in the season when there tend to be fewer blooms
More: 'It's an obsession': Darryl and Judy Johnson's stunning showpiece gardens in Allouez have been a labor of love for 29 years
He also has a soft spot for some of the weird stuff you’re not likely to find in most gardens.
He has six marshmallow plants, a perennial herb with a root the ancient Egyptians made marshmallow from long before people were sandwiching Kraft Jet-Puffeds in their s’mores. The sea kale he’s growing was the bomb in European restaurants once upon a time.
Behnke likes to dig into plants’ histories and find out how they were used hundreds of years ago.
“We’re actually dumb to plants,” he said, popping a borage flower into his mouth. “The more you learn about plants, the more you realize you don’t know what you don’t know.”
Green Bay Packers employees have visited, and so have the rabbits
Gardening in the shadow of Lambeau Field is not without its challenges. Most of Behnke and McCutchen’s neighbors are game-day rental houses, which means a lot of empty, undisturbed backyards during much of the growing season. That’s great for peaceful gardening, but it comes with a drawback.
“I don’t know if you know this, but Shadow Lane is bunny central, because no one lives here but us. Everybody rents, so there’s no bunny pressure,” Behnke said. “We had a Lambeau hawk, and he did some good damage.”
During Packers season, Behnke and his Cheesehead TV co-founder Aaron Nagler stream from a spot on the house’s upper patio. It offers not just a sweet view of Lambeau but also the gardens.
“It’s funny, because people will be like, ‘Let’s see the garden. Can we see Corey’s garden?' It happens all the time,” Behnke said.
He’s made some gardening friends through Cheesehead TV. Former Packers offensive tackle David Bakhtiari and head coach Matt LaFleur have been in his backyard, and members of the Packers staff have come over specifically to check out the garden.
There is still plenty of lawn that could be turned into garden to keep pace with Behnke’s enthusiasm for always adding and trying more. He put in a buffer garden this year to set off the grass as its own space.
“My girlfriend is telling me that I have to keep this area, because people have to play cornhole during tailgates. I’m like, ‘Let’s only do one cornhole,'" Behnke said.
“You know the answer to most things about a garden is you need more plants.”
See his garden and others on Saturday's garden walk
The Gardeners Club of Green Bay’s Garden Walk is 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, rain or shine, at six private gardens within close proximity to each other in the Green Bay area. Featured gardens are:
- 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 are $15 in advance at Larry’s Bellevue Gardens and McAllister Landscape Supplies and Gift Shop. Tickets are $20 day of and available at any of the host gardens. Cash or check only. Ticket sales are limited to 750 people. No children younger than 10; no pets. A portion of proceeds go back into community gardening projects.
For more information and descriptions of each garden, visit gardenclubgreenbay.weebly.com .
Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or kmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com . Follow her on X @KendraMeinert .
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Cheesehead TV's Corey Behnke gardens for pollinators and for flavor, and all with a prime view of Lambeau Field
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