Christopher Farm & Gardens

We hope you have a great Memorial Day weekend with your friends and family! Enjoy seeing some of our spring florals here, and remember to take time to pause this weekend. Remember what our veterans - our country’s greatest - have done for all of us! 🇺🇸

You’ve heard “April showers bring May flowers.” Yeah, yeah. We’ll get to that! Instead, how about “March snow starts the show!” ❄️🌸
On March 16th, just 11 days ago, we recieved 10 inches of snow! All that snow melt, sunshine, and warm breezes near the lakeshore must have been just what these plants were waiting for! This week, we’ve seen these crocuses & winter wolf’s bane make their entrance onto the spring stage. Keep your eyes peeled this weekend for the first flowers of spring in your area!

We are still accepting applications for a few open positions needing to be filled in the Gardens! Who wouldn't want to spend each day surrounded by growing things?! 🌻

Greenscape is hiring 2 landscape positions:
1- Horticulturalist that includes a diverse workload of hard scaping & maintenance &
2- a vegetable grower- planting and caring for vegetables and fruit. To find out more check out Indeed and look for these amazing opportunities. Pass this along to any friend who may be on the lookout for a new job!

Vegetable Grower @ The Christopher Farm & Gardens - Sheboygan, WI 53083 - Indeed.com Greenscape Lawn-Landscaping, LLC

We've been enjoying this maple syrup season so far! There are 22 taps on our sugar maples this year and we have already collected & cooked enough sap to yield two gallons of syrup. Since it's about 40 gallons of sap to boil down per one gallon of syrup, that means we've collected about 80 gallons of sap from our 22 trees.
The season begins with tapping trees and inserting spiles for the sap to flow through into our collection buckets. Sap is stored until it can be put through our reverse osmosis system, which removes about 50% of the water content. Then the sap is filtered and cooked in our evaporator pan. Syrup is finished on the stove top in the kitchen, where we watch the boiling temperature until 211 degrees Fahrenheit is reached. Then we begin using a syrup hydrometer to monitor the density of the syrup. When the hydrometer displays a reading of 66% on the Brix scale (a measure of soluble solids in water) the syrup is ready for one last round of filtration and then on to bottling.
For sap to flow up our maple trees, our daytime temperatures must be above freezing, followed by below freezing nighttime temperatures. With the incoming wintry weather, we may have to press pause on our maple syrup making venture until the world thaws and the trees "wake up again!" 🍁

There are some exciting open positions needing to be filled in the Gardens! Greenscape is hiring 2 landscape positions. 1- Horticulturalist that includes a diverse workload of hard scaping & maintenance & 2- a vegetable grower- planting and caring for vegetables and fruit. To find out more check out Indeed and look for these amazing opportunities.

https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=45f1e81c3cd5ac86&from=shareddesktop_copy&fbclid=IwY2xjawQb8nxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR6S8FF_3aupL8HT1vQTX5t7EP-7KxOM74nHatlKyUJd56Cy7JJtC_SoFx6qOQ_aem_n5hsojwFEnH4aeUFBvNR0Q

Vegetable Grower @ The Christopher Farm & Gardens - Sheboygan, WI 53083 - Indeed.com Greenscape Lawn-Landscaping, LLC

The first bonfire of the year, under a full moon?! Check!✅
The Sheboygan Sheboygan County Cancer Care Fund's "Survive, Thrive & Be Fit" group took advantage of the sunshine in the afternoon this past Tuesday by walking the gardens and playing lawn games together. When it got dark, they kept warm around the fire, with great company, as they watched the full moon rise over Lake Michigan. We're looking forward to more bonfires, game nights & garden projects with this wonderful group of people this year!

We are lucky to witness the rare blooming of our Blue Glow Agave plant, which has lived in our greenhouse for many years!
Agave plants are in the Asparagacea family, which includes asparagus, hostas, spider plants & about 2,500 other species. This specific type blooms only once in its life, after 10-30 years of growing, and the bloom can last from a couple of weeks to months. The bloom stalk here grew so rapidly over the last month that the stalk has now reached the ceiling of our greenhouse! Our staff gave it a little help by using suspended wire to stabilize the stalk.
While most agave species have their flowers pollinated by nighttime pollinators, this one would typically be visited by hummingbirds, bees and other daytime pollinators. We could have made tequila from this plant if we had harvested its inner bulb, but taking shots of this momentous blooming phase, and sharing the photos with you, our viewers, has been a party of its own kind!
This is actually a bittersweet moment in this plant’s lifecycle. Because of the intense energy expenditure it takes for the plant to bloom, the plant will die soon after. However, its very last stand will be to produce offsets, called “aerial bulbils”, to propogate new baby plants, ensuring its lineage will continue on! 🌱💚

Earlier this week, we installed a few mason bee houses around the gardens! Mason bees are much smaller than honey bees or bumble bees, and are especially effective at pollinating early-blooming plants and trees like apples, cherries & pears. These mason bees will hatch in March and give our fruit trees a boost on pollination before many other insects even emerge. Mason bees are quite calm, rarely stinging, require low-maintenance year-to-year, and are excellent pollinators for small areas within 300 feet of their homes. They could be the perfect addition for your garden or backyard oasis!
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