WELCOME TO VOORHEES GREENHOUSES!

Thank you for visiting us today! We want to take a moment to tell you a little about our business. We are a wholesale greenhouse that has been growing Easter plants, spring and summer flowering plants and vegetables, fall mums and poinsettias for 21 years. Voorhees Greenhouses began in the spring of 1998 when Peter and his brother, David, rented a 1 acre greenhouse in Englishtown, NJ. In 2000, Carl Blasig, of Carl Blasig Greenhouses, offered an opportunity to take over his 3 acre greenhouse. Peter and David had spent several years working for their uncle Carl and felt confident they could carry on the successful business he had built. In the summer of 2001 Voorhees Greenhouses found its permanent home at its current location in Robbinsville, NJ. In 2009, Peter and his family decided to make a move south, so David and his wife, Tracey, took over operations at the greenhouse. Since that time we, along with our team of growers, employees and support staff, have been working diligently to continue providing high quality plants with exceptional service to all of our customers. We sell plants to garden centers, florists, landscapers, churches and non-profit organizations in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. So whether you are buying flowers or vegetables from your favorite garden center, buying fall mums to support your favorite group like a dance studio or school sports team, or have a poinsettia in your house in December, there is a chance it came from our greenhouse.

So that’s enough about us! Enjoy the animals and thanks for supporting New Jersey Agriculture!!

GOATS

Ok, not just goats, but BABY GOATS! Baby Nigerian Dwarf goats! Soooo cute!!! Baby goats are fun, they’re sweet, they’re cuddly, they’re playful. They are awesome! Right now we have 3 baby goats on the farm, 2 girls and 1 boy. The twins (Bo and Clover) were born on January 20, 2020 and weighed about 2 lbs. The other little girl was born four days later on January 24, 2020. We keep the mama’s with their babies and separated from the rest of the herd. This allows them to bond and get comfortable with one another. Since they were born in January we kept them in this cage in the greenhouse. They were cozy, warm and out of the wind.

Here is a picture of Emma holding Clover the day after she was born. A healthy baby goat can get up and walk around usually within an hour or so of being born. They usually begin to nurse within 2 hours. By day 3 the babies were playing and jumping all over mom.

Goats make great pets and have lots of uses. They can be either meat or dairy breeds. Our goats are Nigerian Dwarf which is a dairy breed, although we leave most of the milk for the babies to drink. Goat milk can

be used for drinking, to make cheese, yogurt, ice cream. It can even be used for skincare and to make soap. Goat milk soap feels so nice on your skin. Goats LOVE to climb! Our goats love to climb on wood and hay bales. Below is a short video that has a picture of several goats in a tree! Goats

HONEY BEES

Who doesn’t love the sweet taste of honey? Those wonderful little bees spend all day pollinating crops and flowers and collecting nectar to take back to the hive. Bee hives are very efficient and rely on teamwork by everyone. Scout bees fly out of the hive and search for the best source of nectar. When they find it they tell the other bees back at the hive, by moving in patterns, that a great source has been found. They will fly in a figure eight if the source is far or in a circle if the source is close. Scout bees will collect nectar from 50 to 100 flowers each trip and then take the nectar back to the worker bees in the hive. As the bee moves from flower to flower it also collects pollen on its body and drops some of that pollen on the next flower. This is called cross-pollination. Cross-pollination is important to farmers because it helps make the plants stronger and healthier and can also create new kinds of plants! The worker bees then place the honey in the comb in the hive and cap it so it doesn’t fall out.

Bees make everything themselves, we just provide the box and the frames (like you see on the left). The bees make their own beeswax which they deposit on the frame and shape in the honeycomb.

To get the honey we eat, beekeepers will harvest the hives. They pull the frames out of the box (like you see behind the frame), scrape the caps off the comb and place the frames in a spinner, called a centrifuge. The centrifuge spins all of the delicious honey out of the comb and the beekeeper bottles the honey for us to enjoy! Here is a nice little video to teach kids a little more about bees: Busy Bees

DUCKS

Voorhees Greenhouses is also home to 6 adorable Pekin ducks. Pekin ducks are raised for both eggs and meat. This means they are a dual purpose breed. Although we will eat the duck eggs, we mainly have them because they are cute and really fun to watch. Our ducks are about 2 weeks old, weigh less than 1lb, and look like this up close:

If I were to use one word to describe ducklings (other than adorable) it would be MESSY! They LOVE to play in water and are constantly spilling their water bowl so they can splash around! When they get a little bigger (in a couple of months) we will set them loose with the chickens. We have a little pond inside the chicken pen for them to splash around in and some bushes to provide them with shade. They can also go under the chicken coop for shade. They will quickly befriend the chickens and will sleep in the coop with them and the turkeys. Here is a short video on ducks: Learn about Ducks

TURKEYS

GOBBLE GOBBLE!

One of the newest additions on our farm is our trio of Broad Breasted White Turkeys. These turkeys are the most commercially raised turkeys used for Thanksgiving dinners. They will grow quickly in the next few months and will generally weigh somewhere between 25-35 lbs. Right now, they are only about 2 weeks old and weigh less than 1 lb. That’s a lot of growing in a short amount of time! Turkeys need a high protein diet in order to grow big and healthy. Up close, our turkeys look like this:

When they are fully grown, in about 4-5 months, they will look like this:

After they are a bit bigger we will move them into the chicken pen. Here they will have a small pond, plenty of food, shade in the summer and a safe coop to sleep in at night. Here is a nice, short video to teach you a little bit about turkeys: Learn about Turkeys Fun fact about turkeys:

Boy turkeys (Toms) and female turkeys (Hens) poop differently! Toms poop looks like a question mark while a Hens poop looks like the poop emoji!! Our woods are home to a rafter, or a group, of wild turkeys. On rainy days, we often see 15-20 wild turkeys looking for food in our fields! The wild turkeys look like this:

CORNISH BROILER HENS

We have both turkeys and cornish hens at this station. A Cornish hen is a small chicken that is used for food. These chicks are just a couple of weeks old and they will be fully grown in 6-8 weeks and weigh between 1-2 lbs. Can you tell the difference between the Cornish Hens and the turkeys?

Cornish Hens Turkeys

THE GREENHOUSE

Voorhees Greenhouse is made up of approximately 2 acres of glass greenhouse and 1 acre of plastic hoop houses. Our first section of greenhouse was built in 1976. We also utilize about 12 acres of outdoor space for summer plants and fall mums. Our job is to grow beautiful flowers for people to enjoy. Most of our spring and summer plants are grown inside the greenhouse. Some flowers, like pansies, we seed in December. We start a majority of the other plants in January. It’s nice to work in a greenhouse in January. While it’s cold outside, you get to work in a warm greenhouse with the sun shining on you. Most of the plants we grow take about 3-4 months to grow. Some of the items we grow include:

- 35,000 flats of flowers and veggies - 30,000 hanging baskets - Over 100,000 potted plants ranging from 4.5” to 15”

In all of those different sizes and pots and baskets we grow over 100 different types of plants. The spring (pansies and bulbs) and summer plants make up about 75% of our sales for the entire year.

In the fall we grow most of our plants outside. The most popular fall plants are garden mums. We grow about 66,000 of them in pots sizes ranging from 6” up to 20”. They take about 3 months to grow from a small cutting to a ready to sell plant.

We grow poinsettias in the greenhouse. We grow around 36,000 pots of poinsettias or about 60,000 plants in pots sizes ranging from 4.5” up to 20”. Did you know that it takes almost 6 months to grow most poinsettia plants? We plant most of the poinsettias in July to sell in December. It takes about

8 months to grow a poinsettia tree! We start them in April and grow them all summer long.

As you can see, we grow a lot of plants - over 1.5 million individual plants!

PLEASE CIRCLE LEFT NOW TO THE QR CODE BY THE BROWN BARN

THE COOLER

In this brown barn is a large cooler (like a really big refrigerator). The cooler is about 30x60 or 1800 sq. feet and can hold about 3000 crates like the ones you see on the ground here. Each October we fill this cooler full of crates that are loaded with spring bulbs like tulips, daffodils, mini daffodils, hyacinths and grape hyacinths. We stack the crates 12 high and 4 deep in groups of 48. We grow 25,000-30,000 pots of spring bulbs each year using a total of about 120,000 individual bulbs! All of our pots are planted by hand using an assembly line method. We usually have one person that mixes the soil with the sand, makes sure the soil hoppers are full, supplies the planters with the proper bulbs and makes sure the pot filler has pots. Another person fills the pots with the soil mixture and places the pots on the belt. Then the planter plants the correct amount of bulbs in the pot. As the belt moves down the line, we have another person topping the pot off with soil and tagging the pot. The crater then places the pots in the crate and waters in the pots. The stacker then stacks the crates in the cooler. It takes 6 people about 2 weeks to plant all the pots.

Why put the bulbs in a cooler? Bulbs that are used for Easter production are a little different than the bulbs you plant around your house. These bulbs can be more easily “forced” to open (or stay shut) by manipulating its environment. Bulbs need 17 weeks of cold in order to develop the flower. Putting them in the cooler allows us to control when the flower will develop so it can be timed correctly for Easter. If Easter is going to be early then we move them into the greenhouse and turn up the heat to push them along. When Easter is late, things get more complicated. After the needed amount of cold weeks, bulbs come out of the cooler to acclimate to the weather and start to set bud. However, warm weather will push the bulb to bloom too early. In cases like that, the bulbs need to be moved in and out of the cooler to hold them tight so they are not bloomed out for Easter. Most of our spring bulbs go to garden centers, firehouses and churches for Easter sales. Getting a flower to bloom on a specific day that changes every year is not an easy task. Here is a pic of our tulip house right now:

Right now there are about 14,000 tulips in the tulip house with sizes ranging from 4.5” to 10”.

Due to the Covid-19 virus and subsequent social distancing guidelines, all firehouses and churches have canceled their orders. Bulb and greenhouse growers are looking at losing millions of dollars in the coming weeks. We urge the public to support agriculture, in any form, over the coming weeks.

PEACHES

Who likes peaches? We do! Our peach trees are about 10 years old and provide us with yummy freestone, yellow-fleshed peaches in late June/early July. The chickens help the peach trees by keeping the weeds down at the base of the tree and eating any bugs that may be trying to find a home. Once the trees start to form fruit we need to thin out the growing peaches so they have enough room to grow properly. Thinning the peaches takes off about 90% of the growing peaches. Here is a short video about growing peaches: All About Peaches Peaches have lots of uses other than just eating it fresh.There is peach cider, peach syrup, peach jam, peach jelly, peach preserves. There is even peach salsa and peach ice cream! And, of course, peach pie and other yummy peach baked goods. Most of New Jersey’s peaches are grown in south Jersey, but there are some pick your own peach farms near us.

Strawberry Hill Farm located in Chesterfield, NJ is a great family-owned u-pick farm. They open in July and offer u-pick for peaches, nectarines,

apples, plums and pears. Check them out on more info.

CHICKENS

Here at Voorhees Greenhouses we raise a variety of chickens. There are many different breeds of chickens. Some are egg layers, some are meat chickens and some are dual purpose chickens. We mainly raise egg layers, but we do have some dual purpose breeds. Our chickens lay, on average, one egg per day. Our kids are in charge of collecting the eggs everyday. There are several nesting boxes inside the chicken coop. Nesting boxes look like this:

Chickens like to lay their eggs in the same place every day. Once the eggs are collected, they can sit out for 6 weeks and still be good to eat as long as you don’t wash them. Eggs that are washed need to be refrigerated and they are good to eat for 6 months! Most of our chickens lay brown eggs; some are light brown while some are dark brown. We also have chickens that lay green and blue eggs! Our chickens are free range (although we have them in the pen right now so they won’t get hurt). That means we let our chickens go free and roam the property. Chickens really like to dig in the dirt and settle down. When they are not resting in the dirt they are looking for food. We always offer our chickens a protein layer feed, but they really like the summer when they can go out and eat whatever bugs or vegetables or fruits they can find. We also like to hatch our own eggs. We hatch the eggs using an incubator. It takes 21 days for a chicken to hatch. Newborn chicks will begin walking around within a couple of hours of being born! Here is a 3 minute video showing a chick hatching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F38tIGO5TFY

Here is a nice short video to teach kids a little about chickens: Teach kids about chickens Below are some of the types of chickens we have right now. How many can you find?

Buff Orpington

Barred Plymouth Rock

Rhode Island Red

Golden Laced Wyandotte

Ameraucana

Black Australorp

ISA Brown

CATTLE

WE LOVE BOVINE! We have a family of three here at Voorhees Greenhouses. Dozer, dad, is our large brown and white bull. He’s a gentle giant who weighs in at nearly 1000 lbs. Thistle, mom, is all brown and is probably around 750 lbs. Then we have Miss Mae. Mae is Dozer and Thistle’s calf and she was born….can you guess?… in May. We are very creative with our names around here lol. Miss Mae was born in May 2019 weighing in around 60 lbs. How quickly she has grown! Mae looks just like her dad and, like human daughters, is she a daddy’s girl. Boy cattle are called bulls, girl cattle are called cows and baby cattle are called calves. Our cattle are a Jersey cross and are used mainly for dairy production, although Dozer looks like he is crossed with some kind of beef cow. When people think about dairy cows, they usually think of a Holstein. Holstein are black and white and look like this:

After Mae was born, we would go out and milk Thistle. A cow has to give birth before she can be milked. Raw cow milk tastes very different than store bought milk. Raw cow milk can be used to make so many yummy things like yogurt, ice cream, cheese, butter or just to drink. Cattle like to eat….A LOT! Cattle spend about 8 hours a day eating. A cattle’s stomach has four separate compartments that help them digest their food. The field that they are in right now is about 4 acres and our cattle will eat it down several times in the summer. The big hay bale on the wagon is a compressed 3x3x6 ft. bale weighing 1000 lbs.

That bale will feed the cattle and goats for about 10 days. We also feed our cattle, especially Thistle, protein to keep them strong and healthy.

Birthing and nursing a baby uses a lot of Thistles energy so she needs extra protein to stay healthy. Here is a short video about cows: Learn about Cows Now that you’ve learned a little about dairy cows, you might be wondering “if black and white cows give white milk, do brown cows give chocolate milk”? Maybe you’ll have to milk a cow one day to find out.

THANKS FOR VISITING US TODAY!

We want to take this time to thank you for visiting us today and supporting agriculture in New Jersey. We hope you enjoyed your time with us!

Please tag us @voorheesgreenhouses on Please also consider supporting one of our local garden centers. There’s something for everyone at each place.

Pies, Pies and more Pies!...

1203 Route 130

Robbinsville, NJ 08691 609-448-0663

Deli, Fresh Fruits and Veggies...

42 Robbinsville Edinburg Rd (Rte 526)

Robbinsville, NJ 08691

Build yourself a new patio...

1185 Route 130

Robbinsville, NJ 08691 609.448.6222

Decorate your yard... Tony's Farm and Garden Center

1369 Route 130 North

Windsor NJ 08561

609-448-0667

AND BUY FLOWERS AT ALL OF THEM!!!