Robbins Farm Garden is a cooperative community garden project at Robbins Farm Park in Arlington, MA. Since 2010, we’ve grown vegetables organically as a group, created an educational resource in the community and continued the agricultural tradition of the farm at the park. We garden Saturday mornings April – November and Tuesday or Wednesday evenings June – September. The project is run through Arlington’s Recreation Department.
Eat food, not too much, mostly kale!
The photo above is our kale bed on May 24, stocked with well-established seedlings started indoors in early April. The photo below is from May 25 last year. I don’t think we will go back to seeding kale in the soil. With our springtime weather, the results are far too unpredictable.
It’s Salad Time!
We’re in the second week of harvesting salad veg at the garden: lettuce, spinach, arugula and radishes. There’s really nothing like growing your own salad. Pictured above are five of our six lettuce varieties. (Left to right are Little Gem, New Red Fire, Salad Bowl, Pirat, and Kagraner Sommer.) Yum.
Opening Day 2025
Opening Day at the garden was brisk, but dry. (One of the few blocks of time without rain in a while.) We planted radish and pea seed in the ground, and planted the fava bean seedlings started indoors in early March. The soil was prepped for next week’s plantings and we had a harvest of wintered-over parsnips, Egyptian Walking Onions, and (surprisingly) scallions. It felt great to be back at the garden!
First seedlings of 2025
2025 virtual Seed Selection Meeting – January 11
The seed catalogs are arriving!
Our annual seed selection meeting is scheduled for Saturday, January 11 from 10am to 1pm. The meeting will be held virtually. Please contact us to get info to join the meeting.
Everyone interested in the crops and varieties we will grow at Robbins Farm Garden this season is welcome. Prospective new members of the garden group are especially encouraged to attend and join in the discussion. This is the start of our great expectations for the upcoming gardening season!
2024 Notes to the Future (end of season notes)
This year’s weather gave us mild spring temperature swings, followed by a warm and humid summer, a mild autumn with virtually no rain, and no hard frost through November.
It was a great year for carrots, flowers, greens, and nightshades, a slightly less great (but not terrible) year for alliums, brassicas, legumes, root crops and squashes. The standout crops were the peppers, beets, spinach (standard and perpetual), Swiss chard, lettuce, and kohlrabi.
New crops this year were mostly flowers: Bachelor’s Buttons, Calendula and Stock, along with Tokyo Bekana, a lettuce-like green in the brassica family.
Work at the garden began with organizing and fitting out the garden’s new shed, a project that continued through the season. And we added a free-on-curb tent to temporarily shade our harvest on hot sunny days. Other infrastructure projects included building the second metal trellis for the squashes along the fence.
Reconstruction of the park playground was an ever-present feature of the park this season, canceling the Friends of Robbins Farm Park’s regular Spring and Fall Cleanup Days and Field Day. The Friends did have a Town Day booth in September, that we participated in. A playground ribbon cutting was held Nov 23.
None of this would have been possible without the skill, ingenuity, persistence, and genuine good humor of our amazing gardeners: Alan, Bev, Brian, Carol, Celia, David, Elisabeth, Lisa, Martha, Mike, Nicole, Pamela, Shakti, Steven, Suzy, Tim, and Wendy. Thank you all!
