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.
2025 Garden Pests and Disease
Notes to track various pests and pathogens and their treatment. This includes insects, disease and critters.
| Months | First Sighting | Pest/ Pathogen | Crop | Prevention /Treatment | Signs/ Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May | none | Leaf minor | Spinach & beets | row cover with blue sticky trap | successfully prevented it |
| June- | Cabbage worms | Cabbage | Hand removal (multiple passes each week) | Frass, holes in leaves | |
| July-Aug | 7/12 – brussels 7/12 – nasturtiums 7/12 – dino kale 8/9 – curly kale | Aphids | Brussels, nasturtiums, dinosaur kale, curly kale | Insecticidal soap; don’t use on fava beans, damages the blossoms | |
| July-Aug | 7/12 | Mediterranean fruit fly? | Peppers | Spray neem in evenings | Maggots eating fruit from the inside; tiny dots on outside of pepper |
| Jul-Aug | 7/2 | Squash vine borer eggs | Summer squash, pumpkins, red kuri, mambo, cucumbers, honeynut | Remove eggs with packing tape | small red-ish brown spheres on stems and leaves |
| Jul-Aug | 7/19 – mambo,red kuri, dunja | Squash vine borer larvae | Red kuri, mambo, pumpkin, zucchini | Surgery (small cut in vine where frass is found, sharp tweezers to remove borer) | |
| July-Aug | 7/26 | Squash bug eggs | Winter squash (red kuri, mambo) | Hand remove eggs and bugs | clusters of amber spheres |
| Jul | 7/9 | Black spot | Tomatoes | Serenade fungicide | black spots on tomato leaves |
| Aug | 8/3 | Rodent? | tomato | half-eaten ripe tomato | cover developing fruit with fabric bags |
| Cucumber beetle | ? | ||||
| Aug-Sep | 8/10 | Powdery Mildew | Squashes, jerusalem artichokes, sunflower | Spray with Serenade | White coating on leaves |
| Jul-Aug | mid Jul? | Rust? | Bush Beans | none | Discolored leaves and loss of foliage; try fungicide next year? |
Notes on squashes
- 7/12 – First frass from SVBs found on several plants. Surgery on 3-4 where frass was fresh and sprayed the cut with BT afterwards.
- 7/12 – started spraying leaves with Serenade, a fungicide to prevent powdery mildew
- 7/16 – spray Serenade
- 7/19 – spray Serenade
- 7/26 – clusters of squash bug eggs on the winter squash leaves (underneath). They look like tiny amber beads.
- 7/26 – spray Serenade
- 8/2 – spray Serenade; early signs of powdery mildew on pumpkins
- 8/9 – One mambo and one red kuri plant died from SVBs (these plants had surgery the first week and never fully recovered). The two plants each survived long enough to yield a mature squash. Harvested 2 mature red kuri.
- 8/9 – Possible squash bug damage with leaf wilt – no signs of frass, but clear damage to stem and some black residue.
- 8/9 – spray Serenade; starting to see powdery mildew on some leaves
- 8/17 – another mambo plant died from the SVB damage. Yielded one small but mature mambo
- 8/17 – spray Serenade; powdery mildew on a number of plants
Notes on Peppers
- 7/18 – insect app identified a fly on the peppers as a Mediterranean fruit fly. Possible that the damage to the peppers is from the larvae of these flies? Placed a yellow stick trap near sweet peppers
Notes on Brassicas
- Aphids found on tops of brussels sprouts in July. Spray with insecticidal soap and topped the plants (along with most of the aphids, which colonize in the new top growth, in early August)
- Cabbage worms in the cabbages. Maybe try row cloth to reduce eggs?
Notes on Tomatoes
- Signs of black spots on tomato leaves. Started spraying tomatoes with Serenade (organic fungicide) once per week
- 7/12 – started spraying leaves with Serenade, a fungicide to help combat black spots on leaves
- 7/16 – spray Serenade
- 7/19 – spray Serenade
- 7/26 – spray Serenade
- 8/2 – spray Serenade; three plants succumbing to some sort of disease (green zebra and 2 others)
- 8/16 – critter chewed through a bag to eat one ripe tomato. However, the vast majority of ripe tomatoes that were bagged have been untouched by critters.
How much water? (updated)
In a previous post from 2019, I measured the flow rate of our hose and nozzle and related it to the watering needs of the garden, as a guideline for watering. The guideline is based on a reasonable estimate of the need for water of most mature crop plants, which is about 1 inch per week. Since that post, we’ve changed both hoses and garden bed size, so this is an update. This is of course only a guideline, and watering requirements obviously need to take in account the weather and the particular needs of different crops.
Our main garden beds are nominally 4 x 23 feet, or 92 square feet. 1 inch of rain on that surface would be about 7.7 cubic feet which is about 57 gallons.
I measured the flow rate of the two hoses by timing how long it takes to fill a 4 gallon bucket. The hose and watering wand connected directly to the hydrant took about 50 seconds to fill the bucket, or about 4.8 gallons per minute. So to get 1 inch of water on the whole bed takes almost 12 minutes. The hose and wand on the other end of the garden took about 110 seconds, or about 2.2 gallons/minute, so 1 inch on the whole bed would take about 26 minutes.
Splitting those times into 7 days, that would be about just under 2 minutes or 4 minutes on each bed per day to get 1 inch of water per week, if there’s no rain.
A Better Year for Alliums
At this point in the season, it’s looking like 2025 will be a good year for alliums. The onions and shallots are heading up, with less evidence of mildew than they’ve exhibited the past few years. The leeks are also growing nicely, as they patiently await their mid-summer compost dressing.
The garlic we harvested Saturday produced clean, mostly good-sized bulbs, after providing some succulent green garlic from extra cloves planted last fall and a full set of scapes. The scallions had fantastic germination and are steadily reaching for the sky.
The (new this year) garleek has given us a beautiful, trouble-free green-garlic-like crop, with more to come. The onion sets are looking particularly robust, and the Egyptian walking onions provided delicious green onions in spring.
The chives (common, garlic, and Asian) are doing well in the herb beds. Even our leftover sets and seedlings (tucked into the winter squash bed) have given us welcome green onion harvests over several weeks.
Photos (top to bottom): onions, leeks, scallions, harvests of green onions & garleek, and Egyptian walking onions.
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!
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