Robbins Farm Garden

We’re excited to be collecting seed from the garden in earnest this year. There was a steep learning curve, beginning with understanding the factors making some plants we grow unsuitable for seed saving, followed by learning the techniques to employ on the suitable plants.

For the 22 crops/varieties we selected, our seed saving progress will be tracked on the table below. We’ll continue to add information as it becomes available. Seed viability will be tested before our seed ordering in 2025. Wish us luck!

Crop	Variety	Collected	Quantity	Comments	Viability
Arugula	standard organic	Sep-Oct	>500	Seed matures slowly, delicate to process.
Bachelor’s Buttons	Black Magic
Beans, Fava	Vroma	July	40-50	Left to mature on plant, easy to collect.
Beans, Lima	Christmas Pole	Aug-Oct	~	Decided not to save this variety.	~
Beans, Runner	Black Coat	Aug-Oct	20	Simple to process.
Beans, Soy	Tankuro	August	~	Critters got to seed first. Pull early or cage to protect?	~
Calendula	Orange Flash
Cilantro	Caribe	Aug-Sep	>100	Seed matures slowly, plants are fragile.
Corn	Early Pink popcorn	September	100	Harvest same for saving as for popping.
Ground Cherries	Aunt Molly’s	September	@100	Processed with water.
Malabar Spinach	(Burpee)	September	30-40	Trying simple drying (no fermentation).
Marigolds	Red Gem
Nasturtiums	Orchid Flame
Okra	Jing Orange	October		Left to mature on plant; takes months.
Sesame	Black & Tan	September	60-70	Harvest same for saving as for eating.
Stock	Stox Champagne
Sunflowers	Mammoth Grey Stripe	September	~	Critters got to seed first. Cut a section early for drying?	~
Tomato	4th of July	September	>100	Processed through fermentation.
Tomato	Black Cherry	September	50-60	Processed through fermentation.
Tomato	Green Zebra	September	50-60	Processed through fermentation.
Tomato	Plum Regal	September	40-50	Processed through fermentation.
Watermelon	Sugar Baby	August	60-70	Easy to collect seed when eating.

Our embrace of the whole gardening season (such as it is in New England) puts us in the true Yankee gardener camp. We start many crops indoors to get a head start on the season, which opens up some of our garden space mid-summer for late season crops.

We grow early and late season broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower, starting our early crop indoors and our late crop in a nursery bed in early June, following our spring spinach. On our 7-foot high trellis, we grow tall spring peas followed by fall pole beans, the first of which were picked today.

We follow our garlic, onions and shallots with root crops: turnips, daikon, radishes and salad turnips. Our first fall radishes were also harvested today. We slip in two plantings of bok choy, kohlrabi and mustard with almost effortless success. And we plant a crop of late peas after our spring fava beans, though they’re often stymied by trying to germinate in the hot mid-season soil. Sigh.

A few crops are grown successively. Our first two crops of lettuce are started indoors, followed by several direct-seedings through the end of August. (The last went in this morning.) Several plantings of arugula alternate in two small plots. We plant our carrots in three batches, the last going in after our beets, which we start indoors. And we squeeze in a smaller, second crop of zucchini after the first crop of broccoli comes out.

The garden soil is busy supporting crops almost continuously until organized gardening comes to an end in mid-November. Some years we have enough young lettuce plants to keep growing under low row covers through mid-December. And last year, our kales and collards were left in place over winter and survived to give us a spring harvest!

[The photos at right show the fall broccoli, cabbage, pole beans and our first harvest of radishes today.]

One of the goals of the garden is to move toward self-sufficiency. We’ve learned to keep over our garlic and sweet potatoes, and are taking steps toward seed saving. Yet, a significant hurdle has been our standard potatoes. Because we only grow a spring crop and don’t have the luxury of giving them time to fully mature in the soil, keeping our own potatoes over isn’t an option. However, there may be a work around.

We are fortunate to have some great organic farms nearby, LexFarm in Lexington and Hutchins Farm in Concord. Last October, we purchased a 50-pound bag of Peter Wilcox potatoes for $50 from Hutchins to divide amongst the gardeners. As an experiment, we set aside 4 of them in our refrigerator. They started out in simply a brown paper bag, but when they began drying out, we added a plastic bag inside.

When our seed potatoes arrived from our usual Fedco order in mid-April, I was surprised to find that our refrigerated potatoes looked better. And the Fedco potatoes arrived just the day before we needed to plant, giving us no chance to green sprout them beforehand.

We planted the Fedco potatoes in the garden as usual; the Hutchins potatoes went in a Rubbermaid tub beside our driveway. (So not exactly an equal situation.) Nevertheless, the yield ratio (harvested/planted) was a respectable 4.5 for the kept over Peter Wilcox potatoes from Hutchins. The Fedco varieties yielded 6.8 for Adirondack Blue, 3.8 for Yukon Gem, and 3.4 for Purple Viking.

Then there’s the cost comparison. For the 50-pound bag from Hutchins, the cost would have been $2 for the 2lb we need for each variety. (Their farm stand price was $3/lb or $6 for the 2lb needed.) The organic varieties from Fedco were $11.50 plus 1/3 of the $23 shipping charge or $19 for the 2lb needed for each variety.

The only potentially-irreplaceable potato variety we grow is Adirondak Blue. (They’re a real favorite of the group, and highly productive.) If we’re able to source them locally, we should be able to substitute for the other two varieties we grow now. Then we can untether from ordering seed potatoes online.

Our fava beans flirted with fantastic this year. Simply put, they were our best ever.

It’s been a real struggle to grow good favas (or broad beans) in our climate. They prefer life in the UK, free from the dizzying temperature swings of our relatively short New England springs. Yet this year, we definitely got lucky with the weather. There were no late frosts or super early heat waves, though we did have our first of those last week.

We started the fava beans indoors again, but 2 weeks earlier than our initial experiment doing that last year. They were seeded with our alliums and spring brassicas on March 2, which was our first week of seedling work. And they came to harvest on June 22, a full 3 weeks earlier than last year. (Coincidentally, they closely tracked the spring broccoli and cauliflower on days to harvest.)

We seeded in standard 6-packs, transplanted into 3-4” pots at 2 weeks, hardened off at 3 weeks, and planted on March 30 (Opening Day at the garden), 4 weeks after seeding. We also protected the seedlings with a cloche for their first week in the garden. Unfortunately, 2 of the 18 seedlings mysteriously disappeared, leaving us only 16 plants to grow to maturity. (The empty spaces were filled with clusters of leftover onion sets on May 4, which we’re harvesting now as green onions.)

By mid-May, the bean plants were a foot tall and positively packed with flowers. Many plants also produced a second stem. The bean pods became apparent in early June. Despite dozens of flowers, each plant averaged 5 bean pods. Yet no apologizing was necessary! The plants grew large (some measure 32”) and healthy by harvest time. And for some unknown reason, there were no aphids this spring. Our biggest worry has been figuring out the best time to harvest.

The other thing to note is the variety. Encouraged by our relative success with Ianto’s from Baker Creek last year, we planned to get more seed. Unfortunately, it was unavailable, necessitating a return to Vroma from Johnny’s. We’ve grown Vroma – with lackluster results – for many years. (Hence, the switch to Ianto’s.)

So, it would appear that our indoor seeding, earlier schedule, and good luck with weather and aphids was this year’s recipe for success. The final count was 79 pods from 16 plants, with the pods producing an average of 4 beans. And we’re hoping to save seed for next year, so stay tuned.

Seed Saving Addendum

We left enough seed pods on the plants after harvesting for planting next year. The pods were allowed to turn black and become brittle on the plants, then we let them dry indoors in the pods for another week before removing them.

The seed looked good and was put away for planting next spring. Wish us luck!