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.
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 in the tomato bed are looking particularly robust. And the Egyptian walking onions provided weeks of green onions in spring.
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, green onions & garleek, 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!
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!
