Robbins Farm Garden

A Cooperative Learning Project

Elisabeth

November at the Garden

by

We rarely post in November. Perhaps that’s due to end-of-season blues. Yet, putting the garden to bed for winter is as interesting as the rest of the season.

Robbins Farm Garden is in Zone 6B, and every year, the crops succumb to the cold in roughly the same sequence. Early frosts take out the basil, beans, eggplant, okra, squashes, tomatillos, and many flowers. Yet, our peppers and smaller tomatoes are surprisingly cold tolerant, producing well into November.

Our last harvest (on the Saturday before Thanksgiving) routinely includes the cold-hardy regulars: arugula, bok choy, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, Jerusalem artichokes, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, parsnips, radishes, scallions, Swiss chard, and turnips.

Routinely, we leave the collards and kales in the ground (uncovered) for post-season harvests. If we end up with a substantial crop of immature lettuce plants, we place plastic row cover over them for harvests into December. And surprisingly, a few unpicked lettuce plants wintered over for an early spring harvest once.

There are also crops we would still be harvesting, if we didn’t run out, such as beets, carrots, celery, leeks, and salad turnips. Fortunately, some herbs – parsley, sage and thyme – continue to be available. (Our rosemary is typically potted to winter indoors, though we may attempt to winter it over in the ground this year.)

The annual garlic planting is a fun late-season project in early November. (Just when we thought there was nothing to look forward to.) And there is a great deal of material to be packed into the compost bins, along with putting aside buckets of screened compost for our seedlings next spring.

Finally, there’s mulching the perennial herbs and asparagus, and the cleaning, sorting, and repacking of our garden shed. And we’re done.

In Praise of Flowers at the Garden

by

Flowers weren’t the first thing on our minds when we established the garden. Yet, edible flowers were in the front-and-center crescent bed of our first Pilot Garden plan in 2010. Through the many subsequent years, we went veg crazy and rotated different crops – including experimental crops – through the crescent bed. Now we’ve come full circle and embraced the concept of a permanent edible flower bed at the beating-heart-center of the garden.

However, a permanent home for flowers in one bed created a crop rotation problem, triggering an effort to identify the various plant families that the flowers fall into. (Surprisingly, they’re not all in the aster family.) But with that squared away, we are now able to enjoy spectacular flowers in our crescent bed season after season.

A look back reveals numerous flowers grown at Robbins Farm Garden. We’ve grown amaranth, bachelor’s buttons, borage, calendula, celosia, dahlias, lovage, marigolds, nasturtiums, saffron crocus, salvia, snapdragons, stock, sunflowers, verbena, and zinnias.

Though few of these flowers are, in fact, eaten, the spiritual sustenance they provide is profound. And the pollinators couldn’t be happier!

Finally, A Successful Second Crop of Beets!

by

With our fourth attempt at a second crop of beets at the garden, we’ve had our first success.

– In 2020, we seeded a second beet crop on August 15 in an open portion of the fall broccoli bed. We determined the crop failed due to late planting and resolved to plant them earlier in 2021.
– In 2021, we seeded a second beet crop on July 17 in the same plot, as soon as we finished harvesting the spring beets. This second crop failed as young seedlings, possibly due to a hurricane.
– In 2025, we seeded a second beet crop on July 12 at the edge of the zucchini bed. This crop also failed, probably due to competition from the expansive zucchini plants.

These failures led us to try starting the second beet crop indoors and planting them out in good garden real estate (but not in the same bed as the first crop) this year. For convenience, we seeded them with our last indoor seedlings (a second crop of zucchini) in mid-June. We’ve started our first crop of beets indoors since 2017.

We followed the same process of successive seedling thinning as the spring crop. Three seeds were planted in each 6-pack cell. After a few weeks, these were thinned to one seed per cell, each of which has up to three sprouts. When transplanting in the garden, each seed was then thinned to a single sprout.

This year, we provided a proper garden spot by transplanting the beet seedlings into the plot where the fava beans come out in early July. That space had previously been occupied in the latter part of the season with fall peas. (Sadly, a crop of fall peas is too much of a crap shoot in our climate.)

As usual, the beet seedlings looked dreadful after transplanting into the garden. They were covered with shade cloth for two weeks to protect them from the summer sun and heat while they recovered. (Though sadly, we did lose one transplant.) Then they were on their own, and began growing incredibly fast.

For reference, the first beet crop was seeded April 5, transplanted May 3, and first harvested on June 20, 76 days from seeding indoors. The second crop was started June 15, transplanted July 4, and first harvested on August 12, only 58 days after seeding indoors.

It may be worth noting that we cover our spring beet crop with insect screen, protecting the foliage from leaf minor. The second crop was left uncovered, being past the seasonal window for leaf minor. Though the leaves are not as perfect as the spring crop, they are still good quality greens.

We might be able to forego starting the second beet crop indoors by seeding directly in the soil when the fava beans are removed in early July. Though the soil temperatures this summer have been quite high, it’s something to ponder for next year.

New Garden Structure

by

Our new corn frame, seen from eye level.

Losing our local source of bamboo instigated a transition from bamboo garden structures to structures made of metal conduit several years ago. We began with the tall pea trellis and tomato frame, followed by the two shorter squash trellises.

Our latest structure is for the corn and beans section of our Three Sisters bed. It’s an elegantly-simple “table” frame strung across the top with twine, stabilizing the corn and supporting the ever-exuberant beans that grow on the corn.

Each of the five conduit structures is designed to be simple, sturdy, long-lasting, and easy to move as the crops rotate around the garden. And each is restrung with twine every year. When the garden is in peak season, they do their job while almost seeming to disappear. Many thanks to Alan for his brilliant design and construction!

Collards of our Dreams

by

Success with starting kale indoors (see last year’s post) inspired us to follow suit with collards, with similarly spectacular results. They were on the same schedule as the kale: seeded on April 5 and planted out on May 3.

photo of uniform 6-8" high collards

The photo above was taken on May 23, 2026; the photo below was taken on May 24, 2025. Not only do we have our most uniformly-robust collard plants, we are harvesting from them a full two months earlier than last year. The results are well worth the extra seedling work in the spring!

photo of sparse 0-1" collard seedlings