Robbins Farm Garden

A Cooperative Learning Project

Elisabeth

Peppers are in

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Peppers

Mike P. planted the pepper seedlings on May 29, Memorial Day Weekend, three varieties:

Lady Bell, a sweet bell pepper from Busa Farm.

 

Lady Bell sweet pepper

 Carmen, a Mediterranean sweet pepper from Waltham Fields.

Carmen pepper

 Jalapeno, a hot pepper, donated by a neighbor, Robin.

Jalapeno hot pepper

Mike planted the seedlings using a standard successful method:

    1. Scoop the soil out of the planting hole, a little bit bigger than the hole you need;
  2. Throw in a handful of compost and a bit of fertilizer;
  3. With some loose soil in the bottom to correct the depth, position two seedlings* so the soil lines match the surrounding ground level;
  4. Fill the hole halfway with soil;
  5. Fill the hole with water to soak the soil around the seedlings’ roots;
  6. Fill the hole the rest of the way with soil;
  7. Build a little dike around the stem to help catch water.

* We doubled up on pepper seedlings – two to a hole, an inch or two apart. Pepper plants are kind of “loose” and let a lot of sun through the leaves. Growing two side-by-side helps shade the fruit from sun scald, and practically doubles the yield in the space available.

Cauliflower trouble

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Root maggotsTwo of the cauliflower seedlings have been looking pretty bad. I pulled them today and replaced them with two new red cabbage plants from Busa Farm. Upon examination, we found at least one root maggot and a lot of damage.

Cabbage root maggots are the larval stage of Baby caulflowerthe cabbage root fly. There’s not much you can do once you have root maggots, and our only hope is that the other brassicas are strong enough to grow in spite of possible infestation. We’ve already pulled a few cabbages with the same problem. So far, the brocolli doesn’t seem to have been effected.

The only effective prevention for cabbage root maggots is to grow the seedlings under an impenetrable tent or cloche until they’ve grown big enough to survive an infestation. It also helps sometimes to plant later than usual, after the first generation of the flies is past. I took the damaged seedlings home to compost, since we don’t grow brassicas at home.

Sadly, this little damaged plant had already produced a perfect miniature cauliflower bud.

Peas’ progress

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We planted all our peas on April 21, so this is where they are after about 38 days in the ground. We planted three varieties:

Pioneer, a bush shell pea from Seeds of Change. Est 55-70 days to harvest. Oregon Sugar Pod, a bush snow pea,  from Burpee. Sugar Snap,  a vining sugar snap pea, from Johhny’s. Est 62 days to harvest.
Pioneer shell pea Oregon Sugar Pod Sugar Snap

Bamboo pea and bean fence pea brushWe had good germination rates from all of them. Building the trellis

Sugar Snaps will grow 6 ft and taller, so we needed a substantial support for them. Erika, Steven and Alan engineered and constructed a framework using bamboo that has escaped from a neighbor’s yard into Oakes’ yard. Bamboo is extremely invasive, but very useful in the garden. 

For the bush peas, we used the trimmings from the bamboo as pea brush, just sticking them in the ground over the peas to give them a little support. They’ll also be leaning on the fence.

Cukes go under

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PlantingSaturday we planted cucumber seeds, 2 at a time, in 2-foot intervals along either side of the compost bins. We waited till now because cucumbers don’t like cool soil. They are not as finicky as tomatoes and eggplants, the prima donnas that go in next week, but they are real pansies compared, say, to radishes and peas.

Back 120 years ago, cucumbers were a luxury vegetable, served mostly in high-priced hotels like the Parker House over in Boston. At that time, Arlington was the cucumber capital of the United States. It was home to the country’s most famous slicing cucumber, the Arlington White Spine, a great- great-grandchild of which we have just planted here.

Arlington farmers grew cukes during the winter months and early spring in greenhouses, where they kept the soil and the air warm with a combination of steam boilers and daily infusions of horse manure from carriage operators over in Cambridge.

Off-season, for special events, Arlington cukes fetched as much $1 each from wealthy Bostonians. During the summer months they could still get as much as 40 cents each. (To convert those prices into reasonable estimates in today’s dollars, multiply by 22. That’s the Consumer Price Index multiplier for 1913, the first year for which the index was established.)

Eventually the Arlington White Spine fell out of favor as a retail cucumber, though it still goes strong as a breeder. How it lost its position in grocery stores is a long story, one we’ll tell you later sometime. As a breeder, however, Arlington White Spine  remains the Man ‘o War of slicers, claiming more direct descendents than almost any other rival.