Robbins Farm Garden

A Cooperative Learning Project

tomato

Blossoms and even a fruit

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TomatoesOur fourteen tomato plants went into the ground at Memorial Day, after a robust discussion the week before of which types and quantities we should raise.

Twelve of them ended up in the bed we designated for them, and singles are in the adjacent brassica bed in openings created when we had to remove diseased cauliflower and cabbage plants.

This is our roster, thanks to Lisa, who reported their planting when they went in: 2 sugar plum grape, 2 sungold cherry, 1 red zebra, 1 blondkopfchen cherry, 2 Moskovitch, 1 yellow perfection, 1 red brandywine, 1 brandywine, 1 Charlie Black and 2 eva purples.

The method for planting was completely different than what I would have done with my own tomato plants at home had I not been there to observe: The holes were dug one-third deeper than the pots the seedlings were in; this was because tomatoes, I was told (by Mike, or Alan?) are vines, and all about their roots. To accommodate the added depth, we pinched off the shoots from the stem that would have been underground.

The holes were prepared, meanwhile, just as I had, on instruction, earlier in the day for peppers and eggplants: A small handful of chicken poop for fertilizer and a sprinkling of pulverized eggshells for calcium, to ward off blossom end rot. 

Mike, who headed the tomato committee, advised mounding small rings of earth at each plant’s drip line, to form sort of a watering dish. This, he told me, ensures that water showered on the plant is more likely to arrive at its roots, instead of dampening all the surrounding area.

Last Saturday, the first tomato appeared on one of the plants — sorry, dunno which one (it was a sugar plum)— mottled green and marble-sized. I took a picture to share with you, but my auto-focus got a really sharp image of the hairs of an adjoining stem instead. It was mottled green and marble-sized, trust me.

Cabbage Patch Invaded

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The cabbage patch has been invaded … by tomatoes!  The spaces formerly occupied by the two culled seedlings were filled last Saturday by the tomato committee.  A couple other plants are doing poorly — while some are doing very well.  What is the difference?  The cabbage family has a shallow root system, and so more vulnerable when transplanting (as ours were), and more sensitive to being underwatered.  The question is whether the early stunted growth can be overcome by warmer weather, rich sunlight, and good watering.

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.

A Very Productive Day

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 Yesterday there was so much to do in the garden that we split into teams to address different issues.  The peas are getting tall enough that we need to start worrying about a pea trellis.  A park neighbor donated the use of bamboo that is growing in his yard, and a pea trellis was built out of the bamboo stalks.  Some sort of string will be run between the stalks that the peas will climb.

Meanwhile, there were vegetables to harvest!  We planted 2 kinds of radishes, and many of the early radishes were able to be picked.  These radishes are growing in the bed that will be taken over by squash.  By the time the squash is big enough to impact the radishes, the radish season will be over.  More radish seeds were planted in this same bed to provide another crop.

Our first lettuce was planted from seedlings, and many of these seedlings were ready to be picked.  These lettuce heads are amazingly beautiful- green, red, and romaine lettuce.

After we picked the largest lettuces, we transplanted some of the lettuce seedlings we had planted from seed.  This is a problematic procedure, as the sun was brightly shining and there was a good chance the seedlings would not survive the stress of being transplanted.  We decided to give it a try, however, as we would just have thinned the transplants.  We came up with a creative way to try to give them some shade by using the leaves from the bamboo stalks that were being used for the pea trellis.

We planted some more lettuce seeds to grow another crop.  The remaining seeds (beans, cucumber, and squash) that needed warmer weather to germinate were planted.  It seemed like we had gotten a bit lax in our watering and it had an impact on the swiss chard and the beets in particular, so everything got a good soaking.  This got a bit overenthusiastic at times, with the hills of the potato patch being watered rather than the valleys where the seed potatoes are actually planted, and the box containing the seeds getting a drenching.  The seeds were able to be rescued, fortunately.

We nibbled on some of our pickings-

Arugula thinnings:

and radishes:

Our chief gardener called a meeting to discuss the looming problem of deciding which of the tomato plants we have bought or have been donated to us we should plant.  We can’t plant them all, and each type of tomato seems to have a constituency.  We reached a compromise, with about half the tomatoes being cherry, grape or smaller than the usual, and the other half being of normal tomato size, with an emphasis on lots of different kinds of tomatoes.

Finally, the professor subjected us to one of his little Veggie School lectures — this time on the history of radishes — and "gently" reminded us about keeping apace with our community commitments homework on this project, which I’m sure we will all take to heart.

All in all, a very good day.

How I learned to love lettuce

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A head of lettuceI grew up thinking I hated lettuce. Every night my sister and I argued over who had to make the salad- tomatoes that tasted like cardboard, cucumbers (which I still don’t particularly like), and iceberg lettuce. I ate it, but I never particularly enjoyed it. Once I got out on my own, I discovered that there was lettuce that was not iceberg, which made salad much more interesting. I still was not a big fan, however. It took a vacation to Hawaii to turn me around. We were visiting friends of ours who lived near Honolulu, and we went to the farmers’ market that is right behind Diamond Head. Our friend bought a big bag of arugula, and we went home and made a salad. Just arugula and some oil and vinegar. Wow- I had never tasted anything like it. It turns out that the world of lettuce and greens beyond iceberg is large and varied, and I can now happily eat salad just for the greens, without adding much of anything to cover up the boring lettuce base. I’m still partial to arugula, but there is all kinds of lettuce that is mighty tasty .

 

A Productive Rainy-Day Outing

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The weather having prevented a pea-planting Saturday, a number of us instead took the opportunity to visit Waltham Fields Community Farm for their first seedling sale. Besides the crops we won’t be starting from seeds at all, like tomatoes and peppers, there are cool-weather crops we knew we could get in seedlings from our Waltham colleagues or other sources to give the garden an early start. Some of these are items we’ll also plant from seed in a few weeks, letting new generations of plants succeed the first (succession planting). 

On the way to Waltham we took a delightful sidetrip to Belmont Victory Gardens, a real surprise to most of us. The plots are large and fenced, and many are well-established; some had made use of storm windows to create greenhouses in situ. Garlic was in evidence on many plots, and flowers here and there had us dreaming of a spring Robbins Farm Garden with welcoming color.

The midday at Waltham included sitting in on a bit of Arlington resident and Robbins Farm friend Russ Cohen‘s "Edible Wild Plants" presentation, accompanied by splendid treats, including pie made with Japanese knotweed! His culinary abilities with invasives are outstanding. We cut the viewing short to attend the seedling sale and were very impressed with the offerings. We came away with ten 6-packs, of various lettuces, cabbage, broccoli, kale and cauliflower. All but the lettuces are ground-ready (the lettuces need a few more days indoors), and our plan at the moment is to convene Wednesday evening to put our first plants in the Robbins ground.