Wednesday farmstand: “Things come in fits and avalanches here at ARTfarm. As it turns out, we will have a lot of stuff on Wednesday,” says Farmer Luca.
Ridiculous amounts of two kinds of organically grown cucumbers, a few more cherry tomatoes, our first slicing tomatoes, sweet salad mix, spicy salad mix and arugula, figs, lots of watermelon, lots of cooking greens, Italian basil, dill, cilantro, zinnias, radishes, our tiny hot hot chili peppers and the bigger cayenne style peppers, a few new type of seasoning/pickling “cheese” peppers, lots of butternut large and small, little Japanese specialty sweet melons, a few Haitian kidney mangoes. For the farmer in you, we have a few discounted tomato plants looking for a home!
We will have more fresh goat cheese from Fiddlewood Farms and hopefully soon, honey and other holiday treats from Wanda!
Wednesdays have still been on slow side. Will close at 4:30pm.
We humbly thank you for your support!
ARTfarm on St. Croix, USVI 
Thanks so much for all you do to offer such an array of locally grown, lovingly cared for produce. I’m leaving island for 3 months to assist my daughter birth her first child. I’ll be there for my melons to tide over till I leave Friday.
Apprecilove you so much.
Thank you Makeda for all you do in our community to keep families happy and healthy. We love your vibe! Have a fantastic birthing with your daughter and we wish you all the best! We know it will be joyous and we wish we could be there to celebrate!! With lots of good food of course!!
good morning!
Hey just a thought, do you think you might get more people if you had the farm stand later, say 4-5:30?
Then people who work would be able to swing by on the way home and you might get more people.
Just throwing that out there 😊
Joan
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Thanks Joan. We are always open to suggestions!
As we said in the post, these shorter hours are temporary until things pick up again. Then we will probably extend back to our normal 5:30 PM closing time for the midweek farmstand.
We’ve been at this for a number of years and have continually adjusted the farmstand days and times to find what works for the majority of customers. (We were digging through our roadside signs the other day to find the current hours to post on the road and found quite a few old ones from days of the week we are no longer open for! Like Tuesdays and Thursdays used to be the big days at Southgate Farm! Memory lane!)
At this slower time of year when we stay open until 6 PM for those folks who say they will come after work, we often get only get one customer – or no customers at all – for that extra hour or two of being open. Especially when we are shortstaffed, we must balance the farmers’ time to tend to the farm against the return to stay open for that one person unfortunately.
Because we harvest everything fresh for the day of a farmstand which takes many hours, and also because our farmstand retail area is not centrally located to the rest of our work areas, we cannot simultaneously farm and have freshly harvested food ready every day and be open for customer access. That’s why we have concentrated retail hours where we sell everything quickly and efficiently two days a week. We have Saturday morning hours for those who work during the week.
There would be no physical possibility of us freshly harvesting this much food every day of the week. We simply do not have enough time to then also seed new plants, plant new starts, weed and tend the existing food beds, tend to fruit vines, take care of our livestock, train and manage volunteers, manage all the basic landscaping chores, irrigate all of the different gardens daily, post to the blog and communicate with customers, and all the other maintenance tasks that the farm requires constantly while we are in production season. When we are in production, we are working 80 hour weeks. We are very busy all the time.
For those unfortunate souls who work all the time (like us!), we recommend finding a buddy with different work hours who can shop for you. We have a few kind customers who shop for themselves plus a friend.
And of course, we would be remiss not to also mention Sejah Farm down on Midline Road. They are an awesome family farm also, and perhaps because of the centralized layout of their farm, it is more practical for them to be open much longer hours then we can be.
Ridge to Reef farm offers a CSA that delivers into Christiansted and Frederiksted. This is also a good solution for people whose schedules do not allow them to visit our retail farmstand but are craving fresh local food.
Hope to see you soon! Scheduling farmstands is a bit like scheduling a wedding. You want everyone you love to come, but there are always a few guests who have conflicts and just cannot be there for the special event. Luckily, we get married to this farm twice a week! Hopefully your schedule will shift and you can join us, or find a neighbor in your hood with more flexible hours who can hook you up!
Xoxo
ARTfarm