ARTfarm Farmshare Preorders for LAST Pickup Wednesday 4/6/2022, 4–6PM! (Pop-ups from here on out)

The season-long drought has kicked our butts with late-night watering, the grass is getting brown and crunchy, and we are ending the scheduled farmstands for this season after Wednesday this week. Dragonfruit vines are blooming early, though, so stay tuned for pop-up stands, possibly later this month. The salad greens continue, and you can reserve more than one share for Wednesday’s pickup – at 4pm we’ll start distributions for 35 pre-order customers with our heirloom, slicer and cherry tomatoes, onions, fresh greens, garlic chives and basil, winter squash and baby fennel for the early bird customers and more listed below… serving you one at a time inside our old farmstand building, so arrive on time for your group and listen for your name to be called in the parking lot; and play the ladybug game: one customer per ladybug (and masks up please with farm staff) inside the gate! Please arrive on time but not more than 10 minutes early to prevent traffic jams and longer wait times. We appreciate your cooperation!

Sunsetting on the tomato crop for 2022. The dry conditions have lent a lot of flavor to this year’s ARTfarm tomatoes!

Masking rules are changing, and eventually we may go back to a more traditional first-come-first-served farmstand experience, but at ARTfarm we’d still like to remain cautious for the moment. For your safety and ours we are continuing to crowd control with preorders – scheduled customer pickup timeslots served in order of your order submission, and super spaced lines. We’d appreciate for now, customers continuing to mask when passing by others in line or interacting with our farming family/in the farmstand, to help protect our loved ones and customers with compromised immune systems and/or health complications. We are all one! Grateful for life!!

Still not open for regular retail. If you’re new to ARTfarm or haven’t been to see us since the COVID-19 pandemic began, please read THIS PAGE to familiarize yourself with our new socially distanced pre-order arrangements. We are not holding regular retail farmstands at this time. In a nutshell:

Order at least one farmshare (minimum purchase) ahead on our website; check for your confirmation email so you know your name will be on the list! Please practice all the protective measures possible: Sanitize hands in your car before joining us, Maintain social distance between yourself, farm staff and other customers; Masks up when talking to farm staff or other customers; Let the farmer handle the produce for you; Choose extras from first-come-first-served availability; Wait to bag until we’ve totaled up your items; Bring change, cash or check and pen; drop payment in the bucket, we will not handle cash. During this adjustment period, masks are still mandatory at ARTfarm when less than 10 feet from another customer or farm staff. We’re cautiously optimistic we may be able to loosen restrictions soon, but for now please help us protect our at-risk family members and customers!

Success!! We have baby chicks, and a very attentive bush hen we have named Lady Fantine. The babies are enjoying poultry crumble along with some BSF larvae we grew for supplemental protein.

Farmshare choices for Wednesday, April 6th, 2022:

We will have 35 timeslots/farmshares available for scheduled pickup Wednesday. You can also order and specify a neighbor, friend or family member to pick up your order and theirs. The minimum order is one farmshare, and you can order more than one farmshare. Add-ons and extras are not currently available independently of a farmshare purchase; to minimize community contact during the pandemic.

LARGE farmshare, $25, will include:
  • 2 bags of sweet salad mix
  • 1 lb. slicer/heirloom tomatoes
  • 1 pint cherry tomatoes
MEDIUM farmshare, $18, will include:
  • 1 bag of sweet salad mix
  • 1 lb. smaller slicer tomatoes
  • 1 pint cherry tomatoes
GREENS LOVER farmshare, $14, will include:
  • 2 bags of sweet salad mix
Extra Add-Ons (non-reservable)

(Must accompany farmshare purchase, these items cannot be purchased individually. No reservations on these items, they are all first come first served during your pickup slot):

early birds:
  • TEEN arugula or spicy mix (mesclun-ish: arugula, mustard greens, radish greens etc.): $10
  • heirloom TOMATOES: $5/bag 1lb.
  • CHERRY tomatoes, pint: $6
  • winter SQUASH: $3.50/lb. as marked
  • baby FENNEL: $3-4/head as marked
plenty:
  • extra bag of SWEET salad mix: $7
  • ONIONS with green edible tops: $5/bunch
  • baby BOK CHOI: $3/bunch
  • SWEET PAPRIKA, green pimento cheese and cornito PEPPERS: $3/bundle
  • POBLANO peppers, smoky sweet and mildly hot, great fresh/dried: $3/bundle
  • HOT hot hot peppers: $2/bundle
  • assorted HERBS bunches: $2 each
  • GINGER/TURMERICS: $3.50/bag ($7 half pound)
  • Zinnia flower BOUQUETS: $5
  • “Natural Mystic” self-pollinating DRAGONFRUIT CUTTINGS – 30-36″ XL vine cutting, $15 each
  • PINEAPPLE slips to grow-ur-own: $2-3 each as sized
Herb bunch choices for this distribution

(Available as EXTRAS)

  • Italian (Genovese) basil
  • Dill
  • Dill seed
  • Garlic chives
  • Hot peppers incl. serranos, jalapeños, thai chiles, paprika and Lemon Drops!
Lady Fantine is an amazing mother. We love watching her teach her babies to eat fresh corn!

Please contact us immediately by text and phone at (340) 514-4873 if you have reserved a farmshare and cannot pick it up. Supply is limited, demand is extremely high and someone else will gladly purchase your share, if given enough time to respond. We have limited time for distributions and they are scheduled. Our produce is harvested fresh and needs to go home with you same day. This is an honor system since we are not collecting payment until pickup. We do not have cold storage for uncollected shares.

The signup form will show you a “Thank You” page and send you a confirmation email if submitted successfully. If you don’t find it, please check your spam/junk, inbox tabs, and ‘all mail’ folders for the confirmation email, as this has been a common problem for several customers and with a little searching they typically find it. For more tips, visit our Help page.

Need help with the pre-order signup form? (Click here):
Q: I can’t seem to order more than one item.

A: We have designed our order form not to allow any one customer to purchase all of one extra. Sharing is caring. If you’d like extra of something (beyond what you could reserve through our order system), put it in the comments with your order, and remind us at your pickup time: if we can supply it to you we’ll do our best. If you are in the food service industry and looking for bulk availability, please contact us; our order form is for individuals and families to place a single order for a scheduled pickup.

Q: My order isn’t going through.
  • if the automated confirmation email is not immediately found, check your spam folder
  • and the ‘all mail’ folder
  • make sure all required fields are filled/selected
  • just try again
  • use a cellular device (smartphone or tablet) that isn’t using WiFi internet
  • restart your browser/device
  • clear your cache and cookies in your browser/device
  • reboot your router (unplug it for a minute and plug in again)
  • visit our “help” page for additional tips
Q: The form says I didn’t enter my email, but I did.

Our pre-order form requires everyone to type their email in twice, and makes sure the two match exactly. We had a lot of customers in such a rush to get their order in that they’d spell their own email incorrectly and then complain that they could not find the confirmation email. Our ‘type it in twice’ system ensures that you’ll find any email mistakes before you submit the pre-order form.

Q: I ordered before, but I’m not getting your emails.

Our pre-order form does NOT automatically sign you up for an ARTfarm email subscription. Do that HERE!

4 thoughts on “ARTfarm Farmshare Preorders for LAST Pickup Wednesday 4/6/2022, 4–6PM! (Pop-ups from here on out)

  1. Hello. I heard that you accept cardboard boxes and recycle them. Is this true? If so, we would love to drop cardboard there at some point. This is a wonderful opportunity to recycle!

    1. Hey there Joy! We really appreciate you thinking about us for this.

      Unfortunately we can NOT accept cardboard boxes from the public for recycling.

      We do use cardboard boxes in our composting efforts and occasionally for some poultry production. But, they have to be completely free of all tape, plastic stickers or other adhesive or string or toxic inks. We currently already have a couple of people who are supplying us with cleaned and disassembled cardboard boxes that have had all potentially polluting or damaging adhesive stickers and tape removed.

      We are a small mom and pop farm and we do not have the manpower or the infrastructure to properly process and store large amounts of cardboard from the public. It could become a hazard in storm season or during high wind gusts, and stockpiled paper products could also attract termites and other problematic insects in large numbers.

      Processed paper products also tend to be acidic, and the glues, acids and other processing chemicals used in the manufacture of paper products could potentially build up in our soil and create toxicity for soil organisms.

      If there was a facility on St. Croix that could clean cardboard boxes and then shred them for mulch, thereby reducing their wind resistance and increasing the rate at which they decompose, they might be more useful to farmers here. But the chemical make up of those paper products would need to be researched. David Hensley is a soil scientist at UVI here on Saint Croix and he might be one to investigate further whether these would be beneficial as added to our soil types here on the island.

      Thanks for thinking of us!

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