ARTfarm Farmshare Popup Preorders for Pickup Wednesday 5/11/2022, 4:30–6 PM!

It is officially the off season for us, and the pineapples are almost ready. For now, ARTfarm is not on a regular weekly schedule, but we have enough salad greens for a smaller group of customers to pick up Wednesday, and you can reserve more than one share for Wednesday’s pickup. At 4:30pm we’ll start distributions for 25 farmshares with our fresh sweet salad greens, with extras available like eggs from Mongoose & Zinnia, two kinds of radishes (sliced thin for quick pickling is great) with their included lovely green tops (chop into a salad or de-pepper them by gently sauteing); our sweet onions, winter squash, sweet peppers and more listed below… We’ll be 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 inside the gate (and masks up with farm staff please)! Please arrive on time but not more than 10 minutes early to prevent traffic jams and longer wait times. We appreciate your cooperation!

Have you ever been in a musical theater production? You work for weeks on your audition, then months and months blocking, choreographing, rehearsing, building sets and getting everything ready, and after an excruciatingly long time your hard work pays off and there’s opening night? Well, we finally got our World Central Kitchen trailer delivered to the farm last week (wild applause!!!). We will be retrofitting this former refrigerated container to house our cold storage and processing facilities. We are super excited! This summer we will complete the retrofit and put it into service for the upcoming season.

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. Wed 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!

Three generations of Gasperi farmers on St. Croix! On Monday, April 4, 2022 Luca’s dad Kiko was honored by the 33rd legislature of the US Virgin Islands with a Perma-Plaque for his lifetime contributions to the development of the Senepol cattle breed, a beef breed that originated on Saint Croix USVI in the early 1900s. Senepol cattle are known for their excellent performance when pastured under brittle, droughtlike conditions and scrub forage, and the breed is now a significant addition to sustainable beef production across the US Sun Belt and South America. Kiko Gasperi came to St. Croix from Italy in the late 1960s to work at Castle Nugent with his brother Dr. Mario Gasperi, and served as the ranch manager for Castle Nugent Farms under his sister-in-law Caroline and her son Mauro after Mario’s passing in 1989. Kiko spent many years building and mending fencing, tagging calves, dipping herds, and managing pasture. In the hotter part of the day for thirty years he’d be found in his office poring over breeding records and selecting the best animals based on performance to improve the Senepol breed. Our thanks to Senator Myron Jackson who pushed for this resolution to honor the elders who were involved in this work.

Farmshare choices for Wednesday, May 11th, 2022:

We will have 25 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.

THREE GREENS farmshare, $21, will include:
  • 3 bags of sweet salad mix
ONE GREENS farmshare, $7, will include:
  • 1 bag 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:
  • extra bag of SWEET SALAD MIX: $7
  • ONIONS with green edible tops: $5/bunch
  • winter SQUASH: $3.50/lb. as marked
  • mini SWEET PEPPERS: $3/bundle
plenty:
  • white large or red french mini RADISHES with yummy green tops: $3/bunch
  • ‘Mongoose & Zinnia’ pasture raised EGGS: $8/doz
    red and green POBLANO peppers, smoky sweet and mildly hot, great fresh/dried: $3/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)

  • Garlic chives
  • Lemongrass
Hens and chicks is one name for this succulent, drought tolerant ornamental plant.

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!

2 thoughts on “ARTfarm Farmshare Popup Preorders for Pickup Wednesday 5/11/2022, 4:30–6 PM!

  1. Hello! We are on island for two weeks. What is the best way to buy produce from your farm at this time?

    Rose Wood Realtor DRE#01344958, Strock Team A 251-A Center Ave., Aptos P 831.688.9800 ­M 831.239.2484 ­E HomesByRoseWood@gmail.com ­W StrockRealEstate.com ­  ­

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    1. Hi there Rose, I wish we could accommodate you. Unfortunately right now we have no regular retail farmstands. It is an extreme drought time for the island and the summer is usually when we close down food production for several months and do maintenance, construction projects etc. In the summertime we sometimes have a pop-up farmstand when we have a little flush of fruit or lettuce, but it is not regular and not scheduled. We grow a minimal amount of food for our own family at this time of year and don’t typically have enough to hold a farmstand.

      On the off chance that we might have a pop-up farmstand during your visit, you can check back on our website or sign up for emails which is a more convenient way to know when we have posted something new.

      In the meantime I recommend you check with Sejah Farm. They picked up some lettuce heads from us today and they will have it at their farmstand. You can look them up online. Sejahfarm.com

      Enjoy your visit to St. Croix!

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