Category: construction

building and maintaining things for the farm in the most eco-friendly way we can.

Building a Wattle Fence

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We’re experimenting with building a simple wattle fence at the farmstand entrance, using manjack posts and limbs from some fence clearing projects.

A wattle fence is one of the most ancient fence types, and uses no metal fasteners. At the end of its useful life it can be composted!

Our wattle fence will create a pleasant garden walkway for farmstand customers, a place for us to display potted native trees for sale, and an enclosure for our ducks.

Dave Mattera, one of our super volunteers, is spearheading the project on Saturday mornings. If you’d like to join him and learn this eco-friendly, 18th century skill, please feel free to join him! ARTfarm volunteers must be non-smokers, please.

Monday Post-Pond Farmstand

At today’s farmstand we’ll have: Sweet mix, spicy mix, arugula, cucumbers, tomatoes, kale, broccoli greens, sweet peppers, hot peppers, pumpkin, onions, scallions, holy basil, Italian basil, parsley, chocolate, ice cream!

Sorry we haven’t posted in a few days but we were very busy building a giant pond! Thanks to our super volunteers who assisted us this weekend in getting that two-year project completed.

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ARTfarm Closing for a Quick End-Of-Summer Break…

This morning’s farmstand was our last for a few weeks. We’ve got to focus our full attention on some big projects, to make the farm more productive and sustainable in the coming seasons.

We’ll reopen in mid-October with a new rainwater catchment pond, some new signs, some new artwork in the ARTbarn and sheep grazing in our pastures! We’re seeding many crops for this coming fall and winter’s harvest now, starting a new batch of native trees from seed, and playing with a few experimental crops including local roasting corn and fig trees. Stay tuned for updates.

Three workers in a large Mars-like crater shovel rocks into the bucket of a skid steer at ARTfarm.
Three awesome ARTfarm workers - Tucker Brown, Eric Gautreau and Adrian Jordaan - in a large Mars-like crater, shovel rocks into the bucket of a skid steer in preparation for the lining of a rainwater catchment pond.

If you have some time to spare or know anyone with an interest in and enthusiasm for sustainable farming, we are always looking for reliable nonsmoking volunteers and workers who’d like to help out and learn something new. (It’s not ALL shovelling rocks!) Give us a call at (340)514-4873 or pass our website along to those who might be interested: artfarmLLC.com.

Laying Pipe

In the off season, when the tomatoes are NOT bursting off the vines, you’d think we would take it easy, go to the beach, or do some cool new paintings.

Not so, friends.

Luca operating a trencher on a skid steer in the pastures at ARTfarm
Luca operating a trencher on a skid steer in the pastures at ARTfarm. We're laying poly pipe for livestock irrigation! Photo by Mitch Amarando.

The off season is when we catch up on infrastructure projects. Luca has been cutting trenches with a skid steer using a hydraulic trenching attachment in our pastures, to bury water lines for our upcoming livestock project. We’ll be experimenting with multi-species grazing and micropasturing. We’re burying the polyethelene pipe so that it will be protected from UV damage, heavy equipment, fire, and chewing animals. It should last just about forever.