We’ve been growing food sustainably on St. Croix since 1998.
ARTfarm sweet mix is a combination of many sweet lettuce varieties.
Heirloom tomatoes in a rainbow of colors
Heirloom tomatoes come in a shocking array of shapes and colors.
Our bumpy asian variety cucumbers don’t need peeling or seeding with their thin skin and sweet crunchy insides!
Watermelon is one of Farmer Luca’s favorite crops.
Beautiful kale, and brilliant red radicchio, perfect for a colorful salad.
This heirloom Guatemalan winter squash has a deep green color but tastes like a butternut, creamy and rich.
Beets with amazing edible greens on top at ARTfarm!!
Farmer Luca harvesting herbs. The zinnias have gotten to a pretty ginormous size this week! Treat yourself to a few happy blooms for spring!
We grow beautiful Mediterranean figs, guavas, sugar apples, and other local fruits that are too fragile for export! We sometimes have young cloned trees available.

ARTfarm is a small and highly diversified sustainable market garden farm, with a tiny staff and a focus on variety and high quality. We grow seasonally, to meet or exceed USDA organic standards, and we sell direct to customers and chefs right off the farm.

It’s always best to check our latest online postings to know what we have now, this season. But we have several ways for you to search this site:

Our sustainable farming techniques and constant crop rotation make the publishing of an exhaustive pricelist of all the things we grow, nearly impossible and even confusing for the customer looking for something available now.

We farm to organic standards with low rainfall, so crop rotation is used to avoid the use of pesticides; therefore crops may go in and out of season according to growing conditions. We grow a ton of variety; but unlike a farm aggregator or a grocery store, we’re just two farmers with part time help and not open with everything all year long.

In the winter months, we’ll have up 30-40+ different vegetables, fruits and herbs being harvested in any one week, with certain crops coming in and out of season. In spring and summer we focus more on fruit production, maybe a dozen varieties or more. In early fall we might be closed for a month for maintenance, or we might have greens, depending on the weather. So when someone asks ‘what we grow’ at ARTfarm, it’s a long long list, not a quick answer!

What’s available now?

Start at our latest blog post for the most recent listings of farmstand (or pandemic farmshare) produce available now.

Click on one of these posts to read the latest farm news and produce listings!

ARTfarm Farmstand Popup Wednesday 4/19/2023, 5-5:30pm! Salad Greens!

How about those April showers? Right in the nick of time. ARTfarm has been keeping a little bit of lettuce alive with careful irrigation at night. We’ve got some sweet salad mix, radishes, ginger and turmeric, and some oregano and other herbs to share, so we will be open for a POP-UP (no reservations, first-come…

Be Back in a Few Weeks… Thank You!

Greetings from early April 2023! In case you missed this in the previous farm email: Due to some rain shortages and staff shortages, we weren’t able to keep up the lettuce plantings over the last month. We’ll be taking a short break of an unspecified number of weeks to catch up on that and do…

Looking for something specific?

You can browse the tag cloud on every page of our website. It lists our most popular items and topics, and you can also click on individual keywords like “summer” or “cooking greens” to search our site for tagged posts. That way you can see what is typically in season when, or in what month or season a certain crop is typically available.


You can also use the search bar on every page of this site, to search for any topic such as a specific crop like “passionfruit” or “salad” or “cherry tomatoes” or service like “nursery” or “seedlings” or “hours of operation”, or even a time period like “2012” or “May” or “summer.”

Planning a visit or event?

If you need to know what we’ll have in season for a specific future time period, such as your visit to St. Croix or an event you are planning, you can look at farm blog entries from that month in previous seasons, to help you plan. (Every season has been pretty drastically different in the last few years, with rising temperatures and severe storms disrupting our usual farm routines and crop schedules, so keep your thinking flexible. If you need wedding flowers, definitely contact us six months ahead of time.)

ARTfarm archives by month: “Musty Old Posts”

Our season

ARTfarm’s season has been shifting and shortening with climate change since about 2015. Pre-COVID, our farmstand was typically open year-round on Saturday mornings, with the exception of a few weeks ranging from near the end of August or beginning of September to mid November where we may take a summer/fall break to work on bigger construction projects. (Some years due to natural disasters we may vary slightly or greatly from this schedule.)

The week before Thanksgiving week, we’ll usually add Wednesday afternoons from 3pm to 5pm through the end of the growing season in May.

Our prime growing season (tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, vegetables) generally runs from October through April. In the summer months, we remain open to sell seasonal local fruits and whatever salad greens and herbs are available.

Tomato season is generally from mid-December through April, depending on the weather and other variables. Mango season begins in May – June, although some years we have had mangoes in October – December.

With the notable fluctuations in rainfall and climate, seasons can vary greatly, so please consider these to be estimates!

The big all-year list: ARTfarm specialties

We grow a lot of prewashed bagged salad greens in spicy, sweet, and arugula mixes, in micro, baby, teen and mature stages of growth and tenderness. Cooler months of the year.

Every year we experiment with new varieties of heirloom and slicer tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes. We grow at least three kinds of cucumbers every season. December through April, typically.

We grow a lot of heirloom watermelon varieties. Fruits are typically summer, but some go year-round.

We grow many kinds of bunched greens for cooking or juicing. We also feature a variety of popular root vegetables including beets, carrots, turnips, radishes, sweet potatoes. Cooler months of the year.

We grow squashes: Caribbean pumpkins, butternut squash, little Asian pumpkins, winter and summer squashes including zucchini. Cooler months of the year.

We grow other popular row crop veggies in small quantities: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbages, long beans, eggplant, okra, onions; hot, seasoning and sweet peppers and more. Cooler months of the year.

We grow many types of fresh herbs including three kinds of basil, parsley, cilantro, recao, garlic chives, scallions, lemongrass, rosemary, thyme, tarragon, lavender, dill, mint, sage and more. Typically cooler months of the year but some year-round.

We grow aromatic root herbs: multiple varieties of ginger and turmeric. Cooler months of the year.

Edible and decorative cut flowers including zinnias, cosmos, pansies, nasturtiums, beneficial attracting mixes, sunflowers and orchids. Cooler months of the year.

Tropical fruits available in season (increasingly hard to predict) include pineapples, mangoes, limes, soursop, mediterranean figs, avocados, jojo plums, longan, bananas, chocolate pudding fruit, sugar apple, mamee apple, mesple, golden apple and more. Fruit trees and vines typically tend to produce more in summer and fall months of the year, but climate change and severe hurricane damage to trees has caused great variation.

Value added products from other local farmers that we distribute include goat cheese, local honey, fresh baked breads, and locally made dairy-free coconut-based ice cream.

We have grown native trees and plants from seed under contract for medium-scale reforestation projects (300-800 saplings) for local and federal entities. We usually have surplus inventory of native tree species (drought-resistant, shade-producing) for sale, please ask. Species have included black olive, pouhy, sandbox, lignum vitae, pasture fiddlewood, orange manjack, mangrove, dog almond, brisselette, pigeonberry, black mampoo, blackrodwood, water mampoo, linguam, century plant, jamaican caper, ironwood, sea grape, turpentine and others.

We sometimes offer plant seedlings for sale if we have excess: herbs, tomato plants, young lettuce starts, grafted fruit trees, pineapple slips, and dragonfruit cuttings a few times per year. Generally we send people to the VI Department of Agriculture for vegetable starts or to the SGV Botanical Garden for trees and orchids.

We harvest 8-12 fresh herb varieties per farmstand, in high season.
Luca Gasperi and Eric Ogden in 2008 with our red pickup truck holding the "Grow Your Own Pineapples" sign, on our way to Mango Melee!
We often have pineapple slips for sale in the summer months. Check out our video on growing your own pineapples!
Hot and mild peppers in a range of flavors to enhance your dishes and fight inflammation!
Dragonfruits, pomegranates and mangoes at ARTfarm. Sweet!
Two happy ladies laden down with microgreens and mangoes at the ARTfarm
Get your gold and green produce at the ARTfarm! Beautiful sisters Maria and Tara at the farmstand, loaded down with mangoes, carambola fruit and microgreens! Yum.

6 thoughts on “What we grow (and when)

  1. I’m here until Friday, Sep 9th.. Will the farmer’s market be open on Wednesday from 3p-6p, as indicated?

    Thanks,
    Bridgette

    1. Sorry Bridgette we are currently in our summer break mode. We generally close from the end of August until the end of October for the hottest, hurricane, low season months on St. Croix. We are still here working but we are not open and we don’t have anything for sale. It’s a bit like the dead of winter in the states.

      Try visiting our friends at Sejah Farm. They are open every day, their website is http://www.sejahfarm.com

      Otherwise most of the big farm markets on St. Croix happen early Saturday morning so so you are unfortunately going to miss them this week.

      Sorry to have missed you this time and safe travels!

  2. Good day. My family and I have recently moved to this beautiful island and would love to know what grows well here. We purchased a home that hasn’t been occupied in many years and the yard is overgrown. We’ve always grown our own food, but have never lived in this climate. Do things like lavender, lemongrass and basil do well here as yard plants to help repel insects? Or would they just burn up in the heat? Any advice would be greatly appreciated

    1. Hey Rachel!

      I suggest you visit the botanical garden and talk to the staff there. A home garden is very different from a commercial farm, and your success will depend a lot on where your home is located, how much rainfall it gets, and the exposure to sun and wind. Your soil type will also make a difference. And how much time you have to spend on gardening. So I suggest you approach the botanical garden, where they may have some good books and resources. YouTube has a wonderful array of advice videos about subtropical gardening, and you can also talk to the folks at the local extension service at UVI. It is part of their mandate to help local homeowners with advice on how to plant gardens.

      My husband Luca has offered a consulting service in the past for about $150 where he will meet at the homeowner’s location and help them identify plants and trees on their property and give them some general advice on gardening in their location. He’ll usually spend about an hour.

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