ARTfarm on St. Croix, USVI

The crowds have been huge at ARTfarm on Saturdays with the demand for fresh local produce. We would love to see some of that traffic benefit other farmers on St. Croix as well, but many of them, like our friends at Sejah Farm, have been set back in their planting season by wet soil and damage from the hurricanes of 2017.

If you know Yvette Browne you know that she is creative, industrious, generous, and a huge advocate for farmers on St. Croix. She and her husband Dale consistently work to make things better for all farmers on St. Croix. In true form, she is taking on a daunting task: hosting (and feeding) 15 farmers for 10 days at Sejah Farm to try and jumpstart their recovery projects and get them back on their feet producing food for the territory. These visiting farmers in the course of a week and a half will be at Sejah Farm rebuilding their greenhouse and animal pens, planting, sowing seeds, fixing downed fences and installing new fencing, and working to restore breeding groups for the livestock.

ARTfarm will be donating fresh produce to Sejah for these farmers that are here to help. We would deeply appreciate if you, our customers, could bring any of the following supplies to the ARTfarm farmstand on or before Saturday morning. We will deliver them to Sejah!

Sejah Farm VI’s ’15 Farmer Project’: balance of supplies needed

Clean bath towels: 20

Cornmeal in 2lb. yellow paper bag: 10 bags

Spaghetti noodles: 10 pack

Sugar: 20 lbs

Cooking oil large commercial size: 4

Vinegar, 1 gallon jugs: 5

Dawn dish liquid: 1 gallon

Hot cups: 1 case

Coffee

Coffee cream

Hot chocolate mix

Mash potato flakes: 20 box

White potato: 6 bags

Tea bags

Onions

Garlic

The meat/ protein which has to be purchased daily because of storage issues.

Fresh vegetables are also welcome.

Any wonderful soul who is willing to prepare (or purchase) a cooked dish for 20 people, please contact Yvette at (340)277-9392 and arrange a day and time.

Good luck Browne family we love you!!

ARTfarm vegetable production is in full swing in mid-January. It’s the sweet spot in the season when we have a big selection. We have two different sets of tomatoes ripening at the same time right now, so if you were going to pick up some extra tomatoes for canning or sauce, this is the best time of year! And we have a nice patch of young cucumbers we’ve harvested for you.

This Saturday we will have lots of sweet salad mix, arugula, spicy salad mix, lots of cucumbers, lots of cherry tomatoes, lots of slicers and heirloom tomatoes, lots of onions, carrots, radishes, sweet green bell peppers, spicy~mild poblano peppers and yellow seasoning peppers, large butternut winter squash by the slice, Thai pumpkin, loads of cooking greens, lettuce heads, bunched dandelion greens, Italian basil, dill, a little parsley, some recao, garlic chives, sage, lemongrass, lots of baby ginger and turmeric, a few figs, some watermelon, and lots of zinnia flowers!!

We will have a lot of salad greens, cucumbers, tomatoes and zinnias for latecomers until 12!

State Of The Farm post-hurricane updates:

We and most of our South Shore neighbors were restored to the WAPA grid on Wednesday afternoon last week after 111 days without power. We waited three more days, until after last week’s farmstand, to turn it on here at the farm, however. We wanted to keep our fridges running with the generators in status-quo condition until after the farmstand to make sure the product would stay cold. Luckily, after switching to WAPA last Saturday we have not had any of our main farm refrigerators retire (even though some of them, at 25 years old, probably are eligible for Refrigerator Social Security!)

Our GoFundMe campaign problems were finally resolved at the corporate level and they even refunded some of our transaction fees to apologize, by making a donation to our campaign from their customer service team. The funds did finally arrive in our account. We were able to raise almost $6,000 after fees through the online campaign, and a private anonymous donor contributed $14,000 offline. It is an amazing start and we are incredibly grateful to everyone who donated a large or small amount to help us rebuild.

Unfortunately, this won’t be enough to restore the damage to buildings – and unfortunately, we have also discovered that there is currently no available federal disaster assistance to help our farm with this damage.

We are not alone in our disappointment with the SBA loan application process. After we were encouraged to jump through all the bureaucratic FEMA and SBA hoops to put in our application and even had an inspector come out and measure our buildings, we were informed a few weeks later at the decision making stage that “agricultural businesses are ineligible for any SBA loans”. So that was an incredible waste of time. As you can imagine, we and many other farmers in the territory are quite frustrated about this.

The final word from the USDA is that they do not have any disaster recovery program to help us rebuild our seedling house. They have programs intended to help with other losses such as to crops and fencing or dead livestock, but no disaster recovery low-cost loans or grants to assist with reconstruction of any buildings such as farmstands, greenhouses, barns, storage or tractor sheds. Even our local USDA staff have expressed surprise that there can be such a big omission in disaster recovery relief coverage for farmers. So we are looking for opportunities along with other farmers to seek redress for this discriminatory practice. Anyone interested in volunteering to advocate for farmers in the territory, please get in touch.

We love you and we love growing stuff for you. Thank you for your support!

Love, ARTfarm

We resolve to get off the streets in 2018!! We will be hosting everyone back in our farmstand building on Saturday! We resolve to rebuild and make things better, including TWO CHECKOUT LINES tomorrow to get the line speeding quickly through! (But in the meantime, please watch your step as you walk through our construction zone!) Luca wants you to know that he resolves to grow more watermelon! That is a win-win as long as all of you resolve to eat more of it!

For Saturday: did we say BABY SPICY SALAD MIX? ARUGULA?!! Yes, yes we did say that. We will have lots of tomatoes, some heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, sweet salad mix, baby arugula, baby spicy salad mix, lots of lettuce heads, cucumbers, sweet bell peppers, a few seasoning peppers, lots of assorted cooking greens including the kale trio of Ethiopian, dinosaur and purple, broccoli leaves, collard greens, dandelion greens; onions, baby carrots, pink radishes, a few beets, lots of baby ginger and baby turmeric, Italian basil, lemon basil, Thai basil, holy basil, cilantro, parsley, dill, lemongrass, garlic chives, sage, lots of assorted butternut squash, a few watermelons, a few Sakata melons, lots of figs, and lots of vibrant zinnia flowers! We’ve got beautiful raw local honey from Errol’s bees, too!

Just a reminder, our farmstand policy (like most retail stores) is first come first serve. We have been receiving a flurry of requests from different customers recently to hold pre-orders from the farmstand (a service even Plaza Extra does not provide). We wish we could be so accommodating but we simply cannot. We do not do this.

The natural farmstand etiquette that has developed over the years is basically a buffet line. Customers progress in a line (which often forms up to half an hour before our opening time) which winds past all the tables of produce, and choose from what is available. It is permissible for a customer to shop for themselves and also for a friend or neighbor. (This is highly recommended for customers who cannot make it to the farmstand on time.) We do not police the line, it is a self-enforcing honor system.

We love our farming life and we love our customers. We do our best to accommodate everyone. But please remember, despite the diversity and beauty of our sustainably grown mountains of produce you see on Saturday mornings at 10 AM, we are not Whole Foods! 😉 We are a tiny family operation with very long hours, always busy, working, and understaffed so please consider your request — and see if you can work with a friend, colleague or neighbor to come up with a strategy to get the items you need without adding to our long long list of things we need to do. Thank you for your compassion. And thank you for loving our produce.

More updates to come soon on our Hurricane Maria recovery efforts, the deal with GoFundMe, our status with SBA and other fun stuff. No electrical current yet at the farm but we hear Broadband VI is starting work on restoring our tower! Stay tuned!

Happy New Year, everyone! Let’s make this year count!