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. 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.
Our baby mix is made of tiny tender leaves of various greens including mustard, arugula, radish and lettuce greens, harvested just moments ago at the ARTfarm.
For our Saturday morning crowd today we have spicy baby mix, microgreens, arugula, and asian water spinach. In the fruit department there’r carambola (star) fruit, bananas, mangoes, soursop, jackfruit, eggfruit and breadfruit. For treats we have Feel I’s ice creams, Alisha’s Sweetface chocolates, and all the charms of Farmer Luca!
It's fruit salad time! Green and yellow Cavendish bananas rest atop a pile of Haitian kidney and Valencia Pride mangoes at ARTfarm.
Get your gold and green produce at the ARTfarm! Beautiful sisters Maria Walsh and Tara McQueston at the farmstand today, loaded down with mangoes, carambola fruit and microgreens! Yum.
Today’s ARTfarmstand features GREEN: microgreens, teen arugula, asian spinach, basil, lemongrass, garlic chives, breadfruit. GOLD: Valencia Pride and Haitian Kidney mangoes, carambola (star) fruit, pineapple, and eggfruit. Locally made honey vinegar, Feel I’s ice cream, and Sweetface chocolates. Alisha has a new flavor: ginger chili. Yummers!
We have pineapple slips for all you budding pineapple gardeners out there. Two bucks for the little ones, three bucks for the huge ones. It only takes 18 months to grow your own! Fun for the kids!! Teaches patience!!!
You see them at the farmstand. They are what bananas might look like if they were genetically spliced with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Maybe they frighten you. Maybe you simply don’t know how to eat them. Let us help you.
Plantains are a sweet vegetable in the banana family, delicious baked or fried, green or yellow. The yellower and riper they are, the sweeter they become. Like bananas, they come in many varieties, shapes and sizes.
Plantains are amazingly tasty cousins of bananas. They are starchier than bananas, so generally are much more palatable when cooked. Plantains can be eaten when the peel is green or yellow. The riper they become, the sweeter they are.
Sweeeeeet Yellow Fried Plantains
For sweet yellow plantains like the ones in this photo, we like them fried. Peel off their thick skin, slice them lengthwise into 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick pieces and fry them in a hot buttered pan, turning occasionally until they are nicely browned on both sides. These are insanely good as a snack or dessert. They hold together better than fried bananas. We challenge you not to eat them all at once.
Potatoey Green Plantains
For green plantains, you can bake, boil or roast them like potatoes. They are a very nutritious starch with plenty of fiber. They’ll be trickier to peel, so try cutting both ends off, making a slit lengthwise along the peel, and keep your hands wet as some kinds of green plantains can stain your fingers!
Tostones
You can also use plantains to make tostones, which are essentially plantain “chips.” To make tostones, you peel and slice the plantains into rounds, about 3/4″ thick, season them a bit, fry them in oil until just golden, drain and allow them to cool. Then smash them flat, and fry them again briefly to achieve crispiness.
Search the web for more detailed recipes on making plantains part of your healthy, local, Caribbean diet. Experiment, and tell us about the results on your next visit to the farmstand! Who needs potatoes?
ARTfarm on St. Croix, USVI 