ARTfarm Farmshare Preorders for LAST Pickup Wednesday 4/6/2022, 4–6PM! (Pop-ups from here on out)

The season-long drought has kicked our butts with late-night watering, the grass is getting brown and crunchy, and we are ending the scheduled farmstands for this season after Wednesday this week. Dragonfruit vines are blooming early, though, so stay tuned for pop-up stands, possibly later this month. The salad greens continue, and you can reserve more than one share for Wednesday’s pickup – at 4pm we’ll start distributions for 35 pre-order customers with our heirloom, slicer and cherry tomatoes, onions, fresh greens, garlic chives and basil, winter squash and baby fennel for the early bird customers and more listed below… 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 (and masks up please with farm staff) inside the gate! Please arrive on time but not more than 10 minutes early to prevent traffic jams and longer wait times. We appreciate your cooperation!

Sunsetting on the tomato crop for 2022. The dry conditions have lent a lot of flavor to this year’s ARTfarm tomatoes!

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. We’d 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!

Success!! We have baby chicks, and a very attentive bush hen we have named Lady Fantine. The babies are enjoying poultry crumble along with some BSF larvae we grew for supplemental protein.

Farmshare choices for Wednesday, April 6th, 2022:

We will have 35 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.

LARGE farmshare, $25, will include:
  • 2 bags of sweet salad mix
  • 1 lb. slicer/heirloom tomatoes
  • 1 pint cherry tomatoes
MEDIUM farmshare, $18, will include:
  • 1 bag of sweet salad mix
  • 1 lb. smaller slicer tomatoes
  • 1 pint cherry tomatoes
GREENS LOVER farmshare, $14, will include:
  • 2 bags 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:
  • TEEN arugula or spicy mix (mesclun-ish: arugula, mustard greens, radish greens etc.): $10
  • heirloom TOMATOES: $5/bag 1lb.
  • CHERRY tomatoes, pint: $6
  • winter SQUASH: $3.50/lb. as marked
  • baby FENNEL: $3-4/head as marked
plenty:
  • extra bag of SWEET salad mix: $7
  • ONIONS with green edible tops: $5/bunch
  • baby BOK CHOI: $3/bunch
  • SWEET PAPRIKA, green pimento cheese and cornito PEPPERS: $3/bundle
  • POBLANO peppers, smoky sweet and mildly hot, great fresh/dried: $3/bundle
  • HOT hot hot peppers: $2/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)

  • Italian (Genovese) basil
  • Dill
  • Dill seed
  • Garlic chives
  • Hot peppers incl. serranos, jalapeños, thai chiles, paprika and Lemon Drops!
Lady Fantine is an amazing mother. We love watching her teach her babies to eat fresh corn!

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!

ARTfarm First 2022 Farmstand! 4:30 – 5:30pm Wednesday 1/5/2022!

ARTfarm early winter season! Yellow and green zucchinis, cucumbers, sweet corn and long beans. We’ve also got plenty of salad mixes and herbs, and a few tomatoes starting!

Here we are in 2022! We are back to weekly (socially distanced) farmstands: ARTfarm will be open every Wednesday afternoon 4:30–5:30pm. This week our farmstand will be a hybrid of first-come, first-served socially distanced shopping, and 15 online pre-reservable farmshares for pickup at 5:15pm. Your feedback is always welcomed, and we are always experimenting to maximize your convenience. Saturdays will be added at some point later in the season…

Wednesday afternoon 1/5/22… Starting at 4:30pm, we’ll have sweet salad mix, baby and teen spicy salad mixes, baby and teen arugulae (pretty sure that’s the plural for arugula right?), cucumbers, long green beans, summer squash, scarlet turnips, radishes with cookable green tops, cilantro, dill, garlic chives, Italian basil, baby ginger, baby turmeric, chili peppers, Swiss chard, kale, baby bok choy, dandelion greens, SWEET CORN and a few SLICER TOMATOES, and zinnias…

If you don’t want to wait in the seasonally lengthening line on Wednesday afternoon, there will be 15 large ‘late bird’ farmshares, reservable for pickup at 5:15pm Wednesday. $44 will include:

LATE BIRD farmshare – $44, 5:15pm pickup, reserve online:
2 bags sweet
1 bag baby arugula -or- baby spicy
1 pint cherry tomatoes
2 lbs. cucumbers
1 lb. summer squash (zucchini)

No reserved add-ons for these boxes, but there’s a good chance we will still have some extra special goodies off the main list for our late birds, so feel free to bring extra cash or wait to fill in your check. Traffic has been a little slow this winter so far.

Click below and fill out a short form to reserve a farmshare. You must receive a confirmation email to know for sure that we got your reservation. If you can’t find the confirmation email, please read these tips and do some extra searching before you contact us!

Mongoose & Zinnia fresh pastured eggs! The rainbow comes from the diversity of handpicked heritage breed hens, all of whom are talented foragers and help the gardens with both fertility and pest control. They also help close nutrient loops by eating plenty of discarded salad greens and other ARTfarm byproduct produce!

We’ll have eggs from Mongoose & Zinnia (still just one or two cartons, as our chickens are STILL on a laying strike). And…

Looking to grow some food at home? Farmer Luca still has a few extra Black Plum tomato slips ready for transplanting into your garden or container (this is a cherry-sized oval shaped sweet, flavorful and rich tomato for eating and cooking). We’ll also have pineapple slips available. If you want seedlings, please text us ahead so Farmer Luca can prep them and bring them up to the gate ahead of time for you. Text your name and number, variety and quantity to the farm phone at (340) 514-4873.

Ms. Eurythrma Mongoose in her Finery, ca. 1889. Mixed media on paperboard, 10” x 12.5” ©2021 Marina Gasperi.

ARTfarmer, mongoose documenter and chicken wrangler Marina Gasperi recently had a solo art exhibition, “Small Life” at Café Christine Tues-Fri 10am-2:30pm (call for holiday open days). The exhibit is officially closed now as the collectors are picking up the purchased works, but we’ll leave a few available original artworks up through January 11th or so, and high quality art print greeting cards are still available. Marina has also created some adorable Chicken vs. Mongoose holiday ornaments out of recycled irrigation supplies. We are working on her website where her art can be viewed, coming soon! Please visit the Café in Christiansted over this holiday time and enjoy this ARTfarm production!

Love, ARTfarmers

Cover photo: We are a three generation family farm. Luca’s dad has farmed on this spot since the late 1960s, although when he was in charge it was a Senepol cow pasture! Nowadays in 2022, salad and radishes for all! And hoping for rain… the grass is slow to grow in these drought conditions!