Love is love. (c)2021 by M. Gasperi. Do not copy, print or reproduce without permission.
We neglected to acknowledge two important community milestones; Juneteenth happening tomorrow — a day too often overlooked in our schools and society — and in the middle of Pride Month, which intersects in many ways and culminates on Pride Day, June 28th. We encourage everyone to learn more about the history of both.
“Our Nature” (C)2006 by Luca Gasperi. Do not copy, print or reproduce without permission.
Thanks to all in our community who are continuing to do the difficult, exhausting work of exposing social justice issues, and pushing us all to look inside and understand our ONE humanity. It is a necessary step toward solving many of our other species-threatening challenges on our one planet. Big shoutout to the angels at Theater Of the Oppressed VI, Come To The Table, VI Good Food Coalition, the St. Croix Environmental Association, the Women’s Coalition of St. Croix, and others who help us hold respectful space for justice, communication and finding solutions. We support and celebrate you!
A quick update in early June, 2020, to confirm the end of our “regular farmstand” season, and more importantly, addressing a few important events here.We deeply appreciate the sacrifices of soldiers who fought for our freedoms, particularly to protect our Constitution, the right to express and attempt to live our ideals as one nation.
We stand with Black Lives Matter protesters now on the front lines of our nation, fighting for all our freedoms. If some of us are not free, none of us are free. Enough is enough.
We celebrate Pride Month and acknowledge that it is primarily a form of protest because you shouldn’t need a month if it’s who you are. Be who you are. Love is love.
And our advice to graduates, and to everyone fighting a war at the moment: Eat healthy, read books, and get your rest. We need you. We are in, hopefully, and together, a difficult and heavy luteal phase prior to explosive growth of something new.
Reap what you sow. What are you sowing, in your family, in your community?
If you’ve been down to the South Shore recently you know that everything is going into a drought state. We have officially ended our pre-reserved social distancing distributions of the last two months, and are on summer hours: that means we’ll only be open on a pop-up basis if and when we have enough produce to distribute.Personally and for any farm business we will continue to practice social distancing, in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 in our community.
We are working on some gardening articles to help you all with your DIY farming projects at home!
We love our customers, we miss chatting with you, and we’re proud of everyone in the Virgin Islands working together to flatten the COVID-19 curve. Special thanks to our healthcare and essential workers who are STILL on the job to keep everyone healthy and safe and fed.
It’s not over yet. Stay the course. Soldier on. Protect the most vulnerable. Be the change. We got this!
The epic rains of early November 2018 brought epic rainbows. In this case, leading to the arresting sculpture of Niarus Walker.
Halloween flew by like a tropical bat, Diwali brought us its hopeful message of good defeating evil, and the elongated election season is nearly over; it is time to turn our thoughts back to family, gratitude, the simple things.
We are thankful for the many dedicated customers who are eager for ARTfarm to reopen! And for eleven inches of rain that fell over the first two weeks of November, decisively ending our water shortage – but also destroying the first lettuce crop of the season and creating some other setbacks. (We’re seeing major damage to melon vines and papaya trees and possible crop failures on ginger and some of our tomatoes.) But staying grateful that some of our gardens are recovering from all of the drenching!
We will be open for a special holiday farmstand on Wednesday, November 21st, 3pm – 5:30pm with a bumper crop of beautiful cucumbers and smaller quantities of a few other things including a limited supply of salad greens. Here’s the full list:
Lemongrass, garlic chives, Italian basil, rosemary, spicy radishes, two types of cucumbers, some teen spicy greens, baby arugula, a few bags of sweet mix, green papaya, wild cucumbers, some small bulb onions with large green tops (use like scallions), a few marigold and zinnia flowers. And ARTfarm turkey and chicken eggs! Super fresh!
Need a thoughtful gift for the holiday? This is a great time of year to get plants in the ground. We’ve got pineapple slips, fig trees, and native drought resistant shade tree saplings available for sale!
Tomatoes will come in around December 15th.
Grandma’s Fabulous Cucumber Salad that Luca loves (as told to Christina)
There is no recipe for this.
First of all don’t measure anything.
Mandolin a cucumber into thin slices and thinner than anything you’ve ever experienced in your life. Paper thin. Then cover them in water and add an unspecified amount of too much salt. Then go away and do other stuff. Come back in a couple of hours.
Rinse the heck out of them when you come back from your other activities and make sure they’re not too salty.
Rinse them again and again and squeeze them to get the salty water out.
Let them drain in a colander for even longer. Do other things.
Chop up a couple of scallions.
Add a big spoonful of mayo per cuke. Dress with vinegar and basil. Toss.
So just make sure you have:
Maybe about half a cucumber per person
A bunch of scallions (green onion tops or garlic chives work too)
A generous handful of salt
A few spoonfuls of mayo
A little basil (could be dried if you don’t have fresh)
A little vinegar
Fun people to share it with!
We finally got one of our chicken tractors rebuilt after the hurricane. The hens are thrilled with their more comfortable quarters.
Happy turkey day from ARTfarm.We want to give a great big thank you to all of the people who have made our lives possible and made them better. We are grateful that we have a place to farm, and the tools and supporters to make that happen.
If you are doing some holiday shopping this weekend, consider an ARTfarm gift certificate for your loved ones. We also have beautiful one-of-a-kind monoprints and original artwork available through our gofundme fundraising efforts to rebuild our seedling house and art gallery that were destroyed by Hurricane Maria. We’ve raised nearly $4,000 of the $23,000 needed, GIVE THANKS!! Visit http://gofundme.com/artfarmllc to donate and get an original piece of ARTfarm art!
The farmers have been hard at work on some beautiful art. We are making some botanical and farm scene monoprints and paintings to help us raise funds for our hurricane recovery efforts on the farm.
A special thank you Bob Boyan and our other super farmer volunteers.We’re grateful that there are amazing customers and chefs who appreciate the stuff we grow and the work that goes into it, and regularly buy our produce. We are thankful for the family members and volunteers that have been helping us with removing debris, weeding gardens, rebuilding fences and demo-ing our destroyed buildings.
The farmstands have been very slow, we know that many of our loyal regular customers are off island right now. We are dividing our time between fundraising, rebuilding, and producing food and art, with the hopes that people will come back in a month or so to be here for the holidays and eat our food!
Our pastured birds eat bugs, weeds and fresh sunflower seeds in addition to vegetarian poultry feed. We hope someday to feed them exclusively from what we can grow on the farm.Enjoy the holiday season! We will see you soon! Love, ARTfarm
There is no recipe for this.
ARTfarm on St. Croix, USVI 