Tag: produce

ARTfarm produce we sell at our farmstand

ARTfarm Monday Q&A: Never the Same Salad Twice

It’s dry out here! Today’s pungent harvest: Sweet salad mix, baby arugula, baby and regular spicy salad mixes, arugula, onions, scallions, cilantro, Italian basil, lots of tomatoes, slicers and heirlooms, cherry tomatoes, and the last of the figs for a while.

Q: Why aren’t your salad greens as sweet this week as they were last week? Why are the stems larger/smaller? Why isn’t  the spicy as spicy as it was last time? etc. etc….?

A: While one could chalk this up to simple nostalgia, it’s more likely that variations are due to two main reasons:

(1) Mother nature’s treatment of our crops is the primary source of this shift in taste from week to week. Even as our recipes remain unchanged, small changes in the weather can affect the taste of our salad mix.

When temperatures are hotter during a portion of the growth cycle of the lettuce heads in our fields, they respond as many living beings do under stress: they attempt to defend themselves from being eaten as they try to propagate. Lettuce will tend to take on a more bitter flavor in hot weather as it accelerates toward the bolting and seeding cycle of its life (as it would during hot late summer months in the cooler parts of the world). If we encounter cooler and rainier weather, the lettuce will be sweeter. Even a brief few days of intense heat can alter the taste of plants. And variations in weather now can affect the salad flavor two or three weeks from now, as the plants are in their growth cycle.

Spicy greens become more peppery when the weather is very hot and dry, and will taste milder when we’ve had a lot of wet weather. Our formulas for the types of greens and their quantities in the various mixes stays consistent from harvest to harvest, but the weather can change the flavors in the bag of salad you take home.

Occasionally we do have to change the formulation of a salad mix because seed is not available for some of the tasty baby greens that add so much flavor to our mixes. We find a substitution that is similar, but this can also change the taste of our salad mixes over the course of the season.

(2) The other factor that comes into play in the consistency of ARTfarm salad greens from bag to bag is what we like to call the Jackson Pollock effect.

When we make the salad mix we use a very large sanitized stainless surface and mix in many different baby mesclun greens with multiple large chopped lettuce varieties.

When creating his splatter paint pop art creations of the 1960s, Jackson Pollock employed a similar technique. He would toss different colors in random patterns throughout his large canvases.

What we do next at ARTfarm is essentially like taking that large amazing Jackson Pollock painting and cutting it up into many small pieces. Each portion of the canvas represents a bag of ARTfarm salad mix. Some bags will have more large pieces of stem from the base of the lettuce head; other bags will contain a little bit more of the baby mesclun greens; others will be a perfect blend of all the different ingredients that we put into the salad mix. Every bag is a little different because they’re all prepared by hand, and the weather, the secret intentions of mother nature, and the randomness of our process ensure that your experience will always be fresh!

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We know that our customers seek us out because they want real produce that tastes like the place it was grown. We know you can handle a little variety. But, if you ever purchase a bag of salad greens from ARTfarm that you find inedible, please bring it back to us. We’d always like to hear from our customers, good or bad, how you feel about our products, and if we’ve goofed and a product is not up to our normal level of quality, we would be happy to replace it with something you find tastier.

We grow this stuff for you, after all!

ARTfarm Wednesday: 3–6 p.m. So Many Salads To Choose From!

We grew it here, tender, crispy and moist, on the dry and arid south shore of the island, just for you! All organic growing methods and just sweet stored rain water for irrigation. You can taste it in the food! Sweet, baby, regular spicy, and baby spicy salad mixes; baby arugula, arugula, a few cucumbers, onions, beets, radishes, purple yard long beans, cilantro, dill, parsley, garlic chives, Italian basil, cherry tomatoes, slicing tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, sweet tree-ripened Mediterranean figs, and from our partner I-Sha we have all-homemade coconut-based vegan local fruit ice cream in a handful of fantastic flavors. We have spoons, or you can bring your own.

A single ivory-colored egg rests in a patch of dry grass in a pasture.
A mysterious lone guinea hen egg rests in dry grass in a pasture at ARTfarm. Guinea hens lay social nests with 40 or more eggs, so this is either the start of a nest, or a discarded mongoose snack!

Top O’ The Morning To Ya! ARTfarm 10 AM – 12 noon

Despite the temptations of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Christiansted today, the little leprechauns of ARTfarm are hard at work this morning on the south side of the island, harvesting greens to decorate your table. Please come as early as possible for this morning’s stand (10am-12 noon) and buy all your greens, tomatoes, fresh herbs and other treats, so that we can release the cute little fellows to run over the hills and join in the festivities in town.

A heart-shaped green heirloom tomato for St. Patty's Day! Enjoy the parade!
A heart-shaped green heirloom tomato for St. Patty’s Day! Enjoy the parade!

If you’re too busy staking out your parade spot or painting yourself and the kids green to make it this morning, we’ll be open Monday 3-6pm! Today’s haul: sweet salad mix, teen arugula, spicy salad mix, a few cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, slicing tomatoes, heirlooms, loads of beets, escarole, collard greens, sweet potato greens, carrots, Italian basil, lemon basil, mint, Thai basil, parsley, cilantro, dill, garlic chives, onions, scallions, French breakfast radishes, lots of Mediterranean figs, and passionfruit. From our co-agrarians, we’ve got beautiful raw local honey from Errol Chichester.

Farmer Matthew this morning reminded us that today is a perfect day to bake a pie: today’s date, for those of you who didn’t get the joke (like yours truly) is 3.14… pi (the symbol used by mathematicians to represent the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, the lowercase Greek letter π).

Enjoy!

ARTfarm Q&A Wednesday 3-6pm: Hold My Tomatoes!

Today’s farmstand, 3-6pm: Sweet salad mix, baby spicy and regular spicy salad mixes, baby and regular arugula, microgreens, loads of cherry tomatoes, loads of tomatoes, onions, scallions, beets, Italian basil, Thai basil, dill, cilantro, parsley, purple Bodhi beans, assorted chili peppers, a couple cucumbers, baby carrots, escarole, a few bunches of kale, delicious Mediterranean figs and passionfruit. From our partner Errol Chichester’s beekeeping efforts we have local raw honey!

Radishes! Carrots! and Beets! Oh My!
Radishes! Carrots! and Beets! Oh My!
It's the scarecrow, the cowardly lion and the tin man. At the end of the yellow brick road, there was... freshly harvested MICRO!
It’s the scarecrow, the cowardly lion and the tin man. At the end of the yellow brick road, there was… freshly harvested MICRO!
Fresh oakleaf lettuces destined for ARTfarm's sweet mix!
Fresh oakleaf lettuces destined for ARTfarm’s sweet mix!

Q: Can you hold a couple of pounds of tomatoes/some dill/a few cucumbers/a bag of salad for me? I can’t make it to the farmstand on time today.

A: We hate to say no to good people. We love all our customers and supporters. We appreciate and applaud how important fresh, organically produced food is in your lives! This is one of our most common questions – we field several requests per week from customers to hold items from the farmstand.

Our policy for retail sales has always been that we are a first-come, first-served farmstand. We may have good intentions and want to say yes to you, but we do not have the manpower, the infrastructure, the time or the space to set aside produce on request. If you start to consider the logistics, we simply can’t accommodate custom retail pre-orders. We lose money on them. And they’d reduce the early-bird limited-supply offerings we want to have available for customers who came on time or even waited in line.

We are a family farm – mom, pop, and grandpa – with a couple of part time employees and loyal volunteers. Maybe someday we’ll be bigger with more staff, but for now we are tiny. We work literally from pre-dawn until after dusk, six to seven days per week year round, to care for the gardens and livestock and accomplish what you see at the farmstand and appearing on the menus of local restaurants. Our profit margins are narrow because of all the labor costs and handwork that goes into our harvesting and processing work and our organic gardening and resource conservation techniques. We love what we do and are dedicated to it, but it leaves us with very little downtime. Additional tasks and projects pull Luca and Christina away from the art studio. We have to limit the services the farm can offer.

We ARE open three farmstands per week in winter and spring, and at least once a week through most of the summer/fall months. We live in a modern world that values efficiency over all else, but coming to the farmstand is, we hope, a qualitative experience and not just another errand to rush through. If you can’t make it, there is always the next farmstand… we, and our family and friends, thank you for understanding and appreciate your support!