Opening Saturday Nov. 19th, 10am–12noon

An animation shows a tiny farmer repeatedly bouncing high into the air from a wheelbarrow.
Get ready for yummy salad! Farmer Luca bounces in his giant wheelbarrow to express his gratitude for the recent rains and for the end of the endless US presidential election.
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Our passionfruit vines are loaded with flowers at the moment!

Thanks to all of you for your patience as we closed for our summer/fall break and began gearing up for this 2016-2017 season! We’ll be open and ready for you this Saturday with quite a few treats to reward you with:

Dragonfruit (pitahaya) ripening on the vine.
Dragonfruit (pitahaya) ripening on the vine in November! Extended season for this summer crop!

Sweet salad mix, baby arugula, baby spicy salad mix, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, Ethiopian kale, a few bunches of Italian dandelion greens, kangkong (Asian water spinach), fresh herbs (including Italian basil, lemon basil, holy basil, Thai basil, rosemary, recao, garlic chives,) a few papayas, the LAST (really!) dragonfruit and passionfruit.

We’re happy to welcome back our good friend and farmer James Love to ARTfarm this season. He’s already fixed a lot of stuff we broke since the last time he was here! Farmer Katie has reupped with team ARTfarm to work the gardens and pastures for the fall season, and you’ll see Heather back again, helping out at most farmstands and bringing her fresh eggs from ecstatic chickens and selected organically produced produce from her family homestead, Yellow Door Farm. We’ll have other special guests, including fishermen stopping by when fresh fish is available. And our farm kid is carefully tending lots of native tree varieties to plant and to sell this season! The ARTbarn gallery/studio (the old tool shed you walk through to get to the farmstand) has been repainted and patched up, and there will be some fresh new paintings to ponder.

Last year (2015-2016) we began a slow recovery from the drought and damage from South Shore brushfires with a lot of experimental permaculture techniques (we opened in mid-December last year!). This season, thanks in part to a general return to more favorable conditions and a six-day rain bonanza in the last few weeks, our rain catchment ponds have been mostly replenished. We are grateful to make it to your holiday table this year in time for Thanksgiving, Friendsgiving, Fall Harvest Celebration, or however we choose to celebrate coming together in these socially progressive days! We hope you’ll enjoy time with family and friends, and count and share your many blessings.

Thank you.
Thank you.

Can’t wait to see you all – we’ve missed familiar faces, we welcome new customers, and we’re looking forward to sharing and enjoying the fruits of the season! Lots more treats to add to the produce list in the coming weeks. Thank you for your support.

Love, ARTfarm

 

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...the original photo...
…the original photo…

18lb. Wednesday at ARTfarm! 3-6pm

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Welcome, big baby!

Hope everyone enjoyed a peaceful Mother’s Day weekend. Lots of love to all the maternal beings in our universe! The ARTfarm delivered an 18 pound baby yesterday and Midwife Luca was there to catch it!

3-6pm today down the South Shore: Sweet salad mix, baby arugula, baby spicy salad mix, bunched arugula, sweet bell peppers, Trini seasoning peppers, serrano peppers, parsley, Italian basil, lemongrass, a few bunches of onions, a few tomatoes, multiple varieties of watermelons, honeydew, loads of papaya, loads of passionfruit, shaddock, fresh ginger root, and fresh goat cheese from Fiddlewood Farm!

 

Seedy Farmstand! 10am – 12 noon ARTfarm Saturday 

Come try out one of our new heirloom variety watermelons! You can even prepare and eat the seeds! It’s the year of experimentation!
Since the beginning of May, we’ve received over six inches of rain on the South Shore. Yeah, we’re kind of psyched about that.

Farmer Luca has been growing trials of many different kinds of watermelons and other melons this spring at ARTfarm. Today we will have four types for you to try! (Limited quantities, so arrive early if you possibly can.) Frankly, we love them all, but please give us your feedback on what are your favorites so Luca can plan to grow more of the best ones. They taste sweetest when chilled, if you can wait long enough!

The heirloom watermelon varieties we are growing tend to have many prominent seeds (compared to a commercial supermarket type watermelon). While everyone knows that the modern advent of the seedless watermelon has saved humankind countless tedious hours of spitting, our robust and weighty old fashioned seeds can be useful as more than mere projectiles at an outdoor children’s gathering. Of course they can be saved and planted, but they can also be prepared and eaten: The seeds can be juiced; or sprouted, then ground into a sprouted grain flour and used in gluten-free baking; perhaps a more accessible use for the lay watermelon-seed-eater would be to rinse and dry them, then prepare them much like salty roasted pumpkin or sunflower seeds. Here’s a recipe we found online!

Come to the South Shore this morning and hook up your week with organically produced fresh fruits and veggies, herbs and other treats: Sweet salad mix, teen spicy salad mix, bunched arugula, a few bunches of kale and Kan Kong (Asian water spinach) and of sweet potato greens, loads of bell peppers, all three of our hot/seasoning types of peppers, the end of the tomatoes for this season, Italian basil, parsley, recao (culantro), rosemary, lemongrass, garlic chives, a few bunches of onions, radishes, a couple of shaddock (giant grapefruit-like citrus), lots of passionfruit, pumpkin, various types of watermelons – whole and cut, beautiful papayas, fresh ginger root, and loads of amazing zinnia flowers.

Everything we grow is free of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. We are not a certified organic farm, but we grow everything as though we were – meeting or exceeding national organic production standards set by the USDA and keeping careful records – because we want to. Healthier for us, healthier for you, healthier for the soil, healthier for the planet. We are health nuts and we want to improve our soil with every crop and we are obsessive about it. Don’t get us started unless you’ve really got some time on your hands! 🙂

We have fresh local goat cheese  from Fiddlewood Farms! Freak out! It’s so good!!!


Wednesday 3-6pm: It’s a Gourd, It’s a Pumpkin, It’s…

img_2145…IT’S A MELON!!!!!

These crazy, sweet and beautiful looking tiger-stripy Kajari melons were meticulously collected in an eight-year epic quest by melonhead seed collectors who travelled to Punjab, India in search of heat-tolerant specimens. This one Luca trialled, part of the Year Of Experimentation, seems happily adjusted to our Crucian climate and is astoundingly sweet and delicious, honeydew-like in its color but with a softer consistency and a sweeter, stronger flavor than the typical bland green crunchy melon chunks found at the salad bar. We only have half a dozen of these little beauties this week, so be an early early bird to try it, and save the seeds!

Wednesday’s farmstand, 3-6pm down the South Shore Road, due south of Canegata Ball Park as the trushie bird flies: Sweet salad mix, baby arugula, baby spicy salad mix, bunched arugula, a few bunches of kale, cherry tomatoes, small slicer and heirloom tomatoes, a rainbow of bright bell peppers, Trini seasoning peppers, serrano peppers, Indian chilies, recao, Italian basil, parsley, garlic chives, mint, lemongrass, rosemary, freshly harvested ginger root, passionfruit, loads of beautiful sweet papayas, Punjabi honeydew melons, loads of zinnia cut flowers, a few sunny sunflowers! Make someone’s day – why not your own?

From our partner Fiddlewood Farm we have a fresh batch of delicate goat cheese – no labels this week but new ones soon come. Dr. Bradford was excited to share the great news that a new baby doe (girl) goat kid arrived this week! There is nothing cuter or bouncier… Congrats to the new mama! Photos soon!