Tag: spring

posts between March 21st and June 21st

ARTfarm Wednesday Pickups March 20th! 4:30pm – 6ish (or walk-ins no reservation shopping 5:30-6pm)

Heirloom tomatoes are typically picked vine-ripe and thus require careful picking and gentle handling at all times.

Happy Spring! Vernal Equinox yesterday! Feel the planetary shift! Cherry tomatoes, LONGAN!, sweet potatoes, and other plenty and variety available! This is high farming season and weather, and we have so many treats for you! TOMATOES galore – especially cherry tomatoes – reserve an earlier shopping time or just come 5:30-6pm!

Come early for first dibs on an ever changing array of always organically grown extra fruit and veggie seasonal items: fruits, greens, veggies, herbs and specialty ingredients and other stuff. Exhaustive and more accurate list below.

Sweet little carrots! Delicious, raw or sautéed or in cake or any way you wanna cook them! And you can juice the tops if you are bold and want that bitter green in your diet! Super healthy!

Join our scheduled shop-n-pickup (we’re calming the crowds with pickup times: Click to sign up below for one of dozens of pickup timeslots, which will reserve your basic order and give you early dibs on the extra items we have with short wait times!) If you missed this signup, feel free to JUST SHOW UP in the last half hour and we’ll fit you in for extras – PLUS there will be another signup in a couple of days. Detailed instructions, and questions answered HERE if you’re new. Welcome!

ARTfarm NEEDS:

• an experienced Linoleum Flooring Installer. The World Central Kitchen project continues. We’ve knocked out the mechanical end of the 40′ container to recover an extra foot of space. Luca and the volunteer crew cut channels between the compartments to prevent thermal transfer and filled in the T-channel flooring with a combination of insulating foams to help the cold air stay in! Still need a helper with linoleum flooring experience to help us finish out the floor. Send us a contractor!

• ON-FARM VOLUNTEERS. Brisk farm workouts or zen seated handwork in peaceful breezy nature for volunteers (non smoke/vapers). As brief as two hours at a time. Weed, schlepp, spin salad, split seedlings meditatively at a shady table, hoe and rake yourself a sweaty six-pack! Help out with the livestock! Or deliver our produce to local restaurants! Could convert to part-time employment depending on skills, uptake and efficiency. Read HERE about the experience of volunteering at ARTfarm!

Farmshare choices for Wednesday, March 20th, 2024:

A truckload of winter squash and pumpkin harvested at ARTfarm! Regenerative soil practices are really paying off this season.

We will have 55 timeslots/farmshares available for scheduled pickup. 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. At the farmstand, you can choose from remaining add-on extras and we’ll total your order. We require a minimum farmshare purchase because we are chronically understaffed and need to keep farmstand hours brief; but we’ll do our best to make substitutions as needed; we want you to be happy!

Please note: Produce (including tomatoes) labeled “seconds” should be used/refrigerated immediately. Cucumbers are a mix of asian, middle eastern and hardy slicing types.

LARGE healthflex farmshare, $46, will include:
  • 1 bag of SWEET salad mix
  • 1 bag of baby ARUgula
  • 2 lb. TOMATOES (slicer/heirloom mix)
  • 2 pints CHERRY tomatoes
  • 1 lb. CUCUMBERS
MEDIUM spicycherrymato farmshare, $34, will include:
  • 1 bag of baby SPICY salad mix
  • 2 lb. TOMATOES (slicer/heirloom mix)
  • 2 pints CHERRY tomatoes
SMALL sweetermater farmshare, $19, will include:
  • 1 bag SWEET salad mix
  • 1 lb. TOMATOES (slicer/heirloom mix)
  • 1 pint CHERRY tomatoes
TOMATO farmshare, $10, will include:
  • 2 lb. TOMATOES (slicer/heirloom mix)
BOK CHOY BABY farmshare, $10, will include:
  • 3 heads of tender BABY BOK CHOY
Extra Add-Ons (non-reservable – first come first served during your pickup slot):
early birds:
  • purple SWEET POTATOES
  • orange SWEET POTATOES
  • LONGAN dragon eye fruit (related to genip, lychee, rambutan – soooo sweet)
  • ONIONS with green onion tops!
  • white (sweet-spicy) RADISHES with green tops, $3/bunch
  • euro GREEN BEANS medley – no passport required
  • SWEET PEPPERS
  • assorted HOT peppers
  • baby GINGER and baby TURMERIC
plenty:
  • CHERRY TOMATOES
  • HEIRLOOM and SLICER tomatoes
  • 2nds TOMATOES – scratch and dent – use or frigerate immediately
  • CARROTS
  • PUMPKIN whole and slices
  • tender baby salad TURNIPS with green tops, $3/bunch
  • French pink breakfast RADISHES with green tops
  • assorted HERBS bunches: $2 each
Herbs for this distribution

(Available as EXTRAS)

  • Thai basil
  • Cilantro
  • Dill
  • Kaffir lime leaves
  • Lemongrass
  • small leaf OREGANO
  • Scallions

Please contact us immediately by text and/or 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.

Signup form for
Wednesday PICKUP March 20th, 2024!

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. (And then, add us to your address book!) 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 limit any one customer from cleaning us out. 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 Farmstand Popup Wednesday 4/19/2023, 5-5:30pm! Salad Greens!

Hey BUUUUUUDDY! Little pink buds are appearing on the dragonfruit vines. They’ll be fruits in about a month or so.

How about those April showers? Right in the nick of time. ARTfarm has been keeping a little bit of lettuce alive with careful irrigation at night. We’ve got some sweet salad mix, radishes, ginger and turmeric, and some oregano and other herbs to share, so we will be open for a POP-UP (no reservations, first-come first-serve) farmstand in the afternoon, Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 5 – 5:30pm.

We’d appreciate if you have any hint of ill health, send a friend to pick up, or wear a mask when you are interacting with Farmer Luca. We need that guy to stay healthy!

Because it’s a quieter time of year, we are not expecting a big crowd. Looking forward to seeing you! Thank you so much.

If you’re looking for someplace to donate your generous tax refund, The Virgin Islands Good Food Coalition, who tirelessly advocates and supports small farmers and farm to school programs in the US Virgin Islands, is a worthy cause. Go to their Facebook page now to learn more and make a donation: /goodfoodvi

Last year around this time, the VI Good Food Coalition distributed assistance to local farmers through their Farmer Drought Mitigation and Support program. Thanks to VI Good Food, ARTfarm ordered more water, worked on fire breaks and purchased extra water pumps.

See you Wednesday!

ARTfarm Farmshare Popup Preorders for Pickup Wednesday 5/11/2022, 4:30–6 PM!

It is officially the off season for us, and the pineapples are almost ready. For now, ARTfarm is not on a regular weekly schedule, but we have enough salad greens for a smaller group of customers to pick up Wednesday, and you can reserve more than one share for Wednesday’s pickup. At 4:30pm we’ll start distributions for 25 farmshares with our fresh sweet salad greens, with extras available like eggs from Mongoose & Zinnia, two kinds of radishes (sliced thin for quick pickling is great) with their included lovely green tops (chop into a salad or de-pepper them by gently sauteing); our sweet onions, winter squash, sweet peppers and more listed below… We’ll be 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 inside the gate (and masks up with farm staff please)! Please arrive on time but not more than 10 minutes early to prevent traffic jams and longer wait times. We appreciate your cooperation!

Have you ever been in a musical theater production? You work for weeks on your audition, then months and months blocking, choreographing, rehearsing, building sets and getting everything ready, and after an excruciatingly long time your hard work pays off and there’s opening night? Well, we finally got our World Central Kitchen trailer delivered to the farm last week (wild applause!!!). We will be retrofitting this former refrigerated container to house our cold storage and processing facilities. We are super excited! This summer we will complete the retrofit and put it into service for the upcoming season.

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!

Three generations of Gasperi farmers on St. Croix! On Monday, April 4, 2022 Luca’s dad Kiko was honored by the 33rd legislature of the US Virgin Islands with a Perma-Plaque for his lifetime contributions to the development of the Senepol cattle breed, a beef breed that originated on Saint Croix USVI in the early 1900s. Senepol cattle are known for their excellent performance when pastured under brittle, droughtlike conditions and scrub forage, and the breed is now a significant addition to sustainable beef production across the US Sun Belt and South America. Kiko Gasperi came to St. Croix from Italy in the late 1960s to work at Castle Nugent with his brother Dr. Mario Gasperi, and served as the ranch manager for Castle Nugent Farms under his sister-in-law Caroline and her son Mauro after Mario’s passing in 1989. Kiko spent many years building and mending fencing, tagging calves, dipping herds, and managing pasture. In the hotter part of the day for thirty years he’d be found in his office poring over breeding records and selecting the best animals based on performance to improve the Senepol breed. Our thanks to Senator Myron Jackson who pushed for this resolution to honor the elders who were involved in this work.

Farmshare choices for Wednesday, May 11th, 2022:

We will have 25 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.

THREE GREENS farmshare, $21, will include:
  • 3 bags of sweet salad mix
ONE GREENS farmshare, $7, will include:
  • 1 bag 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:
  • extra bag of SWEET SALAD MIX: $7
  • ONIONS with green edible tops: $5/bunch
  • winter SQUASH: $3.50/lb. as marked
  • mini SWEET PEPPERS: $3/bundle
plenty:
  • white large or red french mini RADISHES with yummy green tops: $3/bunch
  • ‘Mongoose & Zinnia’ pasture raised EGGS: $8/doz
    red and green POBLANO peppers, smoky sweet and mildly hot, great fresh/dried: $3/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)

  • Garlic chives
  • Lemongrass
Hens and chicks is one name for this succulent, drought tolerant ornamental plant.

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.

Signup form for
WEDNESDAY PICKUP
May 11th, 2022!

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 limit any one customer from cleaning us out. 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 Farmshare Popup Preorders for Pickup Wednesday 4/20/2022, 4:30–5:30PM!

The drought is turning the South shore and East end a golden brown, and we are no longer on a regular weekly schedule – but we have enough salad greens for a smaller group of customers to pick up Wednesday, and you can reserve more than one share for Wednesday’s pickup – at 4:30pm we’ll start distributions for 20 farmshares with our fresh sweet salad greens, small slicer and cherry tomatoes, onions, winter squash, radishes 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 inside the gate (and masks up with farm staff please)! Please arrive on time but not more than 10 minutes early to prevent traffic jams and longer wait times. We appreciate your cooperation!

As the weather gets hotter and drier on the South Shore of St. Croix and the tomatoes succumb to the drought, ARTfarm pineapple fruits start to increase in size. Watch for hummingbirds who feed on the flowers of young pineapples!

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!

Dry season on the South Shore of St. Croix, USVI. Orchids are one of the few decorative flowering plants that can survive the drought without regular watering.

Farmshare choices for Wednesday, April 20th, 2022:

We will have 20 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. small 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:
  • small slicer TOMATOES: $5/bag 1lb.
  • RADISHES with yummy green tops: $3/bunch
  • winter SQUASH: $3.50/lb. as marked
  • SWEET PAPRIKA, green pimento cheese and cornito PEPPERS: $3/bundle
plenty:
  • ‘Mongoose & Zinnia’ pasture raised EGGS: $8/doz
    ONIONS with green edible tops: $5/bunch
  • 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)

  • Garlic chives
  • Hot peppers incl. serranos, jalapeños, thai chiles, paprika and Lemon Drops!
Hens and chicks is one name for this succulent, drought tolerant ornamental plant.

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.

Signup form for
WEDNESDAY PICKUP
April 20th, 2022!

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 limit any one customer from cleaning us out. 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!