For this Saturday, December 19th we will have, freshly harvested and ready at 10am:
December lettuces are tender and sweet!
Loads of sweet salad mix, baby arugula, teen arugula, baby and teen spicy salad mixes, and royal oak leaf lettuce heads;
These round yellow summer squash are tender and can be roasted, stewed, fried, stuffed…yum!!We love seeing what you do with our produce! Here is a stuffed zucchini with a side salad! Thanks Isabel Cerni & family!
Zucchini, round summer squash, lots of generously sized Ethiopian kale (it’s similar to a mild mustard green, super dark and tender), Tuscan kale and red edged kale, dandelion greens;
Fresh Mediterranean figs are beyond tender and sweet when ripe!
Wild cucumber gherkins, a few half pints of cherry tomatoes, our first slicing tomatoes of the season, and amazing fresh Mediterranean figs.
Open 10am – 12 noon but of course come early for the best selection! We will be open Wednesday, December 23rd, 3-6pm with a similar lineup.
Hot new work from the ARTbarn: Luca recently delivered the original art for the 2016 Taste Of St. Croix poster. The subject this year is one of our fellow farmers, Grantley Samuel, who is known as the Corn Man but is also renowned for his watermelon. Thought you all might enjoy this! Prints will be available at the Taste Of St. Croix in April!
ARTfarm is open Saturdays only (until it starts raining again), 10–12 noon today. We’re on the South Shore Road just east of the Ha’Penny Beach entrance. Fresh today: sweet salad mix, microgreens, bunched arugula, Ethiopian kale, garlic chives, recao, mint, bananas and passionfruit.
From our partners we have homegrown honey from Errol, vegan coconut-based ice creams in local fruit flavors from I-Sha, and miraculous mangoes from Tita. These mangoes are so fiberless and sweet that you can literally eat them out of the half like a melon with a spoon. They have an almost honey-like flavor. Incredible in any mango recipe or simply consumed fresh.
1. Select your mango.2. Slice your mango lengthwise, skimming your knife along the flat mango pit within.3. Scoop out the perfect sized bite and enjoy. (This particular variety of mango is unusually fiberless!)
We want to acknowledge all the recent graduates! This is the time of year to celebrate the culmination of a lot of hard work. Congratulations to all those who have passed finals, completed performances, received accolades, and progressed in some large or small way. Keep on growing!
The strange and wonderful pitaya, or dragonfruit, grows at the end of a primitive, spiny climbing vine. Early summer is typically the season for the dragonfruits to flower and ripen.
Pitaya, also known as dragonfruit, has one of the most strange and dramatic presentations of all the crops we can think of.
Today’s haul: Loads of tender sweet salad mix, Ethiopian kale, bunched arugula, mint, lemongrass, Italian basil, rosemary, zinnia flowers, a few pineapples, a few passionfruit, and red fleshed dragonfruit!
Dragon photo-bombing the dragonfruit. We also have pineapples and passionfruit today for your inner fruit monster! OM NOM NOM NOM
From our partners we have raw local honey from Errol and vegan ice cream from I-Sha.
That’s 10 AM to 12 noon today, folks! ARTfarm is currently open just once a week during this drought.
More pineapples today! ARTfarm pineapples are ridiculously sweet this year, maybe because of all the dry weather. June seems to be our pineapple month!
Open 10 AM – 12 noon on South Shore Rd. this morning, ARTfarm has, organically grown for you: Salad mix, microgreens, small quantities of pineapples, tomatoes, and cucumbers. We have beets, scallions, mature bunched arugula, Ethiopian kale, Italian basil, mint, zinnia flowers, local honey from Errol Chichester, and admission/raffle tickets for the Caribbean Dance show next weekend! No Wednesday stand this coming week, so come out to the farm today…
Our adopted border collies, Ginger and Spice, vigilantly patrol the pineapple gardens at this time of year to discourage rats. We’ve seen these athletic dogs leap all the way over the row of spiny plants during the hunt. This is a viable and much more entertaining alternative to poisons for controlling crop pests on an organic farm. During dry times there is increased pressure from all pests on farm crops and resources.
We are changing our schedule to reflect the weather patterns. The drought is really affecting our ability to grow crops at this point. It also seems like a natural pause to tackle some big farm projects we’ve been wanting to get to. So, we have decided to curtail our Wednesday farmstands until we get some rain or production picks up again. We will be open today and next Saturday as well, and we will play it by ear after that. Mango season is coming, but it also may be a bit delayed by the dry spell we are all in.
Young dancers preparing for the annual show in the Caribbean Dance studio in Christiansted. Support the arts on St. Croix!
The Caribbean Dance School‘s 38th annual performance is Friday, May 29 and Saturday, May 30 at Complex (the high school across from the UVI campus). We have tickets ($15 donation, includes entry into raffle for plane tickets and more) available at the farmstand or you can purchase them at the door! Show time is 7:30 PM. There are adorable tiny ballerinas in the show but also a number of accomplished student and professional dancers — the show is family-friendly and highly entertaining! The closing number in the show features rousing carnival music and traditional calypso dancers, and includes over 30% of the ARTfarm workforce! So come see your farmers in action and support all our local talent in the arts! The Caribbean Dance School and Company is an important cultural institution in the Virgin Islands, founded in 1977 to tour the world and share our island culture, and is still operated by the original artistic directors! It is also an enduring nonprofit organization engaging thousands of students over the years, promoting health, self-esteem, and self discipline. The arts are an important and vibrant part of Virgin Islands culture, help improve our communities in countless ways, and are woefully underfunded. Please come out and show the students you care.
Plus, you’ll get great inspiration for choreographing your own rain dance! 😉
ARTfarm on St. Croix, USVI 