ARTfarm sweet mix comes from many different varieties of lettuces, grown organically and sustainably with stored rainwater irrigation! We interplant to naturally deter pests. And because it’s pretty. We can use volunteers right now, if you’re a non-tobacco user please get in touch! Come play in the gardens!
Wednesday’s October ARTfarm PopUp features sweet salad mix that’s extra tender from the rain. Also a few herbs and baby pineapple plants, and a few dragonfruit and sweet potatoes for the early birds.
As usual at this time of year, it’s been just a handful of people so it’s usually a good time to bring your gardening questions and chat with Farmer Luca. It’s also a great time to ask about volunteering on the farm, or tell a friend if you know someone who might be interested in learning more about sustainable, regenerative gardening practices — we are short a couple of people right now and would love some help in the gardens and with a few other tasks as well.
Our thoughts, prayers and energy toward the people of Asheville NC and others in areas affected by the devastation of Hurricane Helene.
Today is Contract Day in the USVI. Honor the Fireburn Queens of 1878.
Nam doc Mai mangoes from Tropical Exotics orchard on St. Croix are fiberless, buttery smooth and sweet.
Water water everywhere! Thanks to Tropical Storm Fiona and other weather events passing through the area, we have been blessed with over six inches of rain and the catchment ponds are finally refilling!
Saturday 9/24/22 Pop-up at the ARTfarm 11:30am — 12 noon: Sweet salad mix and Thai mangoes! Lots of Nam Doc Mai mangoes from Alex at Tropical Exotics orchard — wisely picked right before TS Fiona so fruits wouldn’t get bruised from falling — ready/ripe in the next three days, priced as marked.
We’ll also have sweet salad mix, sweet onions with delicious green tops. Early birds will also choose from sweet potatoes, garlic chives, lemongrass, mango/white turmeric, kafir leaves, and zinnia flowers. Also, pineapple slips for down-the-road DIY piña coladas.
Tropical Storm Fiona dropped over 6 inches of rain on the ARTfarm over several days. Our largest lined pond is approaching capacity.If the soil has some moisture in it from previous rains, it takes a minimum of 4 inches of rain over less than a week, to get the guts running to fill the unlined dam (pond) on the east end of the ARTfarm pastures. Tropical Storm Fiona was able to fill it 3/4 full! This will help to recharge the water tables on the South Shore.
First come first serve. No reservation required!
Farmer Luca and family wants to take a moment to encourage everyone to support local farmers. If you can’t make it to our farmstand, Sejah Farm is a wonderful farm/market that sells their own produce plus lots of produce from all over St. Croix. They have a wide selection and are open more hours and days than we are.
There is also the Saturday farmers market at the Department of Agriculture grounds where you can buy directly from farmers.
Remember the best way to support agriculture in the US Virgin Islands is to buy produce directly from farmers.
After unusually booming productivity this winter, the end of ARTfarm’s 2020 tomato season is arriving soon…
Things are getting crispy as usual in the spring with dry hot winds…
Everything gets more pungent in flavor at the end of the season … onions full of weeds!
Hey there folks. We hope everyone is staying home as much as possible, avoiding stress, washing hands, resting, eating healthy and trying to keep that 6′ distance. Schools and many businesses and organizations across the island and the globe are temporarily shutting down over coronavirus. We are all finally hunkering down to wait out this crisis, “flatten the curve” of the timing of acute medical needs, and put our community and elders first.
Last week with the COVID-19 risks clearly laid out, we decided to cancel the regular farmstands for the rest of the 2019–2020 season. We considered the demographic of our customers and family, and the typical close proximity provided by our popularity and petite retail space.
But the lettuce continued to grow, so we tried a ‘socially distant’ distribution experiment with pre-sold boxes on Saturday. We sent out our usual email, but with an order form link. Customers signed up for a large or small prepacked box of ARTfarm produce via that one-time link on our website. The first 40 requests received an order confirmation and order number via email, then were scheduled to arrive Saturday morning at staggered pickup times, keeping a generous distance between each other and us, with a check or exact change in (sanitized) hand.
We were able to distribute the majority of the produce we would have sold at the farmstand, while maintaining a minimum of contact and virus transmission. The prepacked boxes and bags made transactions very quick.
There was more demand than supply, unfortunately, and we apologize for anyone who missed the email or the cutoff.
Farmer Luca has walked the fields and estimates that we do NOT have enough produce for a full scale mid-week (Wednesday) distribution of box shares to our customers. This is actually typical for this time of year, as the season continues to dry up. The monster tomato harvests that broke seasonal records and almost broke the cart a few weeks ago are almost finished now.
A small handful of the customers who were ‘next in line’ for a box on Saturday but missed it, have been contacted individually for a small Wednesday share this week. We are doing our best to accommodate as many people as we can with decreasing harvests.
We will post a signup link later this week on our website with pricing and contents for Saturday (March 21st) ARTfarm boxes again, probably 10 large and 30 small boxes. We’re hoping to put in place a more organized signup process and online form and continue for at least a few more weeks, so watch for another farm email sometime on Thursday or Friday! (If you’re not a subscriber, sign up!) We won’t take any orders directly through texts, calls or other means. Please stick to the signup link, later this week.
Our pineapples are looking good, the dragonfruit vines are looking very healthy and may bear heavily this year, and mango trees have set nicely. We’ll try to keep things going and growing as long as we can.
Stay safe and healthy. And thanks for your support!
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.
There is no recipe for this.
ARTfarm on St. Croix, USVI 