Pennington Market Farm

The farmer’s market season is winding down and just wanted to update on end-of-season plans. There are 4 Saturday markets left: 11/2, 11/9, 11/16, and 11/23. Pennington Market Farm plans to attend all 4. After that, I believe there will be a mid-December holiday market, which we won’t be attending… and then a weekly winter market starting in January 2025, which we also don’t plan to attend. So after 11/23, our next market will likely be April 2025.

A big thanks to everyone who has come by our stand this season! It’s been a great year. I’ve been slowly getting our new lettuce greenhouse built and I am hopeful that we’ll have plenty of lettuce mix at the market in the 2025 season. We also just got a batch of 9 baby chicks which are claimed to lay a variety of different colored eggs (including blues and greens), so roughly 6 months from now we’ll see what we get!

If we don’t see you between now and Nov 23rd, want to wish you a happy holiday season!

An update on the egg portion of our business. We keep our chickens and ducks out on grass 24/7, but protected from predators with large fenced pens. We rotate the birds each month from one pen to the next. All the Pennington Market Farm bird information you ever wanted in this video!

Hey all, a quick notice that we WILL be at the market tomorrow (June 8), but WILL NOT be at the market next week (June 15) due to a scout hiking trip. We love you all! Hope to see you tomorrow!

Just a quick reminder that we will NOT be attending the May 18 Manassas farmer’s market. We’ll be back and ready for action May 25. Hope to see you then!

Hey all, just a heads up that we will be able to bring some lettuce mix bags to the market tomorrow. Please shoot us a note if you’d like to reserve any in advance. Email farmer@pennmarketfarm.com or you can send us a Facebook message (https://www.facebook.com/pennmarketfarm/). Thank you!

Hey all, just a quick heads up that we will not be attending the May 18 Manassas farmer’s market due to some other conflicting activities that weekend.

It’s been a great few weeks back at the market so far! We’ve had a little bit of everything with the weather, but it’s been nice seeing faces new and old. Hope to see you on the 4th!

And we’ll be there!

Some changes coming for this season:

• For duck eggs only: Due to the supply/demand situation with duck eggs, we’ll be doing away with ability to place multiple pre-orders. Henceforth, a customer can only place a single pre-order at a time. So, for example, if you do a pre-order to pickup a future week, you can’t place a subsequent pre-order until you’ve picked up your eggs from the first pre-order. We’re hoping this approach allows us to provide a wider breadth of customers with eggs than has been the case in recent seasons.
  
• We will likely not have much lettuce mix for sale at the market for the next several months. At this point, most/all of the lettuce we grow goes to our restaurant customer in Haymarket (Hidden Julles). We’re mid-way through construction of a large greenhouse to boost lettuce production and allow us to bring more to the market, but it will be some time before that’s online.
  
• We will be raising our multi-discount price to $6 for one item, $5/item for 2+ items (ie 2 for $10, 3 for $15, etc). Items that this affects include microgreens, lettuce mix, and potted herbs.

The Saturday market will be located at the same location as recent years… a commuter parking lot across the street from Baldwin Elementary. With new management running the market, we don’t yet know where our stand will be located amongst the other vendors, but we’ll keep you posted if it ends up being a different spot than prior years.

It’s been a nice handful of months off, but we do look forward to seeing old and new customers again!

Hope to see you!

Happy 2024! Hope everyone had a lovely holiday season. We’ve been enjoying having our Saturdays back during the off season in-between markets. We’re still growing lettuce in our hydroponic pool for our restaurant customer Hidden Julles in Haymarket….

The water is heated to maybe 74 degrees, but we don’t have any sort of air heater, and have had some losses this past week due to the recent cold snap. But we’re experimenting with supplemental light and that has seemed to help yield numbers. I think the ideal scenario would be to have an air heater, but set the thermostat to a hair above freezing. Hoping to add supplemental heating in our next lettuce house, which you can see currently under construction in the top photo. Trying to make progress with that when the weather cooperates.

In other news, we’ve applied for the main season Manassas Farmer’s Market, which is scheduled to start the second week of April. First Saturday market will be April 13. We had considered selling at the Manassas Park market during the month of March, but are currently leaning against that idea. We’re hoping to get our same tent location as last year at the Manassas market, but we’ll have to see what sort of feedback we get from our application. We’ll keep you posted on all of that as we get nearer to returning to the market.

All for now! Stay warm! Longer days ahead…

Our 2023 farmer’s market season is ramping down. The last market that we plan to attend will be November 18. There will be a market on the 25th, but we don’t plan to attend that one (weekend after Thanksgiving).

If we had to boil our 2023 farming experience down into one sentence it’d be that our hydroponic greenhouse lettuce experiment has been promising and scaling that up will be our farm’s top priority for 2024. We still plan on maintaining a healthy lineup of potted herbs and microgreens and plan on maintaining our flock of ducks and chickens (ie we’ll continue to have a limited supply of eggs). Currently on the fence about tomatoes next year… we’ll debate in the off season.

The Manassas farmer’s market has had some management changes over the past X months, and word on the street is that a new farmer’s market in Manassas Park will be competing with the Manassas market at the same day / time in 2024 (Saturday mornings). Our current plan is to stay at the Manassas market for the main 2024 season (April – November), but we may potentially attend the Manassas Park market in March 2024. We’ll keep you posted.

We hope to see you in the next couple weeks, but if not, we want to thank you for another great famer’s market season! Enjoy the holidays!