Author: Derek

Got word this afternoon that tomorrow’s farmer’s market has been cancelled due to the forecasted below freezing temps. We will now look ahead to next week and hope to see you on February 6! For folks who pre-ordered from us for pickup tomorrow, we’ll be reaching out here in a few minutes to each of you via email / text. Thanks!

Wanted to give a quick shout out to a couple great customers of ours, local chefs Ezie Junkala and Alessandra Innamorato! Ezie of Ezie & Emil has been coming by our stand since the beginning. Her personal catering menu changes weekly and features a wide range of flavors. And Chef Alessandra of The Feisty Feeder has an impressive culinary resume (she was Merv Griffin’s personal chef, no less!) and equally impressive globally-influenced catering menu. Please check out both of these fantastic local catering businesses!

Last week’s market was a cold one! (I mean, it is winter these days, so what are you gonna do.) Forecast for the 30th looks cold, dry, and sunny. The outdoor garden growth rate is probably at its lowest this time of year, and we harvested all we could last week, so we decided to give the garden a rest this week. So no salad or lettuce mix on the 30th. But plenty of microgreens and we should have some not-yet-reserved eggs out on the table at least at the start of the morning. And our “adult” basil (grown indoors) will also be attending via its heated bin.

Market is Saturdays from 9am – 1pm at the Harris Pavilion. Hope to see you!

Buh bye, 2020! We resume weekly farmer’s market attendance tomorrow, January 9. Again, this winter season farmer’s market location is up at the Harris Pavilion in downtown Manassas. So this will be every Saturday from 9am – 1pm. Weather can be a factor this season, and we’ll send out notices for any adjustments as soon as we get them.

Aside from true summer crops like tomatoes and peanuts, we have pretty much everything else available from our repertoire. We grow our salad / lettuce mixes under two layers of protection in the garden, so we’re still getting some decent output from that crop. Always microgreens aplenty and the birds keep on doing their thing with eggs. The chickens have slowed slightly… maybe going through a molting period. But, as always, if you’d like eggs and we happen to be sold out, you’re welcome to ask and we can put you on the list for next time, etc.

Hope everyone had a nice holiday season. Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow and/or in the weeks ahead!

The latest news from the market managers is that the winter Manassas farmer’s market will be held in the Harris Pavilion (9201 Center Street, Manassas, VA 20110), and not the usual commuter parking lot across from Baldwin Elementary. So this will be Saturdays from 9am – 1pm, first date being this coming Saturday (12/19). The date schedule that I’ve posted a couple times still holds, as do our associated attendance plans.

We don’t yet know where our location will be within the pavilion, but you should be able to find us if you just look for the green tablecloths. Plenty of lettuce and salad mix this week, and the ducks are producing more eggs these days. Should have all of our usual stuff! Hope to see you there!

Things are still moving along as we start to get into the colder months. The market schedule (which weeks on, which weeks off) and our attendance plans are all as they’ve been, no changes planned. I’ll post the schedule here again:

Officially, the “winter market” begins December 19. Last year, the winter market hours were from 9am – 1pm (rather than 8am – 1pm as in the main season). We need to confirm with the market managers whether this will still be the case. We’ve heard murmurs about trying to move the winter market from its parking lot location to some other location (potentially indoors)… between you, us, and the fence post, we’d prefer to just stay where we are. Anything indoors, especially, would seem perhaps risky given the pandemic. Anyway, rumors aside, the plan of record as we know it is to stay in the parking lot. As usual, we’ll send an update if the outlook changes in any way.

Weather for tomorrow says partly cloudy, high of 49. So hopefully not too bad. The microgreens are looking good this week. There’s a period between summer and winter (I suppose you’d call that “fall”!) when the thermostat doesn’t know which way to go… and the humidity in the house rises a bit… and microgreen “performance” starts to struggle. We seem to be past that period now and they’re all looking pretty solid. We have a number of egg pre-orders in the queue for tomorrow, but we may still have some unclaimed duck eggs on the table, at least at the start. And we’ll be bringing peanuts… this will potentially be the last date for those, depending on sales. Should have plenty of salad mix and lettuce bags.

And, last but not least, we plan to debut our adult-ish basil pots tomorrow (pictured). These were started October / November. All grown indoors. If you scroll back a few blog posts ago, you can see some of our grow trials with basil over the summer. We were experimenting with the different parameters (water, fertilizer, pH, etc), and so these current plants were grown using the methods that we honed down from those summer experiments. We’re hoping to continue bringing these every week, and eventually expanding to include other herbs as we get further into next season.

Anyway, hope everyone is doing well and we look forward to seeing you at the market anytime!

So this is our current understanding of the market schedule, as well as our current attendance plans. I believe the market hours will be 8am – 1pm from now through December 5, but then transition to 9am – 1pm beginning with the December 19 market. Of course, all of this is subject to change at any point, and we’ll provide updates if / when those changes happen.

In the garden, our fall salad mix production has kicked in, so we’ll hopefully have a decent supply of salad mix and lettuce mix bags at the market for the next however many weeks. We’re still getting a small number of cherry tomatoes… frost hasn’t totally killed them off yet! And peanuts have all been harvested at this point, so we’ll continue bring cartons of them every week until they’re gone.

The birds have slowed down with eggs, whether due to molting and/or reaction to less light in the day at this time of year, etc. We’re still getting duck and chicken eggs, just at a lower rate than we would during the warmer months. The eggs continue to sell out every week, sometimes before we even arrive at the market. If you’d like eggs, you’re welcome to ask us to get you on the reservation list for a future week, etc.

Inside in the grow room, we’re still carrying on with microgreens as usual. This last basil experiment was educational, and we’ve started growing what we hope to be our first real-deal production basil pots. So hopefully late November / early December we can start bringing those to the market in limited quantities.

Anyway, hope everyone is doing well or at least hangin’ in there! We always look forward to seeing you all on market Saturday. I’ll take a moment to plug our other social media outlets… we’re on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, so feel free to check any of those links out and give us a like or a subscribe to get updates from us as we post them. Thanks as always!

A little montage of things we’ve been doing around the farm for the past couple months.

We concluded our first basil trial on September 8 when the plants hit the 6-week mark. The overall results were our best yet, but still not worthy of bringing to market. So we started a second trial, pictured above, on September 16. In this new trial, we’re taking a deeper dive on the watering amount, and also further exploring the realm of liquid fertilization.

In trial #1, we saw that 1.5 tablespoons of water per day gave us the best growth, whereas 1 and 2 tbsp water / day weren’t as good. So now we’re looking at 1.25, 1.5, and 1.75 tbsp water / day to see if we can improve our accuracy. And for fertilization, the 2-2-2 organic fertilizer that we used in trial #1 gave us the best result when used once per week (as opposed to once every 2 or 3 weeks). So we started with that once-per-week plan as the baseline and added a twice-per-week with 2-2-2 fertilizer, as well as an entirely different fertilizer applied every watering. This other fertilizer (Botanicare Pure Blend Pro Grow) isn’t organic, which isn’t ideal in our opinion, but is commonly used in hydroponic setups, so we wanted to see if we could learn anything from it.

A very important point with this trial is that we’re now adjusting all of the water used in the trial to have a pH of approximately 6.0. We got a pH test kit beforehand and it showed that our tap water is more or less neutral (pH 7.0), and we’ve heard that basil (and most plants in general) prefer a slightly acidic water, around pH 6.0. Given that the results are noticeably better across the board, we believe this pH adjustment has been beneficial.

Anyway, so that’s the setup. So how have things fared so far? Substantially better than last time. Across the board. Noticeably faster growth, bigger leaves, no signs yet of disease or malnutrition, though at 3 weeks in, it might be a bit early for those sorts of issues to emerge. As said in the prior paragraph, this 6.0 pH water could be a big factor. But these higher dosages of fertilizer are also helping. Generally, the story that seems to be emerging is that, because the required growth time for mature basil is so long (4 – 6 weeks or more), the soil alone doesn’t have enough nutrition to support the plant for the duration. Without supplemental fertilization, the basil will eventually deplete the soil’s nutrients and then begin to wither.

So it seems we’re on a bit of a fertilization spectrum here… where on one end of the spectrum, the plant gets 100% of its nutrition from soil with no fertilizer added… and the other end is essentially hydroponics (no soil, 100% fertilization). We’re somewhere in the middle, I suppose… certainly not hydroponic, but not really able to work around these fertilization needs. Again, the goal is to be able to do this year-round, and we can’t grow basil outside in the winter… hence we move indoors under lights. If we could grow outside in the garden, then the “pot” size per plant is as wide as the roots will go… plenty of nutrition available outside. So inside, it seems there needs to be some supplementation for these longer growth periods. This sort of fertilization requirement isn’t as big a factor with microgreens, as they only grow for a week or two before consumption, so the nutrients in the soil alone are sufficient.

We’re still plugging away every week with all of our usual farm activities. Our salad mix production took a big hit during the hot periods of July and August, but it’s starting to ramp back up now that the cooler weather is returning. Cherry tomatoes are still hanging on and we have plenty of peanuts (one row still left to harvest in the next week or two). We’ll have a few cartons of unreserved eggs at the market tomorrow, as well as a big lineup of microgreens. Stay well and hope to see you!

Harvested our first row of peanuts on Labor Day. We should have peanuts (raw) at the market every week for hopefully the next couple of months!

Just an FYI that the Manassas Farmer’s Market is still on today, despite the rain!  We’re here until 1pm.  Hope to see you!