FAQ question #1 of ?

All setup and ready to go! From this past Saturday’s market.

The year is off to a good start so far. Market activity is admittedly quite a bit lower this time of year with far fewer vendors and far fewer customers. But we’re hanging in there, and we’re still getting great feedback and support from the new and returning customers who do make it out, so that’s awesome. We’ll be there again this Saturday, February 8 from 9am – 1pm, so hope you can come out and see us!

Wanted to try a little something with the blog. We get asked questions at the market, sometimes the same question multiple times in a day. So we’re going to try addressing some of these questions in blog posts going forward and maybe eventually build a separate FAQ page, etc. Anyway, so here’s the first one…

What do I do with microgreens? Can I grow them in my garden?

At a basic level, you could obviously do anything you want with the microgreens you buy from us. But the “intended purpose” would be so that you could eat / serve them as food. They are often used in salads or as a garnish for soups or meat. Potentially a lettuce replacement in a sandwich, etc. When you buy a live 5″x5″ tray from us, the general idea would be to keep the plants alive and healthy for the following week or so, and cut (harvest) from the tray as needed. Any harvested portion could be used immediately or stored in the refrigerator for an additional week beyond that.

You don’t really want to grow the plants much larger than they are at the time of sale, mainly because they are seeded quite densely and the individual plants would begin competing with each other for resources (soil nutrients, water, light)… it could get unruly in there. So planting a tray directly into a garden isn’t recommended. We would offer that you keep the tray indoors and in a room with some amount of ambient light. And water perhaps once a day to keep the plants alive and healthy. Our particular trays have slits in the bottom, which means you can water from underneath rather than overhead (helps avoid mold issues, etc). Just put the tray on a plate or some larger vessel and water into that, and the plants will suck the water up through the slits in the tray.

Raising Prices Feb. 1

As a heads up, Elissa and I are planning to raise the prices of our microgreens beginning with the February 1 market. Prices thus far have been $4 for one item (pre-cut clamshell or live 5″x5″ tray), $6 for two items (effectively $3 unit price for two or more items). Our plan is to, on February 1, set prices at $5 for one item, $8 for two items (aka $4 unit price for 2+ items).

Our “customer loyalty” program will adjust with that price increase accordingly. If you haven’t heard about the loyalty program, we wanted to have some way to reward customers who buy from us again and again. So the scheme we brewed up is that, if you sign up for the program (sign up sheet at our table at the market), every 4th market day in which you buy something from us, we’ll give you a free item. This “free item” has effectively been a $4 value, but that value will increase to $5 on February 1. As in, if you’re due a free item February 1 or later, you can still get a free 5″x5″ live tray or pre-cut clamshell despite the prices for those items having been raised. Eggs and veggies (when we have them) would still be freebie options, as well, though no price changes imminent for those.

So why are we raising prices?

Microgreens, it seems, have been generally increasing in popularity nation/world -wide for a number of years, but they are still more or less a niche, specialty product. There just aren’t many vendors around. In this area, maybe one per farmer’s market at best? So it can be challenging to gauge where the market is for microgreens in terms of price per unit. And certainly product quality comes into play, though that is not as easy to quantify. But, as best we can estimate, we have been generally below local market value from the beginning, and in some cases significantly below, depending on the comparison.

Undercutting other farmers, from what we’ve been told, is detrimental in the long run… not only to the farmer doing the undercutting, but also the other farmers who are being undercut. To use a buzz word, you might say it’s “unsustainable”. In our case, we’re still just getting going with this farming experiment, and we have all kinds of ideas for things to try and directions to take the business, but most of those ideas have associated costs to pay before product can be brought to market. The salad mix idea that I mentioned recently, for example, requires some amount of additional infrastructure and up-front purchases before we can bring the first batch to market (hopefully late March). Greenhouse poly, electrical conduit for low tunnels, compost delivery, additional refrigeration for post-harvest (likely in the form of a yet-to-be-built walk-in cooler). And the funds for those items can’t yet be pulled from salad mix revenue… because we obviously haven’t sold any yet :-p So we have a bit of financial shuffling to do, and underselling our microgreens isn’t helping in that regard. And, as far as other farmers, lowballing them on price potentially affects their sales and could cause them to lower price in turn. Enough of that sort of behavior at a macro level can shift the market in the wrong direction, and small farms have a hard enough time staying viable in the business as it is.

Overall, we have been excited and encouraged by the response we’ve gotten at the market since we started attending in late June last year. We absolutely value the relationships we’ve built with our customers over these months, and we want to continue to nurture all of that goodness. From a customer point of view, obviously, nobody likes paying more for something, and there is certainly a risk that this increase will turn some people away and cause us to lose sales as a result. However, not merely staying afloat, but growing over the long term will, as mentioned, warrant investing more time and money along the way, and we’re hoping that the net result of this change will put us in a better position to do that going forward.

Many thanks to anyone and everyone who has come by our table. After the market closure this past Saturday, we’re looking to get back at it this coming weekend (January 25, 9am – 1pm). Hope to see you then!

1/18 Farmer’s Market canceled!

FYI, just got the word that tomorrow’s Manassas Farmer’s Market will be closed due to inclement weather. We had been prepping to bring plenty of eggs and microgreens this week, so if you’d like any and would be willing to drive to our home in Nokesville, please contact us and we can make arrangements. Here’s hoping we can all get back to the market on 1/25!

Our 2020 season starts tomorrow!

Baby cilantro just starting to pop out the true leaves.

We’re resuming weekly market attendance starting tomorrow. Winter market is 9am – 1pm every Saturday until March 28. (Main season market starts in April, and we plan to do that, as well.) This time of year, we don’t have much to harvest from the garden, but we’re full speed ahead on production of eggs and microgreens.

We’ve also started experimenting with herb starts… intending to sell little 3″x3″ pots of single growths of basil, dill, parsley, and cilantro. Those aren’t ready for the market just yet, but maybe in 2-3 weeks(?) Like any other market experiment, we’ll see how people react to them and, if sales are good, we’ll grow more herbs, if not, continue experimenting.

Longer-term than the herbs, we’ve started going down the road toward the magical kingdom of Salad Mix. We’re talking baby versions of lettuce, kale, spinach, maybe beet greens, swiss chard, mustard greens, etc. Salad mix may be a tougher item to take hold at the market, mainly because most of the other produce vendors have some form of bagged greens, bagged lettuce, etc. There’s a possibility that we’d be stepping into a saturated market. But gardening in one form or another is something we’d like to continue to grow (pun intended) with our farm activities, so hopefully we can find a way to differentiate and offer some good variety and quality.

We’ve started transplants of various greens and will be planting the first batch into a bed in the next couple weeks. Following Eliot Coleman’s winter farming strategy of insulating veggies with two layers of protection (outer poly tunnel, inner mesh row cover), we’re hoping that we can at least keep the transplants alive in the ground in January / February… and hopefully, fingers crossed, have something to harvest beginning late March.

Hope to see you at the market tomorrow! Sounds like the weather will be awesome, especially for this time of year.

At the market tomorrow!

Hey all, just a reminder that we’ll be at the Manassas Farmer’s Market tomorrow from 9am – 1pm. Come out and brave the cold with us! Microgreens are looking good this week and we actually got some kohlrabi and arugula from the garden… still hanging on despite all the overnight freezes. And we have a ton of chicken and duck eggs. Hope to see you!

Holiday Schedule

This past Saturday (11/23) was the last market day of the “main season” for the Manassas Farmer’s Market. November 30 through March 28 is the “winter market”, which we’ve signed up for. It’s essentially no different than the main season market, though it runs from 9am – 1pm on Saturdays, rather than 8am – 1pm as was the schedule in the main season.

That said, we’ll be taking a number of weeks off between now and mid-January, so we wanted to give a heads up on when we plan to skip and when we plan to attend…

As a disclaimer, this is all per our understanding of the market schedule, and sometimes that doesn’t always jive with what the market organizers are planning, etc, etc. If this plan changes in the future, we’ll provide another update.

I should also add that if you would like any of our products during this period and are willing to make the drive to our house in Nokesville, we can hook you up. Just send us an email at farmer@pennmarketfarm.com with your order and we can get back to you to make arrangements. For microgreens, please note the grow times listed on our products page… in some cases (eg basil), it could be 2-3 weeks before we’d have your order ready for pickup, so please just keep that in mind.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Broccohlrabi

That’s some weird looking broccoli.

Well this is a bit of an embarrassing surprise. Back in July, we ordered a bag of broccoli seeds from a certain seed company who we’ll attempt to keep anonymous. At the time, we were planning to grow some fall veggies, but also add those same plants to our microgreens lineup. The seeds came a few days later and we soon got broccoli (or so we thought) into our microgreens rotation at the market. And it has generally been selling well. We’ve done 5″x5″ live trays and occasionally have clamshells of pre-cut product. The microgreens look great… similar to kale in height, color, grow time, etc.

In August, we did three rounds of fall veggie planting in our garden. The broccoli seeds were in that lineup, along with arugula, beets, carrots, and kale. First planting would’ve been around August 5th or so, last one around Labor Day.

Fast forward a couple months. Our first row of veggies (the ones planted August 5th) didn’t go all that well. We got some arugula and some beets from that row, but not much from any of the other varieties. But row 2 was better and row 3 was better still.

But where was the broccoli? We’ve never grown broccoli before, so we figured maybe we had just planted it too late in the season and the colder fall temps had slowed the growth, etc. We were seeing huge, healthy-looking leaves, but no little broccoli trees in the center of the plant. Well, a couple days ago, we were installing a Curtis Stone -style poly low tunnel in the garden, and we were staring at the broccoli again wondering what was up and we suddenly came to the realization that we hadn’t been growing broccoli at all…. it was kohlrabi. Rather than the little green trees in the center, there were purple cabbage-like balls. We had been sent an entirely wrong bag of seeds. All this time, we’ve been assuming we’ve been growing and selling Waltham 29 broccoli and, in fact, we’ve been growing and selling what we believe to be purple Vienna kohlrabi.

Now, we’ve been generally happy with the service and products from this particular seed company, so we don’t want to just throw them under the bus. It’s obviously a non-trivial mistake, though apparently broccoli seeds are virtually indistinguishable from kohlrabi seeds, AND as broccoli and kohlrabi are both in the same species (Brassica oleracea), they have very similar nutritional qualities. We’re going to be contacting the seed company shortly to relay all of this information to them and see what we can do about getting a no-joke bag of broccoli seeds. But we want to humbly apologize to anyone who bought “broccoli” microgreens from us these past few months, as you almost certainly bought kohlrabi microgreens instead. Had we grown true broccoli in the past, we might have noticed differences at the microgreens stage of growth (vs. adult) and caught the problem earlier. Hopefully today’s confession doesn’t ruffle too many feathers, but if so, let us know and we can see what we can do to try to make it right.

Looking ahead, we still have a good amount of these kohlrabi seeds, so we’re going to continue growing them, but we’ll obviously be correcting our labeling, market table signage, and so forth. The last we heard, there will be no December 7 market, which means 11/16 and 11/23 will be our last market dates this season before we do a holiday break. We then plan to return for the winter market on January 11.

Hope to see everyone on Saturday! Come out and sample our kohlrabi microgreens! 🙂

Veggies are in!

From left to right: raw peanuts, cherry tomatoes, Daikon radish, red Russian kale, Detroit dark red beets, arugula

We’ve been harvesting various items from the garden the past few weeks and bringing it to the Saturday markets. The broccoli and carrots that we planted in August still aren’t ready, so we’re hoping we can pull some of that before the frosty nights really start to kick in. But the arugula, beets, kale, and radish seem to be fine. Hopefully more of that to come over the next X weeks.

For the peanuts, it’s looking like our final tally is roughly 14 pounds of good quality nuts from the 50-foot bed, with an additional 2 pounds or so of lesser quality nuts that are currently in a discard bowl on the back porch. I got some burlap sacks off of Amazon that hold 1 pound of nuts nicely, so we’ve been selling the nuts at market the past couple weeks in those bags for $5 each. Only have 4 bags left at this point, so they may not be around much longer!

At this point, for the main season Saturday Manassas Farmer’s Market, there are only 3 dates left: 11/2, 11/9, and 11/16. Manassas does offer a winter market, which will run from 9am – 1pm Saturdays from November 30 through March 2020. We haven’t officially signed up for that yet, but we’re leaning in that direction. Our current thought is to go ahead and sign up, but plan to take about a month off over the holidays. We’ll keep you posted on that.

PMF out 10/12

Just wanted to advertise that we will NOT be attending the Manassas farmer’s market this coming Saturday (10/12).  Derek’s grandmother passed away this past weekend and we will be attending the funeral.  But we’ll be back for the 10/19 market and hope to see you all there.

Going Full Sauce

Logan assisting with the row cover. Big bushy row on the left is peanuts. Sparse row to the right of peanuts is our first planting of arugula, beet, broccoli, carrot, and kale (didn’t turn out so well). Two rows with row cover hoops are subsequent plantings of the same. Two tarped rows to far right are TBD (maybe unused until next season).

It’s almost time to start harvesting a lot of stuff from the garden. Elissa’s already been pulling tomatoes and some arugula, and we had cantaloupes a few weeks ago. Peanuts are due mid-October. We also have 3 rows of fall-ish veggies: arugula, beet, broccoli, carrot, and kale… each row planted two weeks apart across the month of August. We’ll see what we see with all that.

Meanwhile, we’re adding more grow lights and shelf space to the microgreens operation. We plan on bringing 11 different varieties to market on 9/28… newest additions being micro cilantro, and then a “regular” salad mix and a spicy salad mix. These are seed mixes that we got from True Leaf Market. It will be interesting to see how folks react to those.

Elissa pulling 5×5 trays out from our germination cooler. Radish for 9/28 market and basil for 10/5 market. We’ve also started “checkerboarding” the microgreens that like to tangle with each other across 5x5s (kale, broccoli, beet)… (see the third shelf down from the top). We essentially stagger four 5x5s in a 1020 tray rather than the full contiguous eight to minimize the entanglement problem.

Birds are doing well. The 7 laying leghorns are pumping out the eggs these days… I think we may be averaging 6 eggs a day from them, which is pretty good in percentage terms for us historically. These eggs are still on the small side, however, but we’re hoping they beef up as the birds mature. AND, we’ve started getting a trickle of duck eggs… maybe one a day. It ain’t much, but we’re hoping it’s a sign that the molting phase is coming to an end.