Pennington Market Farm

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! 🙂

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.

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.

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.

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.

Microgreens have proven to be our bread ‘n butter at the farmer’s market this season. And it’s mainly because the grow time is so short (1-2 weeks). We bring X amount on a given week, see what sells and what doesn’t, and alter our grow plan for the market two weeks later. Pea 5″x5″ trays, for example, have been consistently selling out for us. One week we brought 4 trays and they sold out… two weeks later, we brought 6 trays, they sold out… two weeks after that, we brought 8 trays, etc. I believe we have 10 trays of peas in the pipeline for the 9/21 market. Conversely, buckwheat wasn’t as well received, so we scaled that back and eventually stopped growing it. All in all, the microgreens portion of the farm business has scaled up quite a bit since we started selling at the farmer’s market in late June.

Meanwhile, eggs and garden herbs have been selling, but we haven’t been able to increase what we bring each week because it takes so long to grow a given garden item to full maturity or raise a baby chick to laying age. (Our new adult leghorns have started laying, by the way, and we’ve started bringing chicken eggs back to the market. Ducks are still molting… we’re hoping they start laying any day now.) But we do have some fall veggies underway in the garden (as well as peanuts) and hope to have something to bring in the coming weeks.

As a heads up, we will likely be moving our tent this coming Saturday (9/14) back to our original assigned spot. We just ended a 3-week stint down next to Marlan with Portwood Gardens, and will be moving back up between Little Hawker Cafe (Malaysian street food) and the Mangonada slushie folks on 9/14.

Thanks to all who have come by our table! Hope to see you Saturday!

Quite a bit of bird-related activity since the predator attack a few weeks ago. We already had plans to rearrange our pen fencing to maximize square footage without having to buy additional rolls of fence. So we pushed forward with those plans… new pens are 75 feet by 50 feet, which allows for up to 34 birds in one pen and still remain kosher with the “pasture raised” buzzword. (From what I’ve read, you need to have a minimum of 108 square feet per bird [on pasture] to be considered “pasture raised”.) So we’ve had to shuffle the flock around as we tear down one pen and rebuild it, etc. As I write this, two of the planned three pens are fully constructed and we’re aiming to do the third one this coming weekend.

And in this pen rebuild process, we’ve added a skirt of chicken wire along the bottom outer edge of each pen. This skirt extends 1.5 feet out from the pen fence along the ground (stapled into the ground), and 1.5 feet up along the fence (zip-tied to the fence). So we’re hoping this will eliminate any chance of gaps along the bottom of the fence (how we suspect the predator[s] got in this last time).

We’ve also obtained 19 new birds. 12 Tractor Supply chicks and 7 near-laying white leghorn hens. The Tractor Supply chicks were sexed (90% accuracy, so we’re probably due for a male or two in the bunch). The whole fam has been enjoying playing with the baby birds.

Overall egg production has been virtually zero since the predator attack, and we won’t be bringing any eggs of any kind to market tomorrow. The attack took all of our laying chicken hens, and the 12 new babies won’t be laying until next season. The 7 older leghorns will hopefully be laying any day now, but nothing yet from them. Meanwhile, our ducks, which seem to have survived the attack just fine, have been molting for the past couple weeks, and it’s apparently common for ducks to stop laying while molting. So, yeah, no eggs these days. We’re crossing our fingers that the ducks and 7 leghorns start pumping them out soon. People have been asking for eggs at the market and it’s tough to turn them away, but what can you do.

At some point during the wee hours of this past Sunday morning, some predator(s) got into our bird pen and killed / took 16 of our female chickens. This included all of our laying hens, plus two chicks. All 7 of our ducks survived, as did our two roosters and one baby chick. We don’t know what type of predator it was, whether there were multiple of them, where / how they got inside our fencing. Maybe a weasel? We aren’t long-time bird owners, but have gotten the impression that this sort of catastrophic event isn’t uncommon.

Anyway, so Sunday was a sad day for us. We’ve had plans to build a larger set of pens (75′ x 50′ each) to accommodate additional birds. (Egg sales have been going well at the market.) So we went ahead and constructed the first of those 3 pens Sunday, but added a layer of chicken wire at the base of the pen to make it harder for animals to get under the fence. We want to try to form a fairly tight seal between fence and ground around the perimeter.

As a result of this attack, we don’t currently have any chicken egg production, so we won’t be offering chicken eggs at the farmer’s market for the time being. Our ducks are still laying, though there has been a dip in production, presumably due to the trauma over the weekend. But we do plan to bring duck eggs to market this coming Saturday.

We plan to replace our female chicken flock, though the new birds may be a mix of chicks and currently-laying females. We’ll keep you posted on progress.

So the market masters have technically cancelled tomorrow’s Manassas Farmer’s Market due to forecasted heat… HOWEVER, we have since learned that a number of vendors are still planning on showing up. Pennington Market Farm will be there! We have a big batch of microgreens this week that risk becoming bird fodder if we don’t sell them (not the end of the world, but if given the choice…) Anyway, it’s going to be a hot one for sure, but it’s been hot every week and we’ll have our tent, etc. We’ll also have eggs and potentially basil (need to check our supply out in the garden). Hope to see you there!

These past 3-4 weeks have been substantially busier around the house with farmer’s market prep / recovery activities. Yesterday marked our third week as a vendor at the Manassas Farmer’s Market and all three market days have been encouraging. Many thanks to everyone who has come by our table. The weather has largely been cooperative each time and foot traffic at the market has been decent (per our limited experience).

Our lineup at each of these markets has largely been the same throughout:

• eggs (duck & chicken)
• microgreens (cut and live)
• herbs (mainly basil, mostly cut vs. live)

We honestly had no idea how microgreens would fare at the market, but so far, the reception has been great, with sunflower and pea being the varieties of choice. But we’ve also had decent sales with our other offerings of kale, buckwheat, and radish. So far, we’ve been “harvesting” (cutting) a majority of our micros a day or two before market and packaging in 1 ounce clamshells (keeping in our fridge until market morning). But we’ve also started experimenting with selling live 5″x5″ trays.

Eggs have also been selling well, and if we continue to sell at this rate, we may need to scale back what we bring to whatever our birds lay the week before market day. I want to take a look at the numbers, but if the math works out, we may add more birds to the flock to try to increase production. As with everything, we’ll see how it goes!

Basil has been doing well in our garden, and we’ve brought that to market each time and it’s sold well. We have a number of other things growing in the garden (tomatoes, melons, peanuts, etc), but most of that isn’t yet ready to harvest, and we’ll have to see with each veggie whether we have enough of a surplus to warrant bringing to market.

All in all, these summer days have been busy, but we’re really encouraged and thankful for the response we’ve gotten from everyone at the market. Looking forward to what’s ahead.

We’ve arranged to be a vendor at the Manassas Farmer’s Market on Saturdays! First day will be this coming Saturday, June 29th. The market runs from 8:00am – 1:00pm and is located in downtown Manassas in a commuter parking lot across the street from Baldwin Elementary School.

Our game plan for this coming Saturday is to bring about 9-dozen eggs (some duck, some chicken) and an assortment of microgreens. Hoping to have sunflower, pea, radish, kale, and buckwheat in both cut and live offerings (5″x5″ tray with soil). We have our canopy tent, folding table, company banner, business cards… we’ll see how it goes!