Pennington Market Farm

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!

From seed, no less!

The market season is beginning to wane. Last main season market will be the Saturday before Thanksgiving, November 18. We plan to attend every Saturday between now and then.

Word on the street is that there will be no winter market in Manassas. The past couple years we’ve attended the tail end of the winter market as a way to ramp up for the spring season… we may attend the Manassas Park market in March 2024 if that’s an option. We’ll see how things go.

We’ve been working on scaling up our hydroponic lettuce for next season. We have a 100-foot long hoop house in the works intended for 100% lettuce (maybe some spinach, as well). Aiming to delve further into restaurant sales, but also have more supply for the farmer’s market.

Thanks to all of our customers, as always! Hope to see you one of these weekends.

With all of the weather moving in tonight…. wind, rain, cooler temps…. the Manassas market managers have decided to pull the plug on tomorrow’s market. So no farmer’s market Saturday, 9/23. We’re going to roll all pre-orders forward by one week by default, but if you have a pre-order and would like to do some alternative plan, please reach out and let us know.

Stay dry this weekend and we’ll hope to see you at the market on 9/30!

Great day in store at the Manassas farmer’s market today! We’re still here every Saturday 8am – 1pm until mid-November. Hope to see you!

Our tomatoes are starting to color up, but we’re going to need probably one more week before we can bring anything to the market. So, our apologies, but no tomatoes at the market tomorrow. 🙁 But the plants are looking good in the hoop house and we’re hoping for a nice long healthy season!

Last year, the July 2 market was the first market of the year in which we brought tomatoes, so we’re maybe a tad behind that this year. One big difference this time is that we put a 20% shade cloth over the tomato house back in April. Last year we got what we thought was maybe “sunburn” on a big swath of our Supersweet 100s… and we wanted to avoid that this year, hence the shade cloth experiment. But the downside, perhaps, is this slower start to our season given the slight reduction in light. We’ll see if we can at least avoid that sunburn this time around.

Still cranking away each week on our hydroponic baby lettuce, microgreens, and potted herbs. We’ve been growing our potted herbs in a grow tent that we got this past winter, and they’ve taken well to that, so that’s been a nice plus. Also doing our micro basil in the grow tent.

We’ve been slowly getting the ball rolling on our next big hoop house project. We want to move our old lettuce hoop house (hoop house #2) up next to the tomato house (hoop house #1) and level out the ground there to better accommodate deep water culture pools… for more hydro lettuce next year. It will be a fairly major effort… want to get electric and propane lines run to it, and potentially extend it from 50 feet to 100 feet long. We’re hopeful that the added capacity will allow us to triple our lettuce production next year (give or take). Hidden Julles has proven to be a steadfast, reliable (patient!) customer of ours and we hope to give them more business as we go through this process of scaling up.

All for now! Hope you can swing by the market and see us tomorrow or sometime soon!