Pennington Market Farm

It was a chilly and wet farmer’s market today, but we want to thank everyone who braved the weather and made the trip out. We plan to have our farm stand open tomorrow (Sunday, May 30) from 9am – 2pm, rain or shine. This will be the third week of our farm stand experiment. Our address is 10218 Lonesome Road, Nokesville, VA 20181, and the stand will be up at the front of the property just off Lonesome Rd. The stand is self-serve / honor system, but text / call Derek at 571-243-9415 with any questions, etc.

It’s looking like we’ll have plenty of lettuce mix bags, some salad mix bags, microgreens trays, garden starters, potted herbs, and a couple of Elissa’s baked goodies (carrot cake cupcakes and vanilla bean scones). We sold out of eggs today, so we will not have any eggs available tomorrow. Thanks and hope to see you!

One of our big projects this spring has been to get a 50-foot hoop house built in time for planting summer crops (tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant). It was definitely a learning experience! We tried to record what we could via time lapse. Please enjoy and hope to see you at the market soon!

Hey all! We had a great day today at the market and wanted to thank everyone who came by to see us! The weather this weekend has been / continues to be fantastic. With spring fully underway, we’ve been finding ourselves with more product than we can sell at the Saturday market. So we wanted to try a self-serve / honor system -type farm stand at the front edge of our property in Nokesville. The address is 10218 Lonesome Road, Nokesville, VA 20181. This will be tomorrow (Sunday, May 16) and we’ll aim to have it open for business from 9am – 2pm.

We intend to have most of the same sorts of items that we have at the farmer’s market… salad / lettuce mix bags, “gem” style head lettuces, microgreens, garden starter plants (tomatoes, lettuces, chard, kale, beets, etc), potted herbs. However, we will not have any eggs at the stand tomorrow. For payment handling, we will have a drop box for cash (exact amounts, please) or Venmo is an option (@DerekPennington). If you have any questions at any point, call / text Derek at 571-243-9415.

If you didn’t get a chance to come by at the market today or if you did but just can’t get enough Pennington Market Farm, feel free to swing by tomorrow! And while you’re at it, pay a visit to our farming neighbors Sunshine Honey Farm a little further down Lonesome Road at address 10725. They have rolls, cookies, jams, sauce, and lots of farm fresh eggs at their self-serve stand.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend!

The spring / summer Manassas farmer’s market begins this week! The Thursday market starts April 8 at Harris Pavilion from 8am – 1pm (we will not be attending the Thursday markets). And the Saturday market starts April 10 at the commuter lot across from Baldwin Elementary from 8am – 1pm (we WILL be attending the Saturday markets, as always).

With the start of this new market season, we’re debuting our new “loyalty cards”. These are more or less standard gift cards… but with some incentives built in. Basically, if you choose to get one of these cards, each time money is added to the card, we will put an additional X% onto the card. And that percentage increases in relation to the amount of money added. The overall point being to encourage and reward customers who buy from us again and again. To simplify the point-of-sale mechanics, we’ve narrowed the deposit amounts to the following setup:

Some of you may remember that we used to have a loyalty program where we had a check-in sheet out on our table, and you’d check the box by your name each time you made a purchase…. When the pandemic hit, we couldn’t have “public use” pens out on the table, and tracking who was buying and who wasn’t (not knowing everyone by name) proved to be cumbersome, and we were hesitant to advertise it to newcomers, etc. Beginning April 10, this new loyalty card program effectively replaces that old check-in sheet program. We will have the cards available for anyone who wants to get one, and then you can use for any future purchases, adding money (via cash, check, credit, or SNAP tokens) per the above amounts as desired. We should note that, like most gift cards, these cards will not be redeemable or refundable.

Looking forward to starting the spring / summer market! We’ve been busy at the farm gearing up for the season. We have a 50-foot hoop house in the works that we’re hoping to complete before tomatoes go in the ground late April / early May. Planning to do cucumbers and eggplant in there, as well. And we’re experimenting with a cover crop of peas in the upper half of our garden. The peas will theoretically add nitrogen back into the soil as they grow, and then we’ll likely till them in later in the summer to make way for fall plantings. A lot going on!

A big thank you as always to all of our customers. We hope to see you at the market soon!

We got word yesterday that the April 3 market is now a GO. This will be the last winter season market, and will be at the Harris Pavilion and run from 9am – 1pm. Apparently enough vendors expressed interest in having the market that the managers said “Sure, why not.”

Pennington Market Farm will be there! We had actually been growing microgreens over the past couple weeks assuming that the April 3 market would happen. So we should have our usual complement of chicken eggs, duck eggs, microgreens, garden veggie starter plants, and potentially some of our first spring season harvest of salad / lettuce mix bags.

Spring season market begins right after winter season ends. The Thursday market (which we do not plan on attending) will be at the Harris Pavilion and run from 8am – 1pm, first date being April 8. The Saturday market (which we WILL attend) will be at the commuter parking lot across from Baldwin Elementary and also run from 8am – 1pm, first date being April 10.

Now that we’ve had our fill of administrivia… enjoy the rest of your week and hope to see you Saturday!

Just a quick schedule update: There will be no Manassas farmer’s market on April 3. Tomorrow’s 3/27 market is still on as scheduled (9am – 1pm) at the Harris Pavilion. The spring season Saturday market will begin April 10 and be down at the commuter parking lot across from Baldwin Elementary (8am – 1pm).

Weather is fantastic! Hope to see you tomorrow!

We have a few new / different things going on as we start gearing up for spring season…

The herb dabbling that we started this past summer has started to bear fruit via market sales, and so far, the feedback has been positive. We were initially bringing basil in small pots that were maybe 2″ square (technically 1020 tray inserts called 3601s). Those proved to be too small for the size of the plants… the basil would grow fairly tall, and the whole thing would be really unstable and frequently fall over, etc. So we potted up to 3.25″ square trays (called 1801s) and will soon be evolving to 4″ round pots. Anyway, the feedback has been good, and we’ve been selling out of the basil in these larger containers. And we’re also bringing cilantro now and that has been positive. So game on with herb pots as we move into spring.

We’ve also started offering “garden starters” at the market. These are those small 2″ pots that I mentioned above, but they contain single plants intended for transplanting into garden beds (or potting up and growing indoors). These are generally the same plants that we’re growing ourselves right now in the garden. All of the various salad mix veggies, plus others. In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding tomatoes and maybe eggplant to the starter lineup.

We’ve been gathering materials with intent to build a 50-foot hoop house for our tomato, cucumber, and eggplant production over the summer. Given that we’ll need to plant tomatoes late April / early May, I need to get off the couch and build this thing before too long. We obtained 38 10-foot chain link fence top rail pieces (pictured) and will need to bend them via a homemade jig (I think that’s the appropriate term). The hoop house will be on the order of 12 feet wide and will have probably 3 raised beds in it (2 for tomatoes, 1 for cukes and eggplant). There are companies that offer kits for this sort of thing, but I’m hoping that we can DIY this our own way at a cheaper cost. Probability of the hoop house blowing off its moorings and across the yard sometime this year is, by my estimate, on the order of 50%. We’ll see what happens!

Per our understanding, there are three more winter market dates (3/20, 3/27, 4/3), and then we transition to the main season market beginning 4/10. The winter market is still in the Harris Pavilion and runs from 9am – 1pm. The main season market will likely be back at the commuter parking lot across from Baldwin Elementary and run from 8am – 1pm (we’ll let you know if that ends up not being the case).

Thanks as always and hope to see you soon!

Feels like we’re starting to sound like a broken record. But alas… Tomorrow’s Manassas farmer’s market has been cancelled due to forecasted sub-freezing temperatures. Sounds like there’s also currently ice on the floor of the pavilion, which may not melt between now and then. Hope everyone has a good weekend, and we’ll hope for better conditions on Feb 27!