This Week at Smart Markets Manassas Park Farmers' Market

We welcome two new vendors this week. Crazy Farm from the Northern Neck of Virginia is joining us with a wide selection of veggies to offer you more choices and more opportunity to support our local farmers. And to replace Absolute BBQ, which regretfully had to withdraw from our markets, we welcome H&V BBQ with a wide selection of smoked meats and sides. Hal Thomas and family will set up to serve you BBQ on site or send you home with dinner every Friday evening for the rest of the season.

To help you with your journey to good health, we will host for the first time at this market our in-house certified health coach, Cindy Santa Ana, who will demonstrate healthy recipes that use market ingredients. This is a free cooking class taught by someone who can also tell you what the ingredients do for your body and how they keep you healthy. She will begin her demo at 4 p.m., so plan to come then if you want to learn something while you shop.

The Taste of Local food truck returns this week with a menu devoted to beef — Doug Linton’s Angelic Beef Piedmontese beef. If you have not yet tried this beef at home, stop by and talk to Doug about what makes it so special. He will be happy to explain the genetic traits that create lean but tender and flavorful beef, with much less cholesterol than other beef.

Last but certainly not least, we will have the first peaches of the season to kick off summer. Max Tyson farms in West Virginia where he can be picking gorgeous broccoli and cauliflower as well as peaches and raspberries at the same time. Ask him how that works — it has to do with peach trees on the mountainside and spring greens in the cooler valley.

Start thinking 4th of July this week. Preorder from any vendor what you will need for your holiday celebration. We will be open on the 5th as usual, but next week’s market will be the last before the 4th.

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

We are happy to be participating with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) on an incentive program to boost sales at farmers’ markets across the state. The idea is to encourage you to add a market-season boost to your local economy by patronizing farmers’ markets and spending more money when you do.

VDACS has come up with a punch card that we will hand out at the market and punch every time you spend $10. You can have it punched each week to reflect the total amount of your sales. Once the card is full of punches, you may fill in your contact information on the back and drop it in the jar on the Smart Markets table and pick up another card. Every month, we will hold a drawing and give away a prize. Then at the end of the season your cards will become part of a statewide drawing that will award the winning selection with a Virginia Grown/Virginia’s Finest gift basket worth $250.

VDACS worked with the Virginia Food System Councils to develop the program to enhance its year-old $10-a-week pledge campaign to grow the local economy. Research by Virginia Cooperative Extension has shown that if each household in Virginia spent just $10 a week on locally grown agricultural products, consumers would invest an additional $1.65 billion back into the local economy each year. While our markets, like most in the area, have farmers from neighboring states, most of our farmers farm in Virginia, and we have also have several local bakers at our markets in your area. So much of what you spend really does stay in the state, unlike money spent in the grocery store, which heads to parts unknown to help someone else’s local economy.

We will have the cards at the market this weekend. Our managers and volunteers will be handing them out, and you can pick them up at the Smart Markets tent. Some of our vendors will punch them for you when you make your purchase. If necessary, you can ask the manager or volunteer to punch it for you.

This program has the immediate goal of increasing sales and bringing more money into the state’s economy, but the real-time benefit will be the enthusiasm created at Virginia’s 240 markets that should carry across the state and bring the markets more attention.

Join with us to make this work — and show up those other markets too!

Photo by Sarah Sertic