I'm not enough of a Reston resident to know the schedule of Reston's Lake Anne Farmer's Market. I do know that it at least takes place on Saturday mornings during the summer. There could be more to do it than that.
On a trip to Reston this summer, we got to enjoy a visit to the market. We love farmers' markets and when we spent most of our time in Roanoke, Virginia, we often would visit the Roanoke Farmers' Market.
I have written about it often on my View from the Mountain soap box. One of the posts last year was Changes at the Roanoke Farmers' Market. I also love to take pictures of the market and have posted a number of them like this album from May 21, 2005.
The Reston Farmers Market seems very different from the Roanoke one. The intensity of the Reston market is much greater. We often go to the Roanoke to relax and chat with the vendors. We usually come away with some stuff, but we also come away relaxed.
As we many things in Northern Virginia, the market seems a liltle competitive from the time we had to fight for a parking place until we "worked" our way out of the parking lot. People were working the boothes very hard. I did not hear very many casual conversations.
I got the feeling that this was the bigtime for farm markets, farm different than the tiny one we used to enjoy in Mount Airy, NC or even the six days a week market in Roanoke which actually might be seven days a week now.
The farmers also do not appear to be as old on the average as the Roanoke farmers. Perhaps the ones coming to the Reston Market are a new generation who have figured out how to make money from the land.
We have a small farmers market here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast, but mostly we rely on produce stands run by farmers. It works fairly well. We can go to the grocery store and slide by the produce stand on the way home. That stop lets us top up our vegetables with locally grown ones.
Our biggest challenge is the early season that we face. While we get strawberries in March and April, most of our vegetables are done by the end of July. In fact one of our stands had a sign this week saying "End of season sale, all produce 50% off."
Larger cities like Reston probably draw from a much more differse area. I know the Roanoke market is wonderful in the fall.
We recently visited my daughter who lives near Charlotte, their produce stands are much larger than ours but I don't see the wonderful interesting products that we saw in Reston's Lake Anne Market.
I saw everything from sausage to the strawberries and homemade ice cream. It was a neat experience especially with the multicultural attendees.
My one complain about the market is Lake Anne itself. I am a pure water person and there are far to many geese in the waters at Lake Anne. I know they are a challenge, but standing around nasty water isn't conducive to buying food.
One of the reasons we moved to Carteret County happened to be the clean water. I was happy to read in this article that our end of the county does not have a problem.
Still the trip to the Lake Anne Farmers Market was well worth the effort, even fighting for the parking space.
