Meet Pomykala Farm
At City Market, we’re incredibly lucky to have partnerships with local farms that span decades. One of our longstanding partners is Pomykala Farm, a family farm on Grand Isle that grows a wide variety of vegetables, herbs and flowers. We’ve been working with the Pomykalas since before we opened our Downtown store in 2002. They were kind enough to host us two days after the total solar eclipse brought tens of thousands of visitors to the Burlington area.
When we arrived, an inspector from the State of Vermont was checking out brand-new greenhouses that had just been completed. These new, greener greenhouses have an air pump between the layers that form the outside of the greenhouse to improve energy efficiency. We chatted with Jane Pomykala, one of the farm’s founders, and her son Ben, inside one of their new greenhouses.
“Talking to people around town, I mention Pomykala Fam, and they say ‘oh I know your farm, I get your stuff at City Market!’ So we don’t do a lot of marketing, I feel like City Market does our marketing for us,” Ben joked. (But it’s true – we love introducing local producers like the Pomykalas to our Members and customers. Food just tastes better when you know where it came from.) More seriously, he added: “The farm has been here a long time and we have seen the farm to table movement blossom into what it is today. Without question, City Market and their customers are such a big part of that.”
Ben’s been helping with City Market deliveries since he was a kid. We asked him if he had an earliest memory of our store. “We’d go, my mother would promise us if we were good, we’d get the Barbara’s jalapeno cheese puffs. That was the big treat of the day. City Market was the only place you could get them.”
As a larger farm with an established history, Pomykala Farm plays a special role in our local food system. “We feel in some ways we’re educators,” Jane shared. “It’s really thrilling to see the direction that people go after they might have spent a season or two on our farm. We couldn’t do it without the employees, that’s for sure.” (This conversation came full circle for us a few weeks later, when we learned that Julie Rubaud of Red Wagon Plants worked seasonally in our own Produce Department before starting Red Wagon – tune in for more from Julie in a few weeks!)
Ready to launch your local-veggie summer with some Pomykala asparagus? We’re obsessed with this Spring Cobb Salad, combining the best of a classic cobb with the best of spring in Vermont. Or, use it to top a gingery Spring Vegetable Flatbread. And we can’t talk about what to do with Pomykala asparagus without sharing this Asparagus Salad with Goat Cheese and Blueberries, concocted by long-time Produce Manager Mary Manghis to celebrate local Pomykala asparagus.