Most people think farmers’ markets pack up when winter sets in. They picture their friendly local producers taking a well-earned break until spring, when a warming sun once again coaxes tender shoots from the ground.

Not so Chestnut Hill. Here, at the bottom of the hill on Germantown Avenue, something different is happening. Every Saturday throughout the year, shoppers bundle past tables laden with root vegetables, fresh greens from heated hoop houses, and bins overflowing with gourmet mushrooms.

This is winter farming at full throttle.

“A year-round, producer-only farmers market is something a lot of farmers markets strive for,” says Jon Glyn of Evergreen Events, which manages the Chestnut Hill market. “That takes a lot of preparation—on the farms and in the kitchens.”

That work begins months earlier, when farmers like those at Taproot Farm and Rainier Family Farm dedicate significant portions of their fall planting to winter crops. They’ve built massive hoop houses so they can keep growing all year long.

“Our farmers have really dedicated a lot of their crop plan to provide vegetables for the winter,” Glyn says, crediting loyal Chestnut Hill shoppers for making that plan economically viable. “They really work hard to do that.”

The winter pantry

In summer, farmers markets are an easy sell. Shoppers turn out for flip-flop casual conversation along with their juicy tomatoes, sweet corn, and abundant berries. Winter requires more than a pair of warm gloves. It calls for a willingness to embrace what Glyn calls “the kind of vegetables you have to learn how to work with” — potatoes, turnips, beets, and cabbage. Instead of lettuce, winter shoppers find dark leafy greens: kale, spinach, escarole.

“These have both raw and cooked applications, depending on what your palate is,” says Glyn. “Root vegetables are delicious in soups, which are so warming, and perfect for cold weather.”

Hearty cuts of meat become popular as shoppers seek out dishes that require hours in the oven and fill the house with warmth and aroma on cold days—brisket, shoulder, pulled pork.

The mighty mushroom

In Chestnut Hill, it helps that so many regulars are also excellent cooks, who understand the difference that truly fresh ingredients can make.

“We always joke that the best restaurant in Philly is your home after a market day,” Glyn says. “You don’t have to do much work, either. The stuff is that fresh, and it tastes that much better.”

Perhaps no vendor benefits more from winter than Primordia Mushroom Farm, a 14-acre wooded property in Lenhartsville, about an hour northwest of Philadelphia. While other farmers battle the season, Jesse Tobin and Matthew Sicher are at their most productive.

“The deal with mushrooms is that their growing season is kind of opposite to vegetables,” Tobin explains. “We are growing indoors, so we’re able to grow year-round, but it’s much harder to grow mushrooms in the summertime.”

The problem is temperature control. Most mushrooms thrive at about 60 degrees Fahrenheit and cannot tolerate the soaring temperatures of summer. “We limp through that time,” Tobin says. “We’ll have weeks where entire crops just get lost.”

Winter changes everything. “January, February, March—those are really profitable times for us to be growing mushrooms, as long as we have the customers,” she says. “It’s very easy to have a predictable crop.”

The farm offers about 14 varieties, from shiitake and oyster mushrooms to more exotic options like lion’s mane, maitake, and reishi. They grow on sterilized hardwood sawdust in carefully controlled barn environments — a stark contrast from the manure-based operations that dominate nearby Kennett Square, the mushroom capital of the world.

Primordia started 13 years ago, when Tobin and Sicher, who met at 15 and bonded over identifying wild foods, decided to channel their shared hobby of fermenting sauerkraut, kimchi, and beer into something more ambitious. After building their house (by hand, they say), they turned to building mushroom barns.

“Neither of us wanted to do anything with livestock,” Tobin says, adding that she gets sick working in summer heat, which rules out traditional vegetable farming. “Mushrooms seemed to be the next logical step.”

The business grew fast, perhaps too fast. For seven years, they “chased their tails,” Tobin says, expanding to meet demand from restaurants in New York City and Philadelphia, at one point making deliveries seven days a week.

Then COVID hit. Luckily, they’d just finished building a new lab, sterilization equipment, and pack area when all the restaurants closed. So they flipped their business model, going from 80% wholesale to 60% retail almost overnight. They laid off staff for two weeks, regrouped, and pivoted hard to farmers markets and Community Supported Agriculture, or CSAs, a system through which customers buy harvest shares and receive produce in return.

“We took on more markets, but only year-round markets,” Tobin says. Most became weekly commitments, even through winter. For Primordia, farmers markets now represent more than half their income.

“There are fewer customers when the weather turns cold,” Tobin acknowledges. “But those who do show up are so happy to have this excellent quality of product.”

Why it works

According to Glyn, that kind of loyalty runs both ways. Vendors who brave winter markets know Chestnut Hill shoppers will too. This makes for the kind of reliability that separates a good market from a great one.

“Really, the only vendor you won’t be seeing in winter are the flower farmers,” says Glyn. “Everyone else? They’re showing up to keep you fed.”

“That’s one of the reasons that Chestnut Hill is considered such a great market from a vendor point of view,” he adds. “Even if it’s raining or snowy or really bitter cold, they know that if they just make it to market, the shoppers will too.”