Don’t miss the Independence Farmers Market Grand opening THIS Friday, May 1st, at Town Park. We will feature our Mother’s Day Craft Fair AND Cooking Day. Bill Baldwin will be joining us to make the day extra special.
Guest Chefs Dean McRae and Loren Webster will be cooking with herbs. We’ll have a full house of vendors and IFM Kids Bucks. We are pleased to continue to offer a $30 Match for fresh fruits and vegetables for Snap purchases as well as Fresh Match Plus. Fresh Match Plus is also administered by Virginia Fresh Match (VFM) through a HOPE grant from Wellspring Foundation of Southwest Virginia. It allows us to offer vouchers for fresh fruits and vegetables for Medicaid, WIC, and Farm Market Fresh users.
When customers show their Medicaid, WIC, or Farm Market Fresh cards to Michelle, the IFM manager, at the market booth (in the middle of the Market on the HWY 21 side), they get $10 in vouchers to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables from any vendor selling fresh produce at the market. This is in addition to the current SNAP Match program.
Don’t miss our FIRST 4th Friday Evening Market May 22nd from 3-7pm. This is the first of 5 evening markets that will happen for the first time this year. Safe and Sound will offer Lexington style barbeque for sale as a fundraiser and Rosemary Bauman, the strolling fiddle player, will provide music. ONLY on the 4th Friday of each month, we will REPLACE our regular 9-1 Market with one from 3-7pm. In addition the Market on May 22, others will be June 26, July 24, August 28 and September 25th.
Other highlights for the 2026 season:
Thanks to a grant from the Twin County Community Foundation we will bring back Healthy Kids Bucks (HKB) on 3 of our Cooking Days: June 5, July 3 and August 7. Our partners at WIC will distribute $10 of HKBs to the 1st 50 kids to their tent to spend on fresh fruits and vegetables, plants and seeds that produce food, eggs and honey after doing an activity. Other Cooking Days, on September 4 and October 2, will feature IFM Kids Bucks.
Other events include Kids Day on June 19 with favorites Blue Ridge Discovery Center and Cowboy Don; The 2nd annual Garlic Fest and a bonus cooking day will be July 17; The Tomato Festival is August 7th and the Monster tomato contest returns!; The Apple Festival will be September 11th.