Yarnick’s Farm is well known for their true, vine-ripened tomatoes that “taste like a tomato should taste.” They grow their tomatoes, and other vegetables like cucumbers, eggplant, bib lettuce and hot peppers, hydroponically. Hydroponic means that they are grown without soil in a nutrient-rich water solution in a controlled environment.
The plants are grown from seeds in the starter greenhouse and “graduate” to the hydroponic greenhouse as seedlings. Seedlings are planted in a sterile rock wool made from melted igneous rock. A computer-controlled system provides water and a changing formula of nutrients to the plants through small plastic tubes. Each plant is pruned to a single leader that is trained to grow up and down a string and can grow to as much as 40 feet in length!
These vegetables are carefully picked by hand at their peak of perfection and either sold next door at the farm market, or shipped out to one of the roughly 30 grocery stores between Indiana and Pittsburgh that buy from Yarnick’s Farm. You can’t find fresher produce than what is waiting for you at Yarnick’s Farm market, even if you grow it yourself!
