GlenMark Farms in New Town Offers Neighborhood-Grown Produce

Imagine serving brown eggs collected earlier in the day to your family or a salad with leaf lettuce and radishes picked just 10 minutes before your meal.

That’s what residents of are experiencing with the re-opening of a farm in the development.

Glenda and Mark Ell who moved onto the property late last summer, have already been selling early spring crops at the farm located on the edge of New Town. The farm, which was formerly known as New Town Organic Farm, is now GlenMark Farms. 

Customers are already enjoying lettuce, spinach, radishes and broccoli harvested from the farm. 

The GlenMark Farms stand is open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. or until the produce runs out on Saturdays and Sundays and on other days when Glenda Ell isn’t working one of her other jobs.

Glenda Ell is very accommodating about the lettuce when she’s around. “When people want it, I can say, ‘Come on over and I’ll cut it over for you.’”

Peas and cauliflower are just coming in and as the season progresses, customers can look forward to more veggies plucked fresh from the garden—corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage, peppers, Brussels sprouts, cucumbers, zucchini, okra.  

She also makes and sells pies and breads so the veggie stand is “like an old-fashioned farmer’s market.”  Residents who want to take a crack at growing their own can rent plots at the farm, Glenda Ell said.

“It’s a neat community thing,” she said. “Everybody comes down and takes care of their garden. There’s even have a competition between some residents to see who can grow the most crops out of their plot.”

GlenMark Farms also seems destined to be the focus of a number of New Town community events. 

Some 600 people attended a “Bazaar at the Farm” earlier this month which featured not only GlenMark produce and Glenda Ell’s baked goods but also 24 booths with products as diverse as jewelry and countertops made from recycled glass. Most merchants were New Town residents.

Customers browsed the booths, dined on hot dogs and ice cream served by New Town merchants and enjoyed a live music performance.

Glenda Ell says she and her husband will reprise the roles they played in New Town’s Halloween celebration last year with a huge pumpkin patch and hayrides come fall.

“We’re also shooting for one (special event) possibly at the end of July or early August,” she said. “It’s still in the works as to what we’re going to call it.” 

The farm is home to 50 laying hens, a couple of roosters and 40 baby chicks that aren’t laying yet, Glenda Ell said. Also living at the farm are two horses and nine pigs, which will become bacon to go with the eggs further down the line.

Ell says thus far news about the farm’s products and activities has been shared by word-of-mouth and New Town’s website. She recently launched a Facebook page as a convenient way for residents and others to learn what’s going on at the farm.

Second Farmers at New Town Farm

The Ells are the second farm family to occupy the site, Tim Busse, New Town architect, said. 

New Town launched a nation-wide search for a farmer to occupy the property a few years ago, and chose a St. Charles farmer, who stayed about a year. 

In April 2011, First Bank foreclosed on Whittaker Builders. WBI Resolutions, LLC, which is managed by First Bank, is leasing the farm property to the Ells who plan to purchase it in July.

The Ells seem like a perfect match for the farm. Glenda Ell grew up on a large farm in St. Charles County and Mark Ell’s family owned a farm as well. But nowadays, farming is a tough business. Both the Ells have other jobs—Mark Ell is a concrete finisher and Glenda Ell, who used to be in the mortgage business, is a bartender and waitress at and Binford’s, both in St. Charles.

The farm was added to New Town after development opened in 2005, Busse said. It happened during a workshop with Andrés Duany, a founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ), the town-planning firm for the project but it wasn’t an afterthought, he said. 

“Greg (Greg Whittaker, New Town’s homebuilder) had it in mind kind of from the beginning but he wasn’t sure when he was going to do it,” he added. 

Corban and Goode, the Toronto landscape architects responsible for planning all the open space in New Town, used an existing a 100-plus-year-old barn as the farm’s centerpiece, Busse said.

That barn was built when the Plackmeier family owned the property in the early 1900s. “It’s an iconic barn that we love,” he said. “We wanted to honor the barn.