For years, if you lived among the 67 homes tucked between Brickyard Road and New London Drive and wanted to buy produce from an actual farmer instead of a grocery store, you had exactly one window. Thursday. 3 to 6:30 p.m. In the parking lot of Potomac United Methodist Church on South Glen Road. Miss it, and you waited a week.
That window just widened, and not in the way you'd expect. Nobody opened a bigger version of the Thursday market. What showed up instead, a few miles north on Travilah Road, is a completely different kind of market wearing the same name category.
The Thursday Habit
The Potomac Village Farmers Market has run its familiar rhythm for years: Thursdays, 3 to 6:30 p.m., from early May through late November. The 2026 season runs May 7 through November 26, which works out to roughly 29 Thursdays.
What makes it worth the trip is the roster, not just the produce. According to Maryland's Best, the vendor lineup includes McCleaf's Orchard, Rocklands Farm, Aliaabad Farm, Montgomery County Flowers, Conela's Bakery, All Things Olive, Chocolate Lizard, Frankly Pizza, and Picnic Gourmet Spreads. That's an orchard, two additional farms, a flower grower, a bakery, an olive oil purveyor, a chocolatier, and a pizza stand, all inside one church parking lot, one afternoon a week. It's the kind of market that works because it aggregates a lot of small, specialized producers into a single stop.
What Opened on Travilah Road
The new arrival is Stoney Glen Market, and it did not arrive with a Thursday afternoon slot. It picked weekends. The market soft-opened in late June 2026 and held its grand opening celebration on July 11 and 12, setting up at the Potomac Oak Shopping Center, 12944 Travilah Rd, right at the corner of Glen Road and Travilah Road. Going forward, the plan is Saturdays and Sundays, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., April through mid-December.
The bigger difference isn't the address. It's where the food comes from. Most of Stoney Glen's produce and eggs come directly from Massum Eyrie Farm in St. Mary's County, a farm owned by the same Montgomery County family running the market. That's a single grower supplying most of the stand, not a coalition of independent producers. Round out the table with fresh eggs, local honey, bread, chocolate milk, strawberry milk, and flowers, and you have a market still in its first season, still adding vendors as it goes. Organizers describe it as a place where "the earth's beauty brings community together," which is a gentler pitch than the produce-and-pizza efficiency of the Thursday market, but also a fair description of what's actually there right now: one farm's harvest, presented simply, with more vendors expected to join as the season builds.
Two Different Ideas of What a Market Should Be
Put the two side by side and the contrast is less about newer versus older and more about two entirely different theories of what a farmers market is for.
| Potomac Village Farmers Market | Stoney Glen Market | |
|---|---|---|
| Location | Potomac United Methodist Church, 9908 S. Glen Road | Potomac Oak Shopping Center, 12944 Travilah Rd |
| Days | Thursday | Saturday and Sunday |
| Hours | 3 to 6:30 p.m. | 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. |
| 2026 Season | May 7 through November 26 | April through mid-December (launched June 2026) |
| Vendor model | Multiple independent producers | Primarily one supplying farm, expanding |
| Weekly window | 3.5 hours | 12 hours |
The Thursday market is a marketplace in the traditional sense, a gathering point for several small businesses that each show up because the others do too. Stoney Glen is closer to a farm stand that decided to become a market, built around one family's supply chain and growing outward from there.
Neither approach is better. They serve different instincts. If you want the widest variety in a single stop, an orchard next to a bakery next to a flower stand, Thursday still wins. If you want to know exactly which farm your eggs came from and you'd rather do it on a Saturday morning than carve out a weekday afternoon, Stoney Glen is built for that.
The Math That Actually Changes Your Week
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only clock this as "a new market opened nearby." Before this summer, Mazza Woods had exactly 3.5 hours a week, one Thursday afternoon, to buy directly from a grower. That's it. Add Stoney Glen's Saturday and Sunday hours, and the available window jumps to roughly 15.5 hours a week during the months both markets overlap, a window more than four times as wide as it was in the spring.
The season length shifted too, though less dramatically. The Village market runs May into late November. Stoney Glen's standing schedule is April through mid-December, bracketing the Thursday season on both ends, even though its actual first year didn't get underway until June. If that schedule holds into 2027, Mazza Woods residents will have farm-direct shopping available in April and into mid-December, months when the Thursday market simply isn't running at all.
That's the real shift. It isn't that a competitor showed up down the street. It's that the total number of hours a week you can buy directly from a farmer, if you live in this stretch of Potomac, nearly quadrupled without displacing the market that was already there.
Picking a Day
For a household off Brickyard Road, the practical question is which one fits an actual week, not which one is objectively better.
The Thursday market asks you to interrupt a workday afternoon, but it rewards that interruption with the widest single-stop variety in the area, and it's the one with the longer track record if you're the type who wants a market that's already proven itself over multiple seasons. It also sits close to Potomac Village itself, an easy stop if you're already running errands near the shops and restaurants there.
Stoney Glen asks less of your calendar. It's a Saturday or Sunday morning stop, no need to leave work early, though it sits farther north on Travilah Road, a real drive rather than a quick detour, and the offering is still filling in. If you're the kind of shopper who likes watching a market grow, this is the ground floor of one.
Most Mazza Woods households will probably end up using both, for different reasons on different days. That's arguably the actual upgrade here: not a bigger market, but two very different reasons to leave the house for groceries on two different days of the week, where there used to be only one.
If there's a broader pattern worth watching, it's this. Potomac isn't just adding retail, it's adding retail with different operating logics, one built on aggregation, one built on a single supply chain, both competing for the same Saturday-morning instinct to buy something that didn't come from a truck. Whichever one earns your weekly stop, that's a level of local detail worth knowing before you assume the neighborhood works the way it did last spring.
If you're weighing a move within Potomac or just want a longtime resident's read on how a specific pocket of the community is changing, Ted Duncan has called Potomac home since 1972. Let's Connect.
