Flower Fridays at Bell Urban Farm

Flower Fridays are one of our favorite days at Bell Urban Farm, and chances are, if you visit the Farmstand on a Friday morning, you may have seen us out back assembling our mixed flower bouquets!

Growing Local Flowers

We are a flower farm, so as you would expect, we grow loads of beautiful flowers here at Bell Urban Farm. From March to October, we are planting, growing, and harvesting fresh flowers weekly that we turn into mixed flower bouquets each Friday morning to sell at our Farmstand! We also partner with other local flower farmers such as Destiny and Patrick from Blue Mountain Vegetable Farm, Sean and Melanie from Mindful Farmer, and Jill and Nathan from Whispering Willow Farm. Partnering with other flower farms allows us to have more and a variety to share with our customers each week. We are proud that every single stem we use in our bouquets is grown locally in the state of Arkansas!

Prep for Flower Friday

Prep for Flower Friday starts early each week! We start seeds, plant, weed, and water all week long. Thursdays are our biggest harvest days, and we spend all morning harvesting flowers for our bouquets. Each flower is harvested at a certain stage to ensure quality and vase life. It takes months for a flower to grow from a tiny seed into a usable bloom, so each stem has lots of love and energy invested in it. Our incredible Bell Urban Farm team picks our flowers with care and stores them in the cooler until bouquet making time!

Friday Bouquet Making

Friday is all about bouquet making! Each week we create anywhere from 100-300 mixed flower bouquets by hand! It is a race against the clock in the summertime when the temperature is often 90 degrees before we can even get started.

Typically a team of 3-5 employees and volunteers helps make our bouquets each week. We lay out our flowers assembly-line style along with our boquet supplies like rubber bands, paper to wrap the flowers, and buckets to house the finished boquets. The goal is to create a bouquet in about 1 minute for maximum efficiency! A lot of love and labor is involved in growing flowers and making bouquets, so we aim to be as efficient as possible. Each person creating a bouquet creates something unique! We have a price per stem list that everyone uses so that each of our bouquets contains the same dollar amount of flowers. Each bouquet is hand-crafted using different textures, colors, and types of plants.

If you stop by the Farmstand Friday morning, feel free to stop by our flower tent in the backyard. We are happy to chat about our flowers or can even create you a custom bouquet with a unique color scheme.

One question we get often get asked is, "Do you only make fresh bouquets on Fridays?" 

We always make the most bouquets on Fridays since the weekends are the busiest sales days for us, so if you stop by the Farmstand on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, you will have the widest variety of bouquets to chose from. We often will make new bouquets once or twice during the week to restock the Farmstand as needed, but never as many. 

Where and When to Buy Our Bouquets

Most of the bouquets we make on Friday, we sell directly at our Farmstand or send home with our flower share members.

Another question we are asked is, "What days do you have flowers available?"

In the summer months, May-September, we have bouquets available everyday at the Farmstand. In the early spring and late fall, when flowers are less plentiful, our availability will vary day to day. In the winter, when we don't have flowers growing, we switch to creating dried flower wreaths with local flowers we dried over the summer. Also, after Thanksgiving we start making our evergreen wreaths and holiday arrangements!

We also sell the bouquets wholesale to other vendors in Little Rock. If you live in Little Rock and want to enjoy our local flowers weekly, check with FareMarket or Bella Vita Jewelry for ordering options! They also offer delivery to certain areas.

Our Love of Local Flowers

If you follow us on social media, you will always see me posting tons of photos, stories, and reels on Flower Friday. They are too pretty not to share! Check the Bell Urban Farm Instagram or Facebook on Fridays to see what flowers you can expect in our flower bouquets that week. We also love to see and share the photos you post of your flowers displayed in your home. Don't forget to tag us!

We LOVE local flowers! 100% of our flowers are grown locally and that is super important to us. Did you know that over 85% of the flowers that are sold in the US are imported from outside the country? These flowers are usually grown on large scale commercial operations were they spray synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The workers on these farms are often treated poorly and suffer from continued exposure to these harsh chemicals. The flowers are cut and shipped thousands of miles using fossil fuels, making them every bad for the environment.

Instead, when you purchase flowers locally, you are supporting Arkansas small businesses that care deeply about sustainable farming. You are investing in our small farmers - that is why local flowers matter!

"I love flower farming because I get to spend my days growing beautiful things and then put them all together in a beautiful bouquet. It feels similar to creating a work of art! Seeing our customers enjoy our flowers and buy them to share with others gives me so much joy!" - Kim Doughty McCannon, Bell Urban Farm.