This autumn, members of the Utah Flower Market are finding creative ways to give back to the environment and beautify the community they are a part of.
Started in April 2022, the flower market is a collective of 11 flower farmers from various cities in Utah. The farmers gather together each Wednesday morning at Grove Station in Pleasant Grove to sell freshly cut, organic stems of flowers to local florists and flower enthusiasts alike.
The collective creates an environment where members can communicate, problem solve and support each other as a team, Julie Hall, owner of Maple Bloom Farms, said.
“It’s a collaborative, cooperative and feminine energy here,” she said. “We are totally run by women. We understand what it’s like to be a mom and run a business.”
As the only 100% local floral market in the state of Utah, the Utah Flower Market and its farmers are passionate about protecting and nourishing the environment. These efforts are particularly important as winter approaches and farmers close their harvests while laying the groundwork for a healthy crop in the spring.
“I want to have a farm that doesn’t create harm,” Hall said. For all of the market’s farmers, this means avoiding chemical pesticides; for Hall, it also includes experimenting with pulse watering, a form of water delivery similar to drip irrigation that waters plants in short bursts over an extended period of time and reduces water waste.
For Carlyn Thompson, owner of Wild Willow Gardens, nourishing soil health is a crucial part of preparing her farm for the winter.
“The goal is to leave the space better than what you started (with) when you started farming,” she said. “So, we take care of our soil. That’s the foundation for us.” Thompson has accomplished this by welcoming birds and insects, such as ladybugs, to act as natural pest control and by overwintering crops that nourish the soil until spring.
“In the fall, I collect leaves from the entire neighborhood,” Margot Murdoch, owner of Vox Terra Florals, said. “I just smother my garden with leaves because that encourages the microbial life under the soil to thrive by keeping the soil covered.”
She also engages year-round in what she calls “pretend engineering” or “pretend-gineering,” utilizing window wells, reflections of light off of rock walls and low tunnels to cultivate plants that would otherwise be unable to grow in Utah’s climate.
Joyce Schwartz, farmer and owner of Benjamin Blooms, uses most of her five-acre farmland to grow sunflowers. With her husband’s love of chemistry, they take sustainability to a whole new level.
“He takes the seeds from the sunflower heads and turns them into oil, then turns it into biodiesel, which is what my van runs on. So my van and my tractor run off of biodiesel,” Schwartz said.
Florists who shop at the collective believe the ingenuity and environmental stewardship found at the market impacts the quality of the flowers they sell.
“They last a long time and, obviously, the variety is amazing,” Jill Frisch, owner of The Freckled Maker and customer at the Utah Flower Market, said. “I just love supporting local farmers because they put so much time and effort into it.”
“We love to support local, and the growing farmer movement in Utah, I think, is so cool. The product that we can get here at the market is exceptional,” Lizy Bowden, a large-scale wedding florist and owner of Lizy Bowden Floral, said.
While the women of the Utah Flower Market are concerned about cultivating a healthy ecosystem, they are also passionate about taking care of their local community, Schwartz said.
“It’s always about people, always about people,” Schwartz said.
Hall agreed, describing her teammates as “intermediaries between celebration and grief.”
Emily Sinkovic, owner of Small and Simple Farms, is acutely aware of this. With a career built on conflict resolution and restorative justice, she wanted to find a way to fuse her love of floriculture with improving the lives of Utah’s prison inmates.
Last month, after years of planning and contacting state prisons, Sinkovic was able to achieve her goal and host two floral arrangement classes for incarcerated women through the Utah Department of Corrections.
“Anything from the outside coming in, anything that bridges that gap between the outside, helps them remember to know that they are not forgotten and that somebody outside cares for them,” Sinkovic said. “If I couldn’t be there for a whole week telling them every day that somebody outside cares about you and is cheering for you, at least my flowers can be there.”
Other members of the market donate flowers to hospitals, veteran’s homes and food pantries. Others donate their time and teach local youth groups from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about the art of floriculture.
“Everyone deserves beauty,” Hill said. “Flowers are great for connection. They’re incredible stories of joy and a way that we show love to each other, but also a way to add beauty to our world when it feels kind of dark sometimes. Whether you’re buying flowers or growing flowers, they add a lot of joy and beauty to your life.”
