Home-based business grows out of pandemic, layoff

BELLA VISTA — While it’s not easy to find good in a worldwide pandemic, for one Bella Vista family covid changed their lives and left them with an unexpected home business.

Parmelee Homestead Creations & Urban Farm began when the pandemic caused a layoff in the Parmelee household.

“It was a way to keep our family going,” Becky Parmelee said about the business in which she sells various jams and sauces. She didn’t expect it to continue indefinitely, but the business just kept growing.

“It’s great,” she said. “It’s nice to have an option for preservative-free.”

Her products range from “classics” like strawberry jam, using her grandmother’s recipe, to spicy mango cherry jam. There are also butters, like pumpkin butter and strawberry honey butter, and a mango salsa spread in addition to more traditional salsas.

The state changed its cottage industry laws just in time, she said. She follows all the new regulations set forth in the Arkansas Food Freedom Act, which vary according to where her products are sold — at a fair, a farmers market or a grocery store.

She included the phrase “Urban Farm” in the name of her business because she grows many of her ingredients in her back yard on the east side of Bella Vista.

She has 14 raised beds in her back yard which she calls “an ordinary corner lot.”

“You can grow a lot if you’re strategic,” she said.

She grows most the berries she uses and has an extensive salsa garden with jalapeno and habanero peppers. She ended up purchasing tomatoes this past summer when her tomato plants couldn’t keep up, but since she spent most Sundays at the Bella Vista Farmers Market, she was able to source a lot of local tomatoes, she said. She also uses a restaurant supply company for some ingredients.

She can’t use the word “organic” because that comes with many regulations to become certified, but her produce is free of pesticides.

“We are deliberate and intentional and a little bit old fashioned,” she said about her produce. She uses compost from Food Loops, a local company that collects food waste and turns it into compost.

Each fall, she and her husband, Mike, blow oak leaves from the yard into a pile and run them over with the lawn mower. The cut leaves are moved to the raised beds where they decompose over the winter and enrich the soil.

In the winter she begins by planting hundreds of heirloom seeds that come from a seed company just over the border in Missouri. She has a hoop house that allows her to get a jump on the growing season. The extra plants she sells at the first farmers markets of the season.

“I grow as many flowers as vegetables,” she said. The flowers insure lots of pollinators for the garden.

She concentrates on jams, including a lot of strawberry and blackberry, because jellies are made with juice and require a lot more sugar and pectin. Jams, she explains, are little bit healthier and more shelf stable.

Parmelee recycles mason jars which her customers can return for a discount on future orders. The jars go through a multi- step sanitation process that includes both chemical and boiling water cleansing as well as a trip through the dishwasher.

She learned to can as a child, helping her mother and grandmother on their farm in central Iowa. She spends most days in the kitchen making jams, sauces and salsa. She would rather be out in her garden, she said, but it’s worth it when her cooking makes other people happy.

One lesson many people learned from the pandemic is that people don’t need more things in their home. Often, a more thoughtful gift is something consumable, like a homemade jam or sauce, she said.

With the Bella Vista Farmers Market season over for the year, Parmelee is selling at a list of fairs and special events including a makers market in Bentonville on Saturday and a winter market in Bentonville on Nov. 26.

Her products are also in the Bentonville Mercantile, the Crafty Shambles Studio Store in Bentonville, the Fayetteville Mercantile, Brick City in Fayetteville, Akins Natural Foods in Rogers and Bumbles & Boots Custom Creations in Rogers. In Bella Vista, her products can be found at Just Petaling, a flower shop on Lancashire Boulevard.

She can also fill orders from her web page: parmeleehomesteadcreations.com/ order.

The Bella Vista Farmers Market is a great place to grow a business, she said. There’s a lot of community support and everything is hand made.

Parmelee Homestead Creations is truly a family business, she said. Her 3-year-old son spent Sundays with her at the Farmers Market.

“He loves working it,” she said. He even has his own custom T-shirt to wear.

When Mike Parmelee isn’t helping with the garden or setting up for markets, he spends time in his woodworking shop, which he makes available for rent.

Becky Parmelee also has a photography business where she concentrates on landscape photography and those products are also available online.

For more information about Parmelee Homestead Creations & Urban Farm go to their webpage: parmeleehomesteadcreations.com.

(Submitted Photo) Becky Parmelee at the Bella Vista Farmers Market with her homemade jams and sauces.

(Submitted Photo) Parmelee learned how to grow, prepare and can produce while she was growing up on a farm in central Iowa.