🌻 IMPORTANT WEEKEND UPDATE 🌻

❗️It’s long, but if you plan to visit this weekend, please read❗️

Our first two weekends might be your best chance for sunflower field photos this season. The storms today (Thursday) nearly took out our flower fields with high winds & small hail. Thankfully they somehow survived and still look beautiful! (The flower photo in this post was taken just after the storms)

We have 2 acres total of Sunflowers & Zinnias. They’ve been blooming for about a good week now and they are going to be absolutely BEAUTIFUL for opening weekend! 🤩🌻

❗️HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW❗️

🎟️ Save $2 per ticket by purchasing your tickets before Saturday! Our presale ends Friday night! https://www.simpletix.com/e/sunflower-festival-2024-tickets-168643

🥾 We got at least an inch of rain today. Therefore, parts of the farm, like the flower fields, will be muddy! Wear old shoes or boots when visiting!

🚫✂️ In order for us to protect the currently blooming sunflower field for everyone to enjoy and take photos in, there will be NO U-pick sunflowers; BUT you can cut your own zinnias!

👉 HOWEVER, we couldn’t let you leave the farm empty handed 😉 So we will have a limited supply of several hundred pre-cut sunflowers available for purchase! 🌻😍

📸 We are doing less photo ops in the flower fields than usual to ensure that the natural beauty of the flowers shines through. However, we will still have over 10 different photo ops for you to utilize around the farm!

While Mother Nature has modified our plans this year, we are making the best of it! We’ve been battling the weather all spring but we are so thankful for the beautiful flower fields we do have and we can’t wait to share them with you this weekend!

We hope to see you this weekend for OPENING WEEKEND! 🤩

⏰ FARM HOURS:

Saturday May 18th: 10:00am – 8:00pm

Sunday May 19th: 10:00am – 6:00pm

🎶 LIVE MUSIC:

Saturday 12:00-3:00pm • Markus Miller aka A/Lone Wolf

Sunday 12:00-3:00pm • JP Music

🎨 Face Painting Fundraiser to benefit 4 year old Remi who is battling Leukemia•  10:00am – 3:00pm Saturday & Sunday • 100% of proceeds are being doubled by Western Belle & donated to Remi & her family! (No admission into the farm is required to stop by & support!)

Western Belle Farm • Sunflower Festival 2024 🌻

📍 7929 Heritage Parkway West TX 76691

🌻✨ THIS WEEKEND ✨🌻

It’s OPENING WEEKEND of the Sunflower Festival 2024 and it’s looking like a beautiful weekend to be at the farm! 🤩

🌻 This is your BEST weekend for Sunflower field photos! The small field we have is blooming & might be our best field we get this season 🌻

⏰ FARM HOURS:

Saturday May 18th: 10:00am – 8:00pm

Sunday May 19th: 10:00am – 6:00pm

🎶 LIVE MUSIC:

Saturday 12:00-3:00pm • Markus Miller aka A/Lone Wolf

Sunday 12:00-3:00pm • JP Music

🎨 Face Painting Fundraiser to benefit 4 year old Remi •  10:00am – 3:00pm Saturday & Sunday • 100% of proceeds are being doubled by Western Belle & donated to Remi & her family!

🌻 2 acres of sunflowers & zinnias!  Smaller fields of flowers than we planned, but we are grateful for what we do have despite the cloudy & soggy spring!

✂️ Pick-your-own zinnias and pre-cut sunflowers available for purchase!

🤸🏼‍♂️ 20+ activities are included in admission • Farm Animal barn, Barn Slides, Mini Zip Lines, Jump Pillow, Barrel Train rides & more!

📸 10+ Beautiful spring photo ops throughout the farm

🌮 The Cantina & Canteen will have delicious food options for you! •  We’ve got some delicious new items for you to try! 🥨

🍧 Kona Ice will be at the farm too!

💰 $14 per person ages 3+

🎟️ Ticket presale ends Friday! Save $2 per general admission ticket: https://www.simpletix.com/e/sunflower-festival-2024-tickets-168643

Western Belle Farm • Sunflower Festival 2024 🌻

📍 7929 Heritage Parkway West TX 76691

🎨 FACE PAINTING FUNDRAISER 🎨

May 18th & May 19th from 10:00am – 3:00pm

On opening weekend (May 18th – 19th) we will have a Face Painting Fundraiser benefiting 4 year old Remi Wissinger. We are going to MATCH your donations to double the impact for this sweet family!

LJ & Alyssa Wissinger’s world was turned upside down when their sweet & vibrant 3 year old daughter Remi, was diagnosed with leukemia on January 19, 2024. A once active and full-of-light little girl, was noticeably pale and often tired.

Watching their daughter become so sick has not only been emotionally hard, but, it has been physically draining on this young family. LJ is a firefighter and Alyssa is in PT school and they are making weekly trips to Temple with Remi for chemo treatments.

We love our community and we want to help others in time of need. Please partner with us in raising money for sweet Remi and her family! 100% of the funds raised will go to Remi and her family. Remi is due to become a big sister in August and we want to help ease some of the hardship her family is facing.

The Face Painting area will be OUTSIDE of our admission area and therefore, you’re welcome to just stop by the farm to support the fundraiser! If you can’t attend, here is Alyssa’s Venmo information should you wish to donate: @Alyssa_holt

Face painting will be a suggested donation of $5 and every dollar you spend, WE WILL MATCH IT! 🙌🏽 Mark your calendars for this fundraiser: May 18th & May 19th from 10:00am to 3:00pm 🗓️

Thank y’all for always helping us to give back to the community! We love our community and so let’s show the Wissinger family some love too ❤️

We don’t mean to be depressing but…

The first photo is May 3, 2023

The second photo is May 9, 2024

Just like we teach the kids on the field trips to our farm, here are three very important things that our crops need to grow:

1. Soil 👩🏻‍🌾

2. Water 💧

3. Sun ☀️

This spring, we got SO MUCH rain but hardly any sun. The clay soil sat soaking wet for weeks as it continually rained and stayed cloudy. The flower seeds struggled and most of them rotted. We took a chance and invested again mid-April and replanted our big field only to have even more heavy rainfall and no sunshine. ☁️

If we would’ve had lots of sunny days and 85+ degree weather in between the rains, our field would look completely different right about now. We’d actually have a beautiful field of flowers! 🌻

We don’t mean to be depressing and we would LOVE to be advertising photos of last year’s fields… but the reason we share our hardships with you is for two very important reasons:

1. We want to spread the word of the current flower field status because all we have to advertise our flowers is the BEAUTIFUL photos from last year’s near perfect field. We don’t want y’all disappointed when you come and the flower fields aren’t quite what they were in 2023.😔
2. We want you to understand that while you might have enjoyed the cooler, cloudy spring, it has really affected the crops here at the farm. When you visit here soon, it will be hard to remember our terrible growing season with the sunny and warm days that will have set in (opening weekend’s weather looks great!) … the nice weather was just a little too late for our flowers.

At this point, if we did a third replanting, we wouldn’t have flowers until mid-July. We thought about it… but walking around the farm in July is well… HOT 🥵

Thankfully we do have overflowing tanks of water from all these rains, so hopefully it will be enough to get our fall crops through the summer and come fall, we will have better luck! 🎃🌻

The past few days of warm, sunny weather and no rainfall has been good for the flowers that we do have. It appears that the smaller field is growing and getting ready to bloom. (And they are pretty!) We might actually have some blooming flowers for opening weekend!

The large field of flowers sadly got this sunshine and break from rain a little too late. Once again, we lost a good bit of the flowers to rot. What did make it, seems to have doubled in size in the past week. We are anticipating this field early/mid- June but it will NOT be a full field. It is going to be spotty due to the seeds that rotted.😢

We appreciate your support of our farm, and we hope you will still visit this May & June. We are going to have a bunch of fun on the farm with y’all this spring regardless! We will have flowers, however, the flower fields just won’t be the best they’ve ever been… that was last year’s crop ☺️ On the plus side, maybe our pumpkin patch will be GREAT for 2024! We are keeping the faith that God’s got us and it will all work out! ❤️

Here is the most recent photo of the only Sunflower field we have that is doing well do to good drainage (it was 80% cow manure and not clay soil). It was originally intended to be the field we allowed you to “cut” your own flowers from. These sunflowers are doing well and projected to bloom May 18-28th