Peace-seekers pick their own sunflowers in a country field
If you tiptoe through the fields at Pick Your Own Sunflowers, you’re sure to come across social media enthusiasts taking selfies.
But farmer Laiken Britt is inviting everyone to join his family’s growing venture, which opens for its seventh annual season in Dunnstown, east of Ballarat, on Sunday.
Britt has seen couples dressed in sunflower costumes, yoga practitioners and a wedding party posing among the leaves, but many customers are looking for a morale-boosting break from a hectic world.
“I think they want to be in nature,” Britt says. “They come from the concrete jungle of Melbourne or Ballarat and there’s fresh air. You get out of the car and it’s peaceful. Everyone says sunflowers never look shabby, they make you smile.”
On Sunday, Ballarat’s Tegan Kohlman was making her third visit to Pick Your Own Sunflowers in three years.
Kohlman picked six sunflowers and enjoyed sitting on a hay bale with a view of the nearby mountains.
He described the field as beautiful, lovely, peaceful and enjoyable. “When you dive deep into the sunflowers, sometimes you forget that there are other people around you.”
Farm owner Britt says customers bring dogs, cats, cockatoos and even pet food.
Britt started Picking Your Own Sunflowers in 2020 as a fun side hustle to the family’s farm, which consists mostly of cattle as well as wheat and barley. That month-long inaugural sunflower season was a huge success and ended just as the pandemic began.
The best season came in 2021, with beautiful weather conditions and a bumper crop that lasted six weeks.
Last year the season was shortened due to drought.
The hope this year is to be open five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday, for at least a month before any changes are announced. their website. But Britt says: “Mother Nature is in charge, and we’re moving with it.”
Britt, a former hairdresser from the town of Matlock in England’s Peak District, says she had “never met a farmer” before coming to Dunnstown to work on the Britt family farm in 2010, where she met her now-husband Karl.
For Pick Your Own Sunflowers, the couple’s sons Oscar, 14, Jai, 13, Billy, 12, and Ollie, 5, help them sell tickets, run a hay maze and sell honey and potatoes from local farms.
Community groups raise money from sausage sizzles. Entrance fee is $10 per person, children under five are free. Each stem customers choose costs $2.
Customers must bring their own bags or buckets, and can also bring or rent pruning shears, as the stems are too thick to break by hand.
Britt loves educating the town kids about nature, just as she once did. The plants wilt and die within a month to six weeks, but the seeds cannot be sold because frosts set in in this region and the seeds do not harden.
But the cattle are allowed to eat whatever plants Britt thinks they like.
“We have the brightest cows in Dunnstown,” he says. “It might be the sunflower oil. They look happy when they come in.”
