If you tip-toe through the fields at Pick Your Own Sunflowers, you’re sure to stumble on social media enthusiasts taking selfies.
But farmer Laiken Britt welcomes all-comers to her family’s growing enterprise, which opened on Sunday in Dunnstown, east of Ballarat, for its seventh annual season.
Britt has seen couples dressed in sunflower costumes, yoga practitioners, and a wedding party pose among the petals, but many customers simply seek a mood-lifting break from a hectic world.
“I think they want to be in nature,” Britt says. “They drive up from the concrete jungle, in Melbourne or Ballarat, and it’s fresh air. You get out of the car, and it’s peaceful. Everyone says sunflowers never look miserable, they make you smile.”
On Sunday, Tegan Kohlman, of Ballarat, was making her third visit in three years to Pick Your Own Sunflowers.
Kohlman picked six sunflowers and enjoyed sitting on a hay bale with views of nearby mountains.
She described the field as beautiful, lovely, peaceful and blissful. “When you’re deep into the sunflowers, sometimes you kind of forget there are other people around you.”
Farm owner Britt says customers have brought in dogs, cats, cockatoos, even a pet chook.
Britt started Pick Your Own Sunflowers in 2020 as a fun sideline to the family’s farm that’s about mostly cattle but also wheat and barley. That month-long inaugural sunflower season was a hit, ending just as the pandemic began.
The best season came in 2021, with good weather and a bumper crop lasting six weeks.
Last year’s season was curtailed due to drought.
The hope this year is to open five days a week from Wednesday to Sunday, for at least a month, with any changes announced on their website. But Britt says: “Mother Nature is in charge, and we just roll with it.”
Britt, formerly a hairdresser from the town of Matlock in England’s Peak District, says she had “never met a farmer” before coming to Dunnstown in 2010 to work on the Britt family’s farm, 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. The entry fee is $10 per person, with children under five free. Each stem customers pick costs $2.
Customers must bring their own bags or buckets, and can either bring or hire secateurs because stems are too thick to be broken off by hand.
Britt likes educating town kids, as she once was, about nature. The plants wilt and die within a month to six weeks, but the seeds can’t be sold because frosts start in this area and the seeds don’t harden.
However, the cattle are let in to eat the plants, which Britt reckons they enjoy.
“We’ve got the shiniest cows in Dunnstown,” she says. “From the sunflower oil maybe. They look happy when they’re in there.”