Late blooming sunflowers lure people to farmers’ market in southwestern Japan town

Sept. 28, 2013

Late blooming sunflowers lure people to farmers’ market in southwestern Japan town

The sunflowers planted in a fallow rice field in Haki Town, southwestern Japan, bloom　late August to September. This is a little later than the ordinary blooming season, but the timing is rather convenient for local people, because the flowers attract customers to a farmers’ market there with many kinds of fruits to be harvested around the time of the year.

A local farmers’ group sows the field, just in front of the Farmers Station Basaro building, with sunflower seeds in July every year. The number of flowers is said to be 160,000, but because some flowers failed to bloom this year, the number is actually around 140,000, said a clerk at the information desk.

The sunflowers are as big as the size of the human face, sometimes, bigger than that, but this year, the size is smaller than usual due to heavy rain in August, the clerk said. The sunflowers endured heat waves this summer, but they were vulnerable to wetness, she said. Visitors can not just enjoy the flowers, but they can also cut whatever flowers they like by themselves while strolling in the field. They can buy the cut flowers for 50 yen apiece. The sunflowers are also for sale at the farmers’ market.

Haki used to be a rich rice growing region, but farmers had to find new crops amid the government’s policy of cutting back on the rice acreage from the 1970s to the 80s, she said. Their idea was to plant such fruits as persimmons, grapes and pears. To this end, they brought slanting land under cultivation. Their effort bore fruit, but in some years later, they had to think about what to do with excess crops. Sometimes, they had to throw away surplus products on the field rather than shipping them to the market. A solution to this was a plan to build a farmers’ market station to provide their products directly to consumers. Their income came to stabilize only in recent years, she said.

The sunflower, Himawari in the Japanese, is the symbol flower of Haki Town, which merged with two neighboring communities in 2006 to become a single administrative region in Fukuoka Prefecture.

The planting for the Sunflower Fair in mid to late September started in 1997, one year later than the opening of the Basaro market. The planting group had a headache in growing sunflowers every year. Sunflowers are often accompanied with replant failure, or injuries by continuous cultivation. To solve this problem, the group also grows rape blossoms in the field for soil improvement.

It is quite unusual that sunflowers should continuously bloom for as long as over 10 years, according to the clerk at the information. The edible rape blossoms grown in the field are sold at the market early spring. “Please come again and see the yellow rape blossoms cover the field in spring,” she said smilingly.