As the late afternoon sun beats down mercilessly, KK Vijayan’s sunflowers present a mostly happy picture. “Though called sunflowers, these cannot take too much heat. I doubt if they will flourish in peak summer,” he says as he shows around the 50 cent pocket of land in Thuthiyur where he has grown the flowers. The sight of a patch of sunflowers surrounded by buildings and, in the distant horizon, the highrises of Kakkanad, seems illusory.
The blooms of the first batch, heavy with seeds, are droopy. It has been almost 10 days since the first flowers blossomed. As word spread locally, there’s been a trickle of people. “Mostly, they want to click photographs,” says an amused Vijayan, 41, as he shakes off some seeds from a flower and passes on a handful. This plot used to be a vegetable patch, which he will replant once all the flowers are done blooming.
Now that the seeds are ready to be harvested, he does not know what to do next as he has not been able to find a place that would mill the seed for oil or buy the seeds. The seeds can also be bird feed, he says. Vijayan farms marigold (during the Onam season) and vegetables on plots in Kunnumpuram with his brothers.
“Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, has attempted this (sunflowers) in and around Kochi so, I guess, finding people who would know how to treat the seeds would be hard to find.”
He confesses he knew it would not be easy, but wanted to cultivate the flowers also for his mother, Bhavani. Vijayan guesses his mother is around 80 as, “Back then, people did not keep track of the birth year or birth dates.” Bhavani, who is affected by Alzheimer’s disease, wanted to see sunflowers but her health does not permit travelling to other parts of the State where the cultivation is done. Despite being bent with age, she helps her sons with cultivation by readying grow bags and weeding.
Sunflower farming has caught on in Kerala, with farmers in Kollam, Alappuzha, Wayanad, Idukki and Palakkad growing these plants as a source of income via domestic tourists and also to extract oil, though not on a large scale.
The first blooms appeared 50-odd days after he planted the saplings. He tried seeds at first but when that did not work, he planted saplings sourced from Cherthala. Some of the plants are now six feet tall and the flowers have a diameter of 25 centimetres (yes, measured with a scale). “As days pass and the seeds mature, the flowers droop over. We pluck the flowers, dry them and once done, you just need to tap them for the seeds to fall out.”
Although he still has to figure out what to do with the seeds, he does not regret his decision. “I will figure something out. Of course, I need to think about whether I would do it again.”
