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.
