The Sunflower Days

My Year in the Service of Sunlight

It’s an August afternoon and I’m walking with Friday, back towards the woods behind the barn. We are striding with intention, both. On our way to check on the flock who has been free-grazing around fields and woods for the last two hours.

It’s part of our work to keep the their diet varied, and to let them consume as many green calories from the roots as they can before first frost. Some older ewes are recovering from worming before fall flush. Some are still skinny from feeding twins all summer and still walk with a swingin’ bag between their legs. But they are all happy to be out in the forest tasting the world.

Friday and I feel the crunch of the first apple leaves under our feet. I remember when I first bit into an apple leaf and was surprised it tasted like a tart apple skin. What else would apple taste like!? That’s the kind of lesson I am reminded of as we crunch along into Autumn, still worshiping the sweat on the back of our necks as summer’s tide starts to recede.

Two hours is near the limit of their attention to the fields and woody edges. They start to congregate closer to the gardens, sprawling pumpkin vines, and sweet corn stalks. They want shimmy under the fences to taste the parts the deer didn’t reach with their long necks. Desire, grapevines, and elder sunbeams are everywhere.

Some mornings I come outside, coffee in hand, and watch a doe in her radiant summer pelt in awe. She’s busted through the corn fence and eating everything I planted, but I don’t run out there hollering, waving hands. I didn’t move to a farm for more chaos. I sip my coffee, watch elegance, and try to take notes. If nothing else, helps me pay attention to my posture.

This time of year whitetails are in the glory of their sleekest, reddest, hides. Some are red as Irish Setters. Others are golden, and with their long white fluffy tails and rumps, high in the air as they leap over the fences. You could convince me there are giant golden retrievers with a penchant for corn roaming the hinterlands.

I have half the sweetcorn I planted left. I do not care. It was a small patch and honestly, planted for fun and Mabon decorations around the farm. Long as I can roast a few cobs over a fire and lash a few stalks to the front doors before snowfly, I consider my corn harvest fine.

If she was eating my winter squash, that’s unacceptable. That’s my winter food. But she isn’t. She’s eating yard decorations and campfire fodder. I can afford the loss.

Another sip. Long sigh. It’s August.

It’s such an emotional time of year for me, mostly because of all the preparations ahead. I have winter firewood and hay to earn money for and store for my heat and feed for the animals. The clock is ticking, and I feel that anxiety in every evening we lose another minute of daylight.

It’s also very invigorating. This is the time of year that Autumn truly starts. I wasn’t lying about the leaves already littering the lawn and rustling. Apples hang heavy on the trees. The mare trots out to the biggest apple tree in the field every time I let her out to graze and starts eating the drops like a kid in a candy store.

And. The. sunflowers….

Every April I gather my packets of sunflower seeds I had collected and prepare them to plant. It’s a big deal. April here is still a month when snow isn’t out of the question. Any warmth is welcome, but it’s the kind that waltzes in with the threat of hypothermia after dark. It’s a clammy month up here.

And it’s the month I am done with my wood stove, completely done with it. All winter I heat my house with firewood, my house’s heat. Most people turn dials or click buttons to adjust their house temperature, but I move the mercury hand-placing every log that burns in a small stove.

I have to touch every single piece of fuel that helps me stay warm, for months on end. I can’t leave the house in winter for more than a few hours, as the fire will burn out and the temperatures indoors will plummet, risking the safety of the house itself. Pipes burst, rooms flood, structures get damaged, ask me how I know!

I live this way because I want to. It is the heat I can afford and the life I want to live, a winter within my means. And when April comes I am free and some days are even warm enough to work outside in a shirtsleeves. This is when I plant the hardy greens, potatoes, and sunflowers.

I bury seeds everywhere. Grand ideas about surrounding the house and barns with them. I have since learned there are places no sunflower seed outside a raised bed with full cage around it will work. Chipmunks, rats, squirrels smell and can dig up a sunflower seed in no time, so I had to get strategic about where I grow my happy.

Its the second half of August and in the last 4 months much has happened if you are a sunflower seed. Dozens of blooms have arrived, all over the gardens. There are traditional yellow and gold, but also harvest maroons and reds, as well as a dark purple variety that glows radiant with the sun behind it.

These mornings I go out with some shears and cut bouquets. Such a luxury to have a endless sort of sunlight to bring inside after dark.

Sunflowers are not complicated to grow. They are not orchids. Like me they are hearty, loud beasts, shining bright while they can. And as someone who spent years avoiding the beauty of flower farming because I wasn’t going to eat it or feed it to another animal, I am glad I changed to someone who plans the year around the life of the sunflowers. They are how I welcome the end of winter with their planting, how I celebrate the end of summer with their fireworks.

That overlap of chilly evenings with sunflower bouquets still beside my bed after a night with a fire to ward off the chill, I find the quiet practice of keeping their cycle going like another song on this farm. Another reason to keep fighting to keep it. Another way to learn grace through their fading beauty as the first frost touches their heart-sized disks and the petals fall.

I know summer is fading, but I still have proof on the stem outside my window I have some time left. Time to earn and gather what I need, regardless of how hard it has become. Time to still savor sweaty afternoons on hiking trails or morning feasts from wily whitetails. What matters is I am here. I am still here. And safe. At least for today.

---