Sanborn, N.Y. (WBEN) - Get your cameras ready! The Sunflowers of Sanborn are back again this year and are starting to bloom. Opening day was August 1st and the highly-photographable attraction is open all week long from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. with a variety of fun events for all ages.
Admission to the property is free, giving guests access to the fields where they can pick their own sunflower for $1 a flower, take a ride on the wagon, navigate through a corn maze, watch apples get shot out of a canon and more!
Sunflower field, Sunflowers of SanbornWBEN
In addition to the daily activities, there is a whole schedule of events happening as well, "Coming up this weekend we have our yoga festival. The second weekend of August we do have our craft show for Saturday and Sunday. The third weekend of August we have our 'Touch-a-Truck,' for all the kids, we have a couple of fire trucks coming from our local fire companies and tractors for the 20th and 21st. On the 27th and 28th, we have another craft show weekend. So that'll be great," said Louise Brachmann, owner and operator for Sunflowers of Sanborn.
Brachmann also mentions a car show coming in the second week of September, click here for the full schedule lineup.
Food is also available on the premises, burgers, ice cream, hot dogs and new this year is wood-fired pizza, available at their Sunflower Grill and Creamery.
Due to the drought this year, all the flowers in the 30-acres haven't bloomed yet, but they are starting to come together and visitors came from all over for opening day.
"This year, we actually planted our flowers two weeks earlier than normal and we've had no rain. The drought has affected the flowers, more than normal. We finally got our first rain two weeks ago and when we first planted on the ground was just so hard that the flowers couldn't come out. So the seed ended up dying, and we had to replant them. We've done this about four times so far, we did do some irrigation, but it's just not like what comes from the heavens. There's just such a difference. So the flowers this year, I would say we could probably be a week behind where we have a lot of flowers, they're just not going to be as tall. So usually people expect them to be over their head six, seven foot this year. I don't foresee that," said Brachmann.
Brachman says they plant over 100,000 seeds per acre of land.
This sunflower project started six years ago, done in the memory of Brachmann's parents, who passed, "We planted them on the corner of our farm, in memory of my parents and people stopped from all over and started taking pictures and stopped in the field because they had a loved one that was associated with a sunflower, which I guess you'd never think of until you actually go through something like that, which is why I planted them for my parents. After that we decided you know what, maybe this is something we could do to help our income and we decided to move things back off the road and just started planting more sunflowers," Brachmann says.
The Sunflowers of Sanborn is located at 3311 Saunders Settlement Road, open all week long 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. weather permitting. Brachman says that they could extend their season past the second week of September depending on how long the flowers stay.
Visit their website here for more details and ticket information on specific events.
