Sunflowers of Oki
Kitanakagusuku has a sunflower festival every year at the end of January
“Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.” - Walt Whitman
The start of the sunflower maze on the Miyagi Island.
While driving around Okinawa lately you are bound to come across a sunflower field. Sunflowers are able to grow for most of the year due to Okinawa's climate and abundance of sun. I often see small plots of them whenever I'm driving though the farm villages. I started to notice that the farmers don't seem to harvest these crops. They are often left to wilt and fade with the sun before cutting them back and turning the soil.
I found these while exploring Ogimi village in April.
Now sure there are many profitable reasons to grow sunflowers. Of course there are sunflower seeds which have great health benefits. Sunflower oil that is pressed from the seeds can help with skin and is used often in cooking. There are less profitable uses such as the florist industry, cow feed and even papermaking ( I used some in my collage papermaking class)! However the crops never seem to be harvested at the appropriate time for any of those uses.
I did my research and it turns out that these amazing flowers with a list of talents have one more! Sunflowers are great at cleaning the soil, particularly cleaning out heavy metal deposits! Phytoremediation is the action that certain plants can use to clean and remove contamination from our soils and water. This process has even been used to clean up a nuclear explosion in the Ukraine. We haven't had anything that server here, thank goodness, but heavy metals can come from the use of pesticides, manure and other fertilizers.
Yomitan Village has two large fields that overlook the East China Sea.
There are other plants that do have this capability however, the sunflower is affordable, extremely easy to care for and grows large enough to take majority of the containments away in one growth season. Besides, they look much prettier don't they?!
Haebaru Sunflower field had HUGE sunflowers, at least 7ft. Unfortunatly I came just a little to late and they were tattered and worn.
