You know about autumn corn panels. But have you heard of a summer sunflower maze?
A few summer ago, Jake Gust, the owner of Gust Flower and Product Farm, began cutting a maze/path into the sunflower patch of his farm. Today, his sunflower path attracts several thousand people to the Monroe and Adrian region every summer. It is open from 10 to 20 hours every day. This year, the season ends August 31.
The farm is on 11998 Rodeziller Highway in Lake Ottawa. The intake is $ 5 per person and provides access to the sunflower path, the field for cutting sunflower and the Verbena and Zinnia fields. There is an additional fee for cutting flowers.
Gust’s Sunflower Sunflower
Farm’s sunflower paths/labyrinth dates from 2018.
“I started the labyrinth because I thought people could enjoy it. Corn labyrinths were long overdue and were popular during the fall season. Maybe people would like to walk through sunflowers?” Gust said.
Gust Flower and Product Farm on the 11998 Rodesiler highway in Lake Ottawa is open from 10:00 to 20:00 every day until August 31. His suggestions are more than five acres of sunflower path.
The trail started small.
“I had only one variety and ½ acres. Now it’s 20 varieties and five or six acres,” Gust said. It cuts a random model in the color field every year.
“Some use GPS. I don’t have a real model,” he said.
Later, he added props to the path as an antique tractor and a giant trailer cow, which he bought from the former Borhard Brothers Market in Blissfield. Visitors can also swing on swings.
Sunflower Trail has several requisites, including this cow from the former Borchardt Brothers market in Blissfield.
Sunflower Trail is a popular destination for photographers and families, Gust said.
“People just like to be out in nature and walk through the flowers. In the morning we get many families. They can see the pollinators, bees and butterflies and take pictures,” Gust said.
The new year is a cleaner hunt inside the path.
“It’s for really young children, under 5. They get a card and get a paper stroke in the props (in the list). After all, they get Popsicle. They are excited about it,” Gust said. “People like something a little different every year. Every year we try to make some changes.”
Other attractions of the impulse farm
Gust Flower and Product Farm has more than three acres of cutting flowers. The price is $ 11.
“We provide jar, scissors and water,” Gust said.
The farm has goat pen.
The farm also has a pen with goats and a village store with the participation of a selected and selected production. The suggestions are you choose strawberries, even in August.
“It’s new this year on the farm. It’s a flowering strawberry that now bears fruit. This morning I chose 30-40 neighborhoods,” Gust said on August 18th.
He also sells peaches, cantalups, sweet corn and tomatoes. Watermelons are coming soon. Gust receives melons from Andy Stall, the son of his mentor Tom Stall. Gust met Tom Stall years ago through the Dundee FFA FFA program.
Gust Flower and Product Farm offers production, including a variety of strawberry plants that bear fruit in August.
Raising sunflowers
Graduating from 2005 at Whiteford High School, Gust has been a WhS agriculture teacher for about 11 years. He also runs the Whiteford FFA program.
“My older year, I (too) went to Dundee (high school) to take agriculture and FFA,” Gust said.
After winning agriculture diploma from Michigan State University, the impulse taught in Hilsdale County for three years before he came to WhS.
Jake Gust, a farm teacher, has been growing sunflowers for years in his Gust Flower and produces a farm on Ottawa Lake.
“FFA started (in Whiteford) in 2014. We have over 100 (students) in high school and about 50 in eighth grade. At least two to three go to agriculture (fields), such as animal and plant science, greenhouses and landscaping,” Gust said.
He and his wife Jessica have four children, aged 9, 7, 5 and 2. When the school is out for the summer, Gust and Kids work on the farm. In the fall, the impulse helps his father’s business on the other side of the street from his. Gust Brothers Pumpkin Farm is 13639 Mulberry Road in Ottawa Lake.
“They open on Labor Day. Then I close,” Gust said.
Gust
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The impulse is a self -taught in sunflower agriculture.
“It was a lot of online reading. I like to do it in the winter when you can’t be in the field and dig the ground. The next best thing is to read on different varieties and watch catalogs,” Gust said.
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To provide summer full of sunflowers, it plans several times every summer. The first harvest usually appears in mid -July. In one summer, he will receive at least 250,000 flowering.
“Sunflowers tend to bloom after 60 to 70 days. There may be 10 to 20 flowering of a good plant for branching. We always have fresh sunflowers,” Gust said.
Gust said there are hundreds of sunflower variants. It plants about 20 species.
“Branching, one -headed, tall, short, butter balls, double flowers. Sunflowers of all kinds,” Gust said. “We have a good climate (for sunflowers). They can (cope) with the drier field of the field. They are a difficult plant.”
– Contact Susan Nolan Woslol in swisler@monroenews.comS
This article originally appeared at Monroe News: Walk among thousands of flowers, see props on the Gust Farm sunflower path