Sunflower Festival at Ibaraki in early September

I know it is late January but it is never too late to share with you my beautiful sunflower photos taken back at 6th of September last year :P

Following my grape picking experience at Tochigi, the day tour brought my friend and I to Ibaraki prefecture (茨城県), Chikusei city（筑西市）, for their Sunflower festival!

We were damn lucky that the light rain in the morning had stopped and we could enjoy the awesome view with Tsukuba mountain（筑波山）as the backdrop.

 They also grow yellow cosmos flowers.

4.4 hectares of  yellow flowers and a mountain was certainly an impressive view for me. I was glad that I made it even though I was sickly.

For a brief moment, I revived with that stupid peace sign to take a commemorative photo.

 These are a kind of rare hybrid sunflowers called the "Tohoku Yae" sunflowers.

The main characteristic of these sunflowers is that the petals also grow at the centre core.

 Making them cute and fluffy, like a fur ball hehe~

A hardworking bee for our honey in stores later~

My friend likes sunflowers too so she decided to buy some back.

200yen for 5 bunches is a fantastic deal! Those in the bucket were samples of the amount of flowers you can get with 5 bunches. Of course, those plants near the shed had already been cleared by earlier patrons. So my friend had to go even further to choose the bigger bunches. (we were running late!)

The gardener helped her trim off excess leaves and believe me, the bouquet was still very heavy. I can probably knock someone unconscious if they had not remove the leaves.

We were tremendously satisfied with the beautiful sunflowers and my friend gave me one in hope that it could give me energy to recover :) I placed it in a glass jar after I got home but noticed some black dirt below the flower the next morning. Suspicious that it could be insect dropping, I immediately tossed the sunflower into my veranda (sorry friend, but I hate insects). I wasn't 100% sure if it was droppings or something from the sunflowers so I didn't warn my friend about it. Unfortunately for her, it turned out to be true. She had placed the flowers in her bedroom and woke up a few days later to crawling worms all over her wall and curtains. Yikes, CREEEEEEPY! Her poor husband had to help her catch all the creepy worms and throw the sunflowers away. Well… there's always an ugly side to beautiful things!

Lesson: Always throw away the flowers if you notice black dirt like insect droppings below.

Here is the link to the complete list of sunflower spots all over Japan if you can understand some Japanese: http://www.himawaribatake.net/list.php