Back to see the Cotswold sunflowers

The birds we feed need more supplies, so I headed up to the top of the hills above Stroud to the Bisley Farmshop, where I could buy a 13 kg sack of sunflowers reasonably cheaply. I also bought some peanuts, though in small quantities as directed by Woodpeckers (who should provide expert advice), and a few more winter vegetables seedlings, such as a few lettuce, some red cabbage and calabrese and a batch of leek-lets (as I call them) to fill in the patches in the garden, where summer flowers are beginning to depart.

The air was a little warmer and the scudding clouds in the stiff breeze allowed brief glimpses of sunshine. I drove back the long way and followed my instinct and parked at the farm's Dutch barn which Ashley told me about some weeks ago. I thought I would check if there were any sunflowers left from the large patch he had planted. The field itself is divided into strips of a variety of vegetables and the potatoes and broad beans have long gone. The soil is quite dark red which is unusual for around this area and I think it reflects the clay content in the soil.

Many of the sunflowers had been cut to be sold as flowers in the farm shop, but there was still a large crop of their seed heads 'faces' on the long stalks at head height. I expect they are being kept as a seed crop, and maybe we will be able to have them for bird food when they have dried and been harvested properly. A few plants had obviously developed much later and they were still flowering and attracting a variety of insects of differing sizes and types. It was a little hard to photograph them in the strong wind although the insects seemed to have no problem flying, nor in navigating over the flowers in their search for pollen.

I've now adjusted the white balance slightly, which accounts for the bluish background, which I liked as soon as it appeared.

Here is the earlier blip of the same field of sunflowers