The sunflowers are back at the Smith Perry Berries Farm

OOLTEWAH, Tenn. (WDEF) — The sunflowers are peeking through in Ooltewah at the Smith Perry Berries Farm. With each bucket of sunflowers you buy, it goes towards a good cause. Each bucket is $20 but you get to pick as many as you want. The current record is 180 in one bucket. But what’s even better is that for every bucket, $10 goes towards children hospital for charity.

“Started out with a hunting club and people started just showing up taking pictures like family photos and they always wanted to pick the sunflowers and I told them ‘No you can’t pick them you’re welcome to take pictures you can’t pick them’ and so I thought well I’m going to plant a field and see if they will pay to pick them, and it just branched out from that,” said Co-Owner of Smith Perry Berries Farm, Aubie Smith.

This year has been a bit of a struggle for the farm as there wasn’t much rain from when they first planted the sunflowers till today and they are actually smaller, but oddly enough people actually prefer the smaller sizes.

“I’ve heard a lot of people make the comments that they like them better that they are short because you know it’s the same height as the kids, so the pictures were better, so it’s been a real struggle this year with the drought,” said Smith.

If you haven’t been able to go out and pick your own sunflowers this year, there’s a short time frame as they only flourish for about a week until they start to die off.