Floral fundraiser: Chatham farm opens field of 20,000 sunflowers for charity

Published Jul 04, 2024 • 2 minute read

Matthew and Gail Whitney, owners of Puddleford Tree Farm, are shown Tuesday, July 2, 2024 among some of their 20,000 sunflowers planted in rows to make it easier to wander through and get photographs. The field is now open to the public with the $5 per carload admission being donated to the Alzheimer’s Society of Chatham-Kent. Photo by Ellwood Shreve /Postmedia News

CHATHAM-KENT — There’s an easy way to take photos with thousands of sunflowers — and support a good cause — without leaping over a drainage ditch to get there.

Matthew and Gail Whitney, owners of Puddleford Tree Farm near Kent Bridge, have opened their property for people to wander the roughly 20,000 sunflowers they have planted on about 0.6 hectares (1.5 acres).

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“We plant them, they grow and then we have the public come in and admire them,” Gail Whitney said. “People go in there and they’re instantly happy.”

Admission is $5 a car and clippers are available for visitors to pick sunflowers at a cost of $1 a stem. It’s all on the honour system.

“It’s a straight donation to the Alzheimer’s Society,” Whitney said.

The sunflower seeds are donated by Pioneer Seed, Whitney said.

People can come and to “enjoy the peace and quiet of the countryside and be away from the city for a while,” she added.

Farmers prefer not to have people in their field of sunflowers they’ve planted, because it can damage the crop, she said.

“So, what we’ve done is we’ve made room for people to go in among the sunflowers,” she said. “Kids run and play, it’s really cool.”

The Making Sunny Memories fundraiser, which began in 2021, was inspired in part by the public’s response to their Christmas tree farm during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Whitney said.

She said the 2020 Christmas tree season “was huge for us, because people were staying home and people could get outside and do things.”

Seeing visitors so excited that Christmas convinced them to do something in the summer as the pandemic continued, Whitney said.

Puddleford Tree Farm also does Christmas ornaments with proceeds going to the Alzheimer’s Society.

Whitney said this began in 2020, when her late father Gerald Johnson, who had a form of dementia, helped her paint wooden discs that were made into Christmas ornaments.

Puddleford Tree Farm is open daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. at 22896 Scane Rd.

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