Thursday, January 5, 2012

girasol

Girasol is the Spanish word for sunflower. It means literally “tour sun”. However, not all sunflowers track the sun. In fact, mature flowerheads typically face east and do not move, but the leaves and buds of young sunflowers do. Their orientation changes from east to west during the course of a day.DSC00673
After the zone conference yesterday, Presidente and I needed to run an errand to Lobos. This was not a quick type of errand. This was an errand that would take us to campo, but not the campo that we have been to before.DSC00676
As we were driving along, I was enamored with the fields of sunflowers that stretched out as far as the eye could see. The province of Buenos Aires grows the majority of the sunflowers harvested in Argentina. Last year they had quite a few problems with swelling numbers of birds (parrots and pigeons) feeding on the fields. Growers try to scare them away using balloons with "menacing eyes" painted on them. Farmers also try to scare the birds using reflective tape, scarecrows, and by setting off fireworks, which we know by now is practically a national obsession. Who knew that there was something besides entertainment behind it?
DSC00677
Argentina is the world's No.2 sunflower oil exporter, trailing only the Ukraine last year and accounts for almost a fifth of the global export supply.
In addition to all of that, they are  fabulously beautiful! DSC00674
 
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/us-argentina-grains-birds-idUSTRE71F5NK20110216
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/argentina-sunflower-seed-chamber-sees-area-up-10-2011-07-13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower

1 comment:

  1. Sister Carter, thank you so much for doing this blog! It is awesome! I cant even put into words how much this means to me! I love hearing about the culture and seeing some of the things that our missionaries are seeing everyday! I didn't even know about this blog til right before Christmas when another mom told me. Oh how exciting it was to see pictures of our son before Christmas! Our missionary is Elder Moore currently serving in the Chivilcoy zone. Thanks again for the blog and for helping watch over our missionaries. ..thanks for being our missionary angel... Sheila Moore

    ReplyDelete