Closed not just for today, this week or this month. “For years, we’ve had people stopping alongside the road to take pictures,” said Brad Bogle, who, along with his parents, harvests sunflower seeds for bird food on their farm, Bogle Seeds. The Bogles opened up their farm to photographers on July 20, charging $7.50 an adult. Tourists taking Instagram-ready selfies have clogged up Santorini, Greece, with its distinctive blue rooftops, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Great Wall of China. The family is in its sixth generation on the farm. Barry Bogle, a farmer at Bogle Seeds say sunflowers are very susceptible to different diseases and if someone goes through the crop and breaks a leaf off, that opens up an area on that plant where a disease can enter. His son Brad, the sixth-generation of Bogles farming the land since 1874, described Saturday as a "zombie apocalypse." (Laura Clementson/CBC) 
 
 Police arrived 
 
 The farm's parking lot holds about 300 cars but even that wasn't enough and people were parking where they shouldn't have. And for more than a week, you could roam part of their field and take a picture before you head home. (Laura Clementson/CBC) 
 
 People from Toronto 
 
 Barry says people from as far as New York and Dubai have visited his farm in the past and enjoyed talking about the flowers. Bogle Seeds, a farm offering people the opportunity to take photos with their sunflowers was forced to close on Saturday after far too many people showed up. "People started coming in from every direction in the farm and just thousands of people walking past our ticket booth." All roads backed up with traffic, people parking on the side of the highway, people trying to cross the highway ... even saw a fender bender while leaving." - Barry Bogle 
 
 Traffic was so bad in the area that Hamilton police and OPP were monitoring traffic and assisting with parking concerns. Around 2 p.m., they asked the family to shut down the operation and later closed Safari Road, which abuts the field. The horde — which Mr. Bogle estimated at 7,000 people that Saturday — left behind garbage and a host of angry neighbors who found the road in front of their homes closed after the police arrived and the festivities were shut down. It was just chaos." ​Sunflowers, Bogle says, are a crop that's very susceptible to different diseases and if someone goes through the crop and breaks a leaf off, that opens up an area on that plant where a disease can enter.
– The invite promised a "spectacular sight"; the reality was a spectacular disaster. For eight days at the end of July, all was fine as tourists flocked to the Bogle Seeds sunflower seed farm in Hamilton, Ontario. They were there at the invitation of the farm's owners, who'd decided to open the farm up for two weeks to picture-taking visitors, some from as far away as Australia and Dubai, per the Globe and Mail. But on July 28—what Brad Bogle now calls "Crazy Day," per the National Post—everything went awry, when about 7,000 selfie-obsessed sightseers converged upon the farm, per Bogle's estimate. The day-trippers started showing up shortly after dawn, the parking lot that could hold 300 cars was filled before 10am, and the scene soon degenerated into "utter chaos," per the CBC. Included in that chaos: people not paying admission, littering, and enraging the farm's neighbors. "One of my neighbors told me that he caught two people going to the bathroom in his front yard in his bushes," Bogle, who runs the farm with his parents, tells the Post, adding to the New York Times: "They were knocking down sunflowers and taking flower heads with them. … [It was] a zombie apocalypse. … We went from a week of amazing to that." What had spurred the giant crowd, unbeknownst to the Bogle family: viral photos of their sunflowers that had spread on social media. Now, a huge black banner scrolls across the Bogle Seeds website declaring: "All photography of sunflowers ... [is] now closed for the season!" That hasn't stopped the curious from still trying to make their way onto the farm, yelling at Bogle or flipping him the bird when he turns them away. "I'm a farmer," he tells the Times. "I just want to be in the dirt."