Fluwel Special Narcissus
Dear Customer,
I’ve never seen them this great :)
This is a quote of one of my neighbours. Everyone in the area knows he says this every single year, every harvest season. He was right to do so: The bulbs need tob e sold, after all, and if you are enthusiastic about them, you’re bound to infect others with that positive energy. I’ve noticed that I have taken to doing the same thing as my dear neighbour, too: I’ve never seen my Daffodils this great!
Karel has spent the last week with his cousin Sigge, sister Roos, and Roos’ boyfriend Lout (who normally works on boats instead of flower fields). Together, they’ve been digging up all of the varieties that are too small to be done completely by machines. I’ve not had to lift a single finger this year, which is a luxury. We always start off with the largest bulbs, so they can spend some time out in the sun before we bring them into the warehouse. We want the sand left on the bulbs to dry out completely, so we can easily shake it off once we start processing them.
If everything goes on the way we hope i twill, I’ll start sorting though my smaller bulbs tomorrow. It would be nice if all of the orders could be placed by then. This means that you will have until tomorrow, Monday July 14, to shop in our Fluwel Special Narcissus store. The reason we do this is so we will be able to take out all of the bulbs we’ve sold from every little variety as we are processing them. Once they’ve been processed and have gone on into storage until they’ll be planted again, it will be virtually impossible to find a specific variety for a late order. There will be over 500 bags, all filled with a different kind of Daffodil, so it would take ages if we were to continue taking on and filling new orders after processing the bulbs. But don’t worry if you’re not sure if you can get all everything you want before the 14th: Our regular assortment will remain availabe until well into Autumn, and there you can also find special and unique stuff..
This was me starting off with the practical announcements for a change! Now, onto the flower bulb world of this week. I had to visit Gijs Burger to settle a debt I owed him: I had promised him five tickets to Land van Fluwel, our flower bulb adventure park here in North Holland. Gijs had asked me if he could start growing Daffodil Diego, a variety that was with us until then. I said Well Gijs, that is okay with me, but in return, in the future you can’t say no if I ever ask you for a small number of bulbs. Gijs said he would agree to that exchange if I added tickets to Land van Fluwel to my offer, so he could visit this summer. This sounded fair to me, but I was not going to make it too easy on him, so I said that then, I wanted to also add an annual dinner party with his parents. If you’ve read my newsletters closely in the past, you might remember Gijs’s parents, Karin and Rob Burger, being good friends of ours. Gijs is the same age as one of my daughters, and is slowly taking over from his father, like Karel is doing, too. I do hope Gijs told his mother about this, otherwise she might read in this newsletter that I’ll come over for dinner once every year. Hi, Karin—did you know your nickname is Macaroni-Karin in our house? This, dear reader, is because Karin came over to bring a pan of Macaroni when my daughter Pien was in hospital again. The other kids could eat from that pan for days, so the name Macaroni-Karin stuck.
This is Gijs’s warehouse. He has quite a large business, which he runs with his brother and two of his cousins. Here, you see the cleaning of the Tulip bulbs. The machine does the initial cleaning, then the bulbs go on to a conveyor belt where they pass people checking the quality and doing the bits the machine might have missed. After that, they go into a sorting machine that separates the bulbs by size. 10, 11 and 12 centimeters circumference go on to another conveyor belt, where they are checked again for quality and then counted and packed, ready to be shipped to customers.
The variety on this belt is Hakuun, a beautiful flower that we also sell in our web shop. Rob and I took a quick look, and they look very good so far. I hope they are going to make a lot of people very happy next Spring.
Tulip Hakuun
Tulip Hakuun. If you like white Tulips, you can confidently plant this variety in your garden. It’s a strong flower, very trustworthy. It might be a good choice if you want to go with white this year.
But I’m going back to my fields now, there are a few smaller Daffodil varieties that haven’t made it out of the ground yet. I’m going to dig them by hand. It doesn’t sound like much fun, but actually, this is one of my favourite activities of the season.
See you next week,
Kind regards,
Carlos van der Veek
Carlos van der Veek
