That’s What I’ll Write About In The Newsletter
This week, I drove down to Lisse to pick up the last of the Daffodils that are going to be shipped to England this year. They have to leave the warehouse on Friday, and as I’m going to get them, it’s Wednesday already, so I shouldn’t procrastinate it another day. The newsletter also has to be finished up to be translated, which makes this Wednesday feel extraordinarily close to last Thursday. But we managed! I stopped by a little restaurant on the way to my Daffodils to write without the distractions from home. The restaurant had a bar with a tall, happy-looking man with an impressive, full beard standing behind it. He invited me to choose any chair in his restaurant to sit down on and offered me a glass of wine before I had gotten out my notebook, so it felt like a good choice of location. Before I knew it, I had both my food and half a newsletter.
Except I still don’t know what to write about this week. I think “that would be a great subject for this week’s newsletter” about three times a week, but once I’ve sat down with my pen and paper ready, all those things have left my mind completely. Catastrophe. I did get a nice phone call from Amaryllis grower Martin Boers this year. He supplies some of the Amaryllis bulbs we offer in our web shop. I think about that now because I had decided to start bringing a little notebook everywhere so I could write down those aforementioned ideas right as I thought of them, which was a good idea, if not for Martin calling me to inform me that my notebook was still lying in his office. So I seem to have lost my memory, and this week’s newsletter is somewhere over there. I’ll let you know what should have been in it when I get it back.
So now I’m writing a newsletter of which the subject is still somewhere in the office of an Amaryllis grower in the Westland. But I was happy to go down there this week and see all the growers. I had the opportunity to take lots of photographs for our website, and next week, the entire blog will be on Amaryllises, because they are going to be available for pre-order very soon!
Time to get on with it, I also must go to Nic van der Zon in Losse to pick up more bulbs. Nic always talks your ear off, so I expect to be able to find new newsletter topics during my visit. There are not many growers with quite my kind of crazy, but if there’s anyone that comes close, it’s Nic.
I have barely opened my trunk when Nic starts talking about his Daffodil The Foxtrott. He told me I might be able to sell this in larger quantities next year on the regular website instead of with the Special Narcissus, because they are growing extremely well and they look very good. But he didn’t need to convince me of anything, I’ve had The Foxtrott on my wish list for years now. Over an hour later we had seen dozens and dozens of Daffodils, and we were still going when his brother Gerard came around. Gerard has been infected with a slightly less extreme variant of the Daffodil Virus, so he steered the conversation towards our companies, and if our children wanted to inherit them or not. Gerard and Nic are my age, approaching or around sixty, and none of their children want to take over when they retire. What will happen with Fluwel? Time will tell, but it was interesting to all of us that they are all willing to let go of one of the best jobs in the world. They are all studying as hard as they can and they are very smart, only to then use that to spend the rest of their lives behind a desk. I will never understand the appeal of that. Being outside as much as you’re inside is one of the best possible outcomes of a job, if you ask me. But agriculture has been in the news negatively for so long now, and that has really impacted the way the next generation sees it, even though it’s actually an opportunity to improve how things are done. I strongly believe there is a right, sustainable way to do all of it, and we’ll need the next generation to be interested in it in order to succeed.
Before we knew it, hours had passed, and I still had to drive for an hour to get home. It was too late to visit the Dahlia gardens at Keukenhof at this point. I’ve heard so many great things about those! They have to be beautiful after a summer like the one we’ve had. Maybe I’ll manage to go this weekend. But now, I have to finish the last details of all of the Daffodils that are going to England this week.
Next week, I’ll tell you more about the Amaryllises and the Amaryllis growers.
Kind regards,
Carlos van der Veek
