A Day Trip to Texel
Dear readers,
Frequent readers already know I visit Texel a couple of times every year, and this time, I took my nephew Sigge with me. He is one of the star players in our Dream Team, and before we left, we made a stop to secure our gift: a box of Gevulde Koeken, a Dutch specialty—those are almond-paste filled soft cookies, for those who have never visited The Netherlands. We stopped at a bakery to get them for Johannes van Heerwaarden, one of Texel’s Daffodil growers (who also keeps bulls as a hobby).
Our web shop is doing well this year, so I wanted to see Johannes to order more Daffodils. He is a very nice man, but whenever you are negotiating with him, he will try to charm you into a better price by offering you… exactly: gevulde koeken for your net visit. Luckily, I already knew about this trick, and I had my counter offer ready. So to any other flower bulb trader reading this, this is some free insight into Johannes’ weak spot :)
Daffodil Texel Sun in my front yard
Sigge is a good driver, but when he steered our car onto the ferry, we realised we had forgotten our old bread to feed the seagulls. We always did that when the kids were small and we went on holiday to Texel, which was about as international as we’d go when they were still little. Feeding the seagulls is an important part of the ferry ride to Texel, as everyone knows that you should never feed those birds because they will never leave you alone again, so on a ferry is the only moment you can do it without severe consequences.
Texel is dry, too.
When we arrived on Texel, we visited Paul and Tijs van Exel too. He is the grower of our Fluwel Daffodil / The Golden Legacy mix. For those who don’t know the backstory of that mixture yet: Sigge’s grandfather, my dad, Karel van der Veek, spent his life working on the foundations of this mix. He wanted to see every Daffodil the world had to offer, and no one loves Daffodils more than he did. But he had the same problem every single true Daffodil enthusiast has, which is that he never threw anything out. That meant that when he left this earth, he left behind 2635 varieties of Daffodils. Yes, that many, and in addition to those varieties, he also left us over a thousand seedlings that still needed to be selected and grown
From that entire collection of over 2500 Daffodils, I took the best and most healthy bulbs, and those were all put together into one mixture. We have now started to offer this mixture, and its name is Fluwel Daffodil Mix in our web shop. American readers can also buy this mixture through our friends at White Flower Farm. On their website, the mixture is named The Golden Legacy, which is a perfect fit if you ask me. If you love Daffodils, you should definitely try it out. Almost every bulb is a different variety, so you can really see what the Daffodil has to offer.
We also visited David Stark, to get ourselves some more Daffodils. As you can see, we do not grow every single Daffodil we offer ourselves. The larger varieties often come from our colleagues, other Daffodil growers in the area. Our own nursery is specialised in small, more exclusive varieties that are still largely processed by hand.
Sigge and Tijs Piepers
David grows a couple of beautiful Daffodils, like Slim Whitman, a variety that comes from Ice Follies. The bulbs look beautiful: shiny and healthy. Daffodils tend to like growing on Texel a lot, though Texel has the same problem as almost any other area this year: it is very, very dry. Potatoes and Onions suffer the most from that drought. David showed us a field of potatoes that looked downright withered. First, the seeds had barely made it, and then the seeds that did had a hard time growing. The same happened at Tijs van Exel, his potatoes behind his warehouse had almost no green left on the plants at all. He pulled one out and the potatoes looked great, but way, way smaller than usual. The past couple of years, potatoes have been cheap on the market, but this year will probably look different. I do hope that a better price will compensate for the lost numbers for the growers.
And because Sigge and I were on Texel anyway, we did have a little tourist outing, too. Texel is a Wadden Island, and on those islands, you can walk very far into the sea at the right time of day. Then, we had a hamburger, and Sigge was smart enough to pocket the leftover fries for the seagulls on the way back.
