A Peek Behind the Scenes

Good morning readers of our newsletter,

It is me, Lian, again! In a previous newsletter, I took you along with me during a spring work day at Fluwel. I told you how my days are never the same during this time of year, so I wanted to do that again this week. This time, Carlos took me along to ‘the South,’ a phrase you probably recognise by know: the Flower Bulb area in South Holland. We started at a Tulip grower who was busy in his fields, looking for diseased bulbs to take out. This is done by simply walking through every single path and pulling out the tulip bulbs that show signs of viral infection. When we arrived, this grower left his brothers to their long walk and took us to his Daffodil fields.

Carlos loves Daffodils, as you probably know, and he bought one of the varieties the grower showed us. We drove along the rest of his Daffodil fields before he had to get back to his Tulips, and Carlos and I went to our next address.

The next stop was a Daffodil show by grower WF Leenen. We were lucky,because we arrived at lunch time and they had just served food. They asked if we wanted to joint hem, and that was an offer we could not refuse! Everyone was together for lunch, which was extra nice because it meant we could talk to everyone we wanted without having to look for them outside—with how big the fields are, sometimes that takes a while. After lunch, we went to the show, and it was beautiful. Carlos is obviously the big Daffodil expert, and he knew everyone who was present, which is always funny to see. I was introduced to everyone, and there was one person I already knew. I ended up buying my own very first Daffodils from him, which was very cool to do. It’s my favourite now, and it will be in our web shop for next season!

Please do buy it, so I can show to everyone that I have a good eye for new varieties :)

After the Daffodil show, we went to the Keukenhof, which was actually my first time there. Carlos took his camera and notebook, he was onbiously there for work, but I have to admit I was more of a tourist. It is so big and beautiful, and also so busy. The weather was great, which made it even better.

We first checked on our Fluwel exhibition, which was going well. The Tulips and the Daffodils were shining, and we were happy with them.

Then we went on tot he mixtures, most of them are in the same area. We were planning on writing down inspiration for new mixtures for our shop. If we know which varieties we would like in a mixture, we can keep them apart when we harvest the bulbs and then plant them as mixtures to try it out, as you never know if the blooming times align and if they will actually look nice together in real life. If we are happy with a mix after this ‘trial run,’ it gets added to our assortment. And then the hardest part comes… thinking of a good name! Making a new mix is always so fun, and there are so many options, but thinking of a good name once you have a good composition is one of the hardest parts if you ask me.

Most of the buses that drive tourists to and from the Keukenhof leave at 5, so it got quieter after that. We also left shortly after, having seen everything we wanted to see.

Our last stop for the day was one of Carlos’ best friends, Eric. Regular readers may recognise his name. Eric has a gigantic Tulip garden with loads of seedlings. His fields surround his house, and in total, he has around 4000 varieties. Carlos assured me that while he may seem crazy, Eric is, in fact, worse. For every single variety we looked at, he knew which two he combined in order to make this new one. I can’t even imagine having to know all of that, but I did see that they were all very beautiful. By the time Eric had showed us everything, it was time to eat, Eric invited us to stay. We went to an italian restaurant in Sassenheim, which was one of those places where you don’t even have to open the menu because the people working there will tell you about the best choice of the day. The food was delicious, and now that we had also succesfully avoided rush hour, we went back home, content with the day we had.

As you can see, this day was totally different from the previous one I wrote about. I really like how my days are never the same in this time of year, and I hope you enjoy reading about what goes on in the Flower Bulb world every day!

Thank you for reading.

Kind regards,
Lian and the Fluwel Team