Cooking

Dear readers,

We'll keep it short today because we have some cooking to do. Not in a pressure cooker, mind you: the Daffodils need a good four hours in the vat. Though simmering is not quite the right word either; 46 degrees is the exact temperature at which the Daffodils are cooked. Many of you will now be wondering, with furrowed brows, what on earth is going on this time, but I will explain. A great many flower bulbs, in fact almost all flower bulbs apart from the Tulip, are given a hot-water treatment during the summer months. One by one, before the grower plants them, they go into the vat, where they are immersed in a warm bath for a few hours.

Every bulb grower has vats in their shed in which large numbers of bulbs receive this kind of hot-water treatment each year. In the photo, Lilies are being cooked, but Amaryllises, Crocuses, Alliums and many other flower bulbs are cooked every year too. In the past, chemicals were added at the same time, mainly to combat harmful fungi. Nowadays, almost all of those chemicals have been banned and banished from bulb sheds. Fortunately, it turns out that cooking them in clean water works reasonably well for most flower bulbs too.

Jan Hein sent me a WhatsApp message to say that his little vat was simmering away and that he wanted me to bring over my Fluwel Special Narcissus collection. He had almost finished treating the Daffodils he grows for the Fluwel website and now, on the very day I always write the newsletter, he wanted the Daffodils I keep in the shed as planting stock to go in straight afterwards.

So this newsletter has to be squeezed in as a quick little job. It seems like a small task, simply tipping the mesh crates into the one-cubic-metre bins. And it is, but I always have to make sure I have gathered together every variety that needs to go into the vat.

Daffodil seedling ZW 23

Every year I throw away dozens of Daffodils, often because they are too susceptible to diseases such as viruses or bulb rot, but sometimes simply because I do not think they are pretty enough. Or, and this happens quite often too, I do think they are pretty, but they do not sell at all. Then they have to make way for another variety too. But every year I also collect and/or buy dozens more. Well, you either suffer from bulbesity or you don't. I certainly do, especially when it comes to Daffodils: mine is quite a serious case of bulbesity.

In the photo above is a Daffodil seedling I came across earlier this spring in one of grower Nic van der Zon's fields in Lisse. She did not quite fit into his growing plan; he already had a few larger batches that looked fairly similar, so he offered her to me. It is difficult to say no to something so beautiful, of course, and after a few rounds of good old-fashioned haggling, she was mine for a very reasonable price. Nic, meanwhile, managed to wangle a few bulbs of some unusual varieties out of our collection. I am going to come up with a lovely name for her, and next year she will be for sale in our Fluwel Special Narcissus collection.

And so there are varieties lying around in every nook and cranny of the shed and in my little greenhouse that still have to go to Jan Hein for their hot-water treatment.

Daffodil Peach Prince

Before I stop, one quick bit of housekeeping for the thousands of people who have already ordered bulbs from us. After 13 September, it will no longer be possible to combine new orders with orders already placed to avoid paying shipping costs twice. It is definitely worth having another browse around the web shop; a number of new varieties have been added over the past few months.

Time to stop.

Kind regards,

Carlos van der Veek

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