The Dream Team

Dear readers,

And just like that, all the bulbs are suddenly out of the ground – you just can’t make sense of it. One moment you’re worrying about everything that still needs to be done, and the next, the Dream Team is standing there ready to go. Once they get going, those daffodils are in the crates and loaded onto the trailer before you know it. Oh yes… the miniature daffodils still need to be lifted into mesh crates. “Karel, have you…” “Yes, I’ve already called Sneekes. He’ll be here Monday at ten.

Precisely at 10 o'clock, a brand-new New Holland rolled into the field, with a very proud Justin behind the wheel. (If you ever want to get on well with agricultural contractors, always compliment the machine they arrive with). "That’s a beautiful tractor, Justin!"

"Yeah, nice, isn't it? Sneekes bought a new tractor for me, only 3 weeks old, 176 hours on the clock. My previous one was a John Deere, clocked 21,000 hours; everything on that old machine rattled." Doing a quick calculation, I said, "then you didn't have much time off these past three weeks, Justin". Right, working every evening and every Saturday; with this hot weather, almost all the Tulips had to be harvested at the same time.

After digging up two varieties, I could see that Justin was an experienced captain on his gigantic machine; the miniature daffodils arrived in the containers spotless. Before long I got one of those looks that says, what are you still doing here, we’ve got this. So I quietly disappeared to prepare everything in the barn.

Isn't is amazing? Only a few years ago I nicknamed them the Dream Team because they spent more time dreaming than working. I always had to keep an eye on them. And now, suddenly, they’ve seen the light. They work like horses and I’ve finally got the freedom I used to dream about while they were still doing the dreaming and I was practically on duty twenty-four-seven.

Another one of those little jobs where the Dream Team really surprised me – the daffodil bulbs have already been dug up too. That’s one of those little jobs that always seems to get left until the very end of the season. One of those oh yes, that still needs doing jobs.

It’s fiddly work that requires a sharp pair of eyes. The seeds have been in the trays for two years, some for a year, and now need to be carefully extracted from the sand. Put on some music, tell some great stories about piercings and tattoos (those girls, mind you – I can’t really speak from experience there) and get cracking.

All sorts of things appear from the sand. Beetles, moths, worms, ants, centipedes and larvae. Great big fat larvae.

Lovely… at least if you ask the girls.

This is the harvest. Hundreds, probably even thousands, of little bulbs that over the next three or four years will each grow into a daffodil. Every single one will be different; in a few years, they will all show a different flower, not one is the same.

Here in the photo are the black daffodil seeds. These are now empty shells because a little bulb has already grown out of them. The small white bulbs are one year old, the larger ones have already been growing for two years.

Writing this reminds me of the lively discussions I’ve had several times with my Northern Irish friend and fellow daffodil breeder, Brian Duncan. Among daffodil enthusiasts Brian is known as the master breeder. He’s also one of those people who records absolutely everything. Every seedling he raises is carefully documented. He can tell you exactly which variety produced the seed and which daffodil supplied the pollen. He knows the mother and the father and, if he starts leafing through his many notebooks, he’ll also tell you without hesitation who the grandparents are of every daffodil he has brought into the world.

According to Brian, the way I breed daffodils is like chopping wood with a blunt axe. I just keep swinging away like a lumberjack. Every now and then something beautiful appears, but according to Brian it’s almost criminal not to know the parents of such a lovely new daffodil.

All that record keeping takes far too much time if you ask me. And then imagine having to keep every batch of seedlings from every individual cross separate for five or six years before you even see the first flowers. No chance. I’m really not going to do that.

Brian keeps telling me that you have to know the result of every cross because that’s how you learn. And so it goes on, sometimes well past midnight, while we’re sitting at Brian’s place with a glass of whisky, happily arguing our case. Betty has even come downstairs once, at nearly two in the morning, asking if we could keep it down because she couldn’t sleep.

Then suddenly the perfect answer came to me, one that brought the whole discussion to an end:

But Brian, when you met Betty 70 years ago (yes, they are both well into their nineties), you didn't ask yourself who her parents were and what they looked like, did you?

Brian found that quite funny, although it was a bit like a farmer with toothache.

Last week I went slightly over the 1,000-word limit, and I can see I’m already getting quite close to it again. I’d better not make things too difficult for the translators; I’m actually keen to get out and about again. Still, I’m curious to know how many of the 1,000 or so varieties of daffodils we grow actually come from Brian. It turns out there are now well over 150 registered varieties. That’s quite a lot; at the moment, ‘only’ just under 100 come from our own breeding programme.

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