An Overload of Options

Time flies! If you ask me, it would be nice if there were a few more weeks in a day. Every day feels like Sunday: there is always an entire week to prepare for. If you stand up on your toes, you can already see autumn in the distance as well, and if autumn is near, that means it’s also time to start thinking about actually planting your flower bulbs. If you’ve been keeping an eye out on the Fluwel webshop this year, you’ll have noticed that there is so much to choose from that it may start to feel a little anxiety-inducing at times. In Dutch, we have a word for that: Keuzestress. Literally translated it means ‘choice stress,’ and it’s used when there seem to be too many options to choose from, and all of them seem to be the right one, too.

The Fluwel Daffodil Mixture

No matter, we must all learn how to expertly browse flower shops and pick out the right ones efficiently. Especially for inexperienced gardeners, I can imagine that there might be a feeling of nervousness or anticipation. What actually is the right option, and which flowers will do well in your garden?

I believe I can help. Any other self-appointed life coach might try to sell you an expensive stress ball or something, but I have a better idea to keep your hands busy: Daffodils! Obviously, you should not spend the day squeezing them, but planting them in the garden is a good idea any day. There are no flower bulbs as reliable as the Daffodil is, if they like the spot you plant them in, they might even come back year after year. Just add a bag of Fluwel Daffodil mix to your basket and have them sent to your home, and the relaxation can start. I feel like I owe you some solid recommendations, as all my talking about rare and special different varieties must have added to your keuzestress as well.

Flower Arrangement of Tutti Tulpi Mix

If your stress is more general and not necessarily due to the number of options in our flower bulb shop, I would probably still recommend gardening for you, too. Nature and fresh air will help the tension to disappear from your mind and body, spending time outside is good for anyone’s health. I always draw a comparison to the way houses are built: all the electrical cords in a home are in touch with one copper cord that disappears into the earth. If there is too much energy on the cords in your house, it can all flow away through the earth, so you won’t feel a shock when you touch something with too much energy in it. You can probably predict where I’m going with this, but I think human beings work the same way. Put your hands in the dirt and you can visualize all the stress and tension leaving your body and flowing into the ground underneath. Not only nice for yourself, but also nice for anyone living with you!

Big Ups

If Daffodils are not your first choice of flower bulbs, there are other ways to go at it as well. There are people who would rather plant Tulips, and they are faced with the same problem: you can endlessly scroll through the Tulip category as well. If you are overwhelmed and don’t know which to choose, I would recommend Big Ups. This is a no-nonsense Tulip mixture that almost always works, anywhere and everywhere you plant them. Another good option is Tutti Tulpi. This is a good way to acquaint yourself with Tulips, too: every bag has 50 different varieties of Tulips in it, so no two flowers are going to be the same.

Big Ups

What else is there to tell? I always try to write around a thousand words, and I’m not there yet, so I can talk some more. I’ve been to two separate birthdays in the last weekends of friends who turned 60. The first one was my friend Rob, we’ve been friends for years and share some strange characteristics. We both have vested interested in always finding out who will be the last to leave a party or a bar, so it was very predictable that I was the last man standing at his birthday party, too. Around three in the morning (late for people turning sixty, early for my college-age children), his wife Karin stole the last of my beer, put me on my bicycle, and gave me a push in the direction of home.

Say Cheese

The second party I attended was from my friend Theo. He has an enormous flower growing company with his son, brother, and cousin, and there were a lot of flower bulb world-enthusiasts coming to his birthday. We can talk flowers for hours on end: he has a lot of our Daffodil varieties, but the best part is probably their own Tulip hybrids. Believe me when I say that the Fluwel webshop will see new varieties from Theo and his family in the next few years. This year, we have introduced Dancing Passion, Flaming Memory, and Lemon Shoot.

Lemon Shoot

So yes, my fellow partygoers were all people who are technically my colleagues. If you added everyone together, there were probably around 2000 hectares of land standing around drinking beer. As birthday presents, I gave both friends an enormous Cactus. You know those unacceptably large Euphorbia things: those were the ones I brought. My idea of a joke, because now, those two idiots are spending the rest of their lives looking at a Cactus that is literally not going anywhere and is never going to die, either. I hope they think of me every time it’s in their way.

Dancing Passion

Cacti are good gifts, I think, because it feels like a bit of an insult to someone for some reason, but in a funny and loving way. I gave Bregt, who you met in an earlier newsletter this summer, a Cactus too, but she got a nicer one: one of those huggable Cacti that don’t look (or feel) too aggressive and that look nice in a fussy pot. She was very happy with it, too.

My daughter Roos with the Cactus we were going to be giving to Bregt

See you next week,

Kind regards,

Carlos van der Veek