Summer Vacation… Or Not?

I feel like I’ve taken over less newsletters than usual this summer, even though we were just as busy as always. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that I, Pien, sometimes take over the writing when my dad is too busy to do it. It’s one of those situations now: there are containers full of bulbs leaving every day, and orders have to be prepared whether they are small or big.

The smaller orders are the ones I deal with most. The Fluwel Specials and the American QDaff are the main categories for this: through that, there are tons of orders with all kinds of tiny, rare, and unusual Daffodils meant for true enthusiasts and Daffodil-lovers.

These are the really strange orders, the ones where we can all see that lots and lots of people are actually buying Daffodil bulbs per 1, 2, or 3 per variety, people with a real obsession, I think. Which is what my dad has as well, as you probably know. There are 437 different varieties of Daffodils in the Fluwel Specials category. You can’t order them at the moment, but as there are nineteen pages of options, it may be a good idea to start looking at which ones you like best :)

The fun part about all these varieties is that they all started out small, and then I’m not talking about the fact that most of the Daffodils are miniatures. I’ve known most of these varieties for years, when they were only a handful of bulbs, and when we just started sending them to people, we had way less of them and we hand-wrote the packages and bags. The name of the customer, the name of the variety, we wrote it all down. Now, we do print that part out on a sticker, but as you see here, the actual orders are still being assembled by hand!

Every year I look through the orders, and we always recognise names of people that come back every year. It’s always fun to see who has ordered even more bulbs this year than the last, and for some people we genuinely do wonder if their wives know about this. We at least hope they never make a comment when she buys new shoes… 

This is how all the little bags with special bulbs are looking this year. You can see Vlad and Pauliina assembling orders: we put them all in alphabetical order. After a few years, this has proven to be the most efficient way to collect all the varieties for the orders after we’ve gotten all the bulbs we’ve sold out of the larger stock of every variety.

Some readers may remember that I’ve talked about the way we assemble these orders before. We even have a word for the process of thinking of the most efficient way of doing this: Karelen. I’ve explained it before, but to refresh your memory a little: my brother, Karel, is very good at stepping to the sidelines of the whole process and just looking at the proceedings for about ten minutes. He’ll contemplate if we are doing everything the right way, or if maybe he should make some changes that will make the process go a bit faster. After a while, he’ll realize that he did, in fact, think of everything the last time he took a moment to reconsider everything, and that all is going well. But don’t worry, in about an hour or so he will take another moment, and then he’ll be sure about it. Karelen, that is called.

Luckily he did this extensively in previous years, because this summer, he had to sacrifice some of his time in the warehouse for his student life in Groningen. He started college there last year, but now he can be a ‘mentor’ for new students, and show a group of people the city in the introduction week. During this week, new students are guided through the city, and they get information about all the clubs and societies they can join during their time in Groningen. Karel was a member of the Boat Club last year, he still is, and I think he and his friends have seen a rowboat at least three times now. As you can probably imagine, the social aspect of sports remains most important in student life. At least, in The Netherlands–I understand this is very different in countries like the United States.

My sisters have also always helped out with the miniature Daffodils at the end of the season, but it does feel a little different now that we’ve all finished high school. During high school, years were conveniently split up by the summer vacation, but Roos has finished her bachelor’s degree and had the enlightened idea that instead of breathing in bulb dust all summer, she could in fact find a job on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, so she did that, and Pleun is busy with her Master’s degree internship.

Now that we’re getting older, the summer vacation isn’t the main event that splits up the year any more, it’s more so Christmas and then, obviously, New Year’s Eve and Day, but luckily we still have the busy season of the flower bulbs. That way, we still have a way of ending and starting the year in late August, maybe the beginning of September. That feels way more familiar, at least to me.

Now that the last few days, or weeks, of the busiest season are slowly passing by, I hope that you’ve all had a good Summer Holiday and that you’re already excited to plan and plant your garden this autumn. We are looking forward to it at least, and if you have any questions, you know where to find us. 

Kind regards, 

Pien van der Veek