The Lilies are available.
A new year, new rounds and new opportunities, we are looking forward to it.
This year we hope to make many garden lovers happy with our beautiful flower bulbs. We start with the Lilies , which you can order again from today. From 27 February you can order the Dahlias and other summer flowering bulbs from us.
The reason we start selling Lilies earlier than Dahlias is because the Lily is a flower bulb that feels most at home in the ground. Of course you can also plant Lilies at a later time in March or even early April, but Lilies are flower bulbs that do not really like to be stored above ground. In our shed they are in the cold store in the peat moss wrapped in plastic, and that works fine, but still; they prefer to be in the ground, just like perennials.
The Lily is a real recommendation for the garden, beautiful plants that bloom for weeks and, if they are happy, come back for years. If you have no experience with lilies in your garden, you can always look at our site under Flower bulb information / Lilies. Here you will find an extensive description of How to plant and care for Lilies.
The newcomer Lilium Magnefique is also worth considering, she was an eye-catcher in our test garden. Magnefique has a tender appearance but her sturdy healthy plant can take a beating. She is short in height and blooms as one of the first, also very suitable for pots and flower boxes.
But please take your time to have a look at our webshop, you are very welcome.
The Amaryllises are also still available and they are also doing fantastically well this year. They will already be blooming for many of you because we have already received dozens of sweet messages with compliments from happy customers. Thank you for this, that makes us happy too. But you can also plant Amaryllis bulbs now, you can do that all winter. In about four weeks you can have a flower like the Velvet Nymph above that is now in our kitchen.
There are still a few available of the ancient but still beautiful Picotee.
This year I have also decided to show each newsletter something that I encountered during that week.
Narcissus bulbocodium Mary Poppins
This week it was Mary Poppins who surprised me. It is a Daffodil from our own nursery and when I found a bag of Mary Poppins in the shed in October after planting, I planted these bulbs in a pot. The pots were left lying around in the shed and when I found them again just before Christmas, there was already a lot of growth on them and I even saw that the flower buds were already coming out of the bulb. I thought I would put them in the warmth with the Amaryllises, see what they would do. Normally you cannot get flower bulbs to bloom so early if you have not given them a good cold-rest period beforehand. But the Mary Poppins does not seem to need that, she turned out beautiful, she really surprised me.
Outside, Mary Poppins is also an early flowering Daffodil, she usually shows her first flowers at the end of March, but if it is still too cold around that time, Mary also thinks 'too bad' I'll stay away for a while. Now it turns out that she can flower much earlier if we put her in the warmth earlier. What I also notice is that her flowers are now much whiter than the warm butter white that she shows in the spring. You can also find Mary Poppins in the Fluwel webshop and you can order her from May 15th.
There is little else to report in the bulb sector, the bulb fields are neatly covered and in good condition. It is a bit on the wet side but we can generally handle water well in the polders. 
Kind regards and see you next week,
Carlos van der Veek
