Summer vacation… or not?

I feel like I have taken over fewer newsletters from my father this summer than usual, and that while it was busy again this year. If you have been reading the newsletter for a while, you probably remember that I, Pien, occasionally write something when my father does not have time. Now he asked for that too: containers full of bulbs are sent away every day and therefore large and small orders have to be prepared all day long.

Those small orders are normally what I am most concerned with. For the Fluwel Specials and the American QDaff, all kinds of 'little orders' are packed with all kinds of special types of daffodils of the kind that are meant for the real enthusiast or professional idiot.

It feels strange to say 'orders' because the amount of bulbs per type may be low—sometimes they are sold individually—but otherwise these are the types that feel bigger. If you are not (yet) familiar with this part of the website, I can really recommend you to take a look. This kind of craziness is what it is all about, at least for my father: 437 different products, he will probably be able to identify them all by appearance, which largely started as a handful of bulbs but which have now grown to enough to sell a few of them in the webshop. At the moment you cannot buy them, pre-orders will be possible from February 9, 2025, but because there are 19 pages of daffodils it certainly wouldn't hurt to start looking at which ones you would like... If you are as crazy as my father, of course. You don't have to ☺

The nice thing about all these small varieties is that, as I just said and therefore not entirely surprisingly, they started small. The first few years, my brother and sisters and I counted these bulbs from the varieties, put them in a bag of 1, 2 or 3 bulbs, and prepared the orders. We even managed to keep writing the bags by hand for a few years, with the customer's name and the variety on it. In the meantime, this is neatly put on a sticker, but the bulbs are still all packed by hand!

Every time I look at who ordered from this category this year, I recognize names that come back every year. It's always fun to see who bought even more bulbs than the year before, and we always let each other know when we have a 'familiar' in our hands. (Does your wife know how much money you spend on daffodils, sir...? We hope you never say anything when she buys new shoes!) This year all the bags with the special varieties are like this. Here you can see Vlad and Pauliina sorting the orders: we have put all the bags alphabetically by variety, the most convenient way to keep them somewhat organized while we are talking about this enormous amount of small varieties that all have to be processed by hand.

The attentive reader will now know that in previous years I have also talked about the arrangement of all types and how we think of the most efficient way to find everything together. We called part of that thinking 'Karelen' a few years ago. I already explained it then, but to refresh your memory: my brother, Karel, is very good at sometimes standing on the sidelines and staring into space for ten minutes. According to himself, he uses this time to study the exact process again and to analyze whether it can be improved in some way. Often to always he comes to the conclusion that he thought about it well enough the last time and that, indeed, nothing needs to be changed: the process has already been optimized by him. But don't worry, in an hour he will repeat this again. Then he will know for sure. Karelen, as they say.

It's a good thing that Karel did this so extensively in previous years, because this year he had to sacrifice part of the order-packing time to make room for the Groningen student life. He started there last year, but now it's of course even more fun than in the first year, because if you've been studying for a year you can sign up as a 'mentor' for the introduction week of the university, in which the new students are shown around and get an idea of ​​all the study, sports and social clubs that they can join. So Karel and a friend of his have rowed a group of fresh students around Groningen. Last year he himself became a member of one of the student rowing clubs of Groningen, just like I was in Leiden, and if I understand correctly he and his team actually sat in a rowing boat at least three times last year. You probably already sense that the sports clubs among students are also largely about the third half. If all goes well, he's going to continue studying somewhere by now.

My sisters have also been in the shed this year, but it is different now that we have been out of high school for so long with those six weeks of summer vacation. Roos has finished her bachelor's degree and is going to work for half a year first so that she can continue her studies in February, and instead of breathing in dust in a bulb shed, she has decided in a moment of clarity that you can also work on a cruise ship on the Mediterranean for a few weeks. Pleun is now halfway through her master's degree, and with a thesis and an internship, there is no real summer vacation either, but luckily her internship is in The Hague, and because I live there now, she can stay with me during the week.

When you are at the end of your studies, you do not realize at all that the biggest difference is that you no longer see the years as school or college years, always ended and started by the start and end of the summer holidays, but as calendar years. Fortunately, we still have the busy season of the flower bulbs, which is also characterized by the period July and August. Because of that, it always feels to us a bit as if that is the beginning and the end of the year.

The last few days of the busiest time of the year, in more ways than one. I hope you had a nice summer, with or without summer vacation, and that you are already a little bit excited about getting into the garden this fall.

Greetings,

Pien