Flower enthusiasts thrilled by organic bulbs

The sale of cut flowers and bulbs grown organically is expanding slowly but surely. There are now quite a lot of market gardeners growing shrubs or ornamental plants, who for years have been selling via wholefood stores, organic supermarkets and markets. This article is a portrait of Peter Timmerman, who operates to the north of Amsterdam and sells half a million flower bulbs a year.
(Picture: Annelies Timmerman with her husband Peter)
Full of enthusiasm, a girl is standing in a field of flowers and is enjoying their scent. Then she sees Annalies Timmerman, who is working in the field and runs towards her to say hello. Mrs Timmerman explains the various types of flower and their characteristics: as well as tulips, you can buy narcissus, crocus, snowdrops, muscari (grape hyacinth), iris and spring snowflake, that are cultivated by the Timmermans themselves or on neighbouring farms. All the bulbs or the farms are certified by Skal and carry the Dutch EKO logo.

It is the middle of April, and the tulips are in full bloom in the Province North Holland. Visitors gaze in amazement at huge fields of tulips, narcissus, hyacinths and muscari (picture), that are found principally to the north and south west of Amsterdam. A sea of colour that intoxicates the senses. This colourful spectacle and the blue sky stretch as far as the eye can see. A good 1,000 people visit the Timmerman family’s farm every year. On one occasion they even met Queen Beatrix, who was visiting innovative farms.

“In 2000, I took over my parent’s farm, that has been in the family for five generations,” explains Mr Timmerman (47). The farmhouse was built in 1740, and the Timmerman family has lived in it since 1893. “With dairy cows, there was no prospect of growth, so we changed to bulbs,” he says. In 2001 the farm converted to organic production. As a second string to their bow, the Timmermans have built up a herd of 130 red deer (picture) for the sale of meat and antlers. They also keep five goats to graze the grass and to keep clear the drainage ditches that you see everywhere here.

The farm has 24 ha, of which 3 ha are used in rotation for cultivating bulbs. A sevenfold rotation – red cabbage, cauliflower, grass, cereals and clover – ensures the soil and the plants stay healthy. “We grow the tulips after four years of a clover grass mix, and then it’s the turn of cauliflower and red cabbage,” explains Timmerman. The high-value bulbs account for about a third of his turnover.

The cost of cultivation and marketing is considerable: every single plant is inspected six or seven times during the season, and there must be no sign of infection by the tobacco mosaic virus, the tulip mosaic virus or botrytis. Any plant that does not conform totally with the species or is infected by a virus is pulled up and destroyed. The flowers must breed true, something you see best in the flowering period. There are yellow, red, violet and pink flowers next to each other in long strips. The tulip growers walk slowly through the fields of plants on the lookout for anything amiss. Conventional flower growers would long before have resorted to chemicals to combat diseases. As Timmerman points out, in conventional production the bulbs are sprayed every ten days. Not without reason, the conventional production method is now discredited because of the high input of pesticides and the pollution of the groundwater. “Our plants are far more robust and more suitable for an organic garden, because the weak and sickly plants have been eliminated instead of being treated with chemicals.” Also, his plants have had more time to grow than those in a conventional crop.

The bigger the variety of plants the more attractive is the product range for the customers the hobby gardeners all over Europe and also in the USA. The Timmermans used to grow 15 varieties, but now the figure is 46, because at the end of 2007 they took over varieties from the farm of Wim Postema a few kilometres away that was closing down. Postema is a pioneer in bio-dynamic bulb cultivation, and now he organises the dispatch of small quantities of bulbs to customers of his firm Ecobulbs.

Why are so many bulbs grown in the Province North Holland? On the one hand, the loamy sand has a high humus content and is ideal for cultivating bulbs and cut flowers; on the other hand, over decades, and even over centuries, a marketing structure has been developed that means they can be sold efficiently to anywhere in the world. You only have to think of the well known flower auctions in Alsmeer.

The Timmermans sell their bulbs to wholefood wholesalers in Germany and the Netherlands, such as Biocenter Zann near Rotterdam. Zann supplies both bulbs and tulips as cut flowers plus fruit and vegetables to Germany, England, France, Scandinavia and Belgium.

Timmerman even sends supplies at regular intervals to the USA. The mail order firm Organic Bouquet in California and Sunvalley Flowers sell the popular bulbs to customers and hobby gardeners.

The Timmerman farm also supplies Frank Schouten with bulbs. He plants them in the autumn, and in the spring he harvests 1.5 million tulips as cut flowers that he sells via wholefood shops in the Netherlands and Germany.

Tip:
www.ptimmerman.nl
www.biobol.nl
www.ecobulbs.nl