No. 166: End of December Musings

We have a lot of contact with growers who specifically cultivate a number of unique vegetables for (originally) Surinamese, Antillean, and Indonesian compatriots. My father already started this, we worked with Xotus in Leidschendam and many other growers. Gradually, this has become a specialty within our assortment. In fact, you name it and we sell seeds or plants for it!

You can find a selection from that assortment here

Many of these vegetables are increasingly finding a place on the plates of all our compatriots! For many years, we also encouraged and informed growers in Suriname itself to successfully cultivate vegetables, for example at Weg naar Zee and Rosevalweg. That was rather difficult at first, but I now notice that an enormous number of good projects are running and getting off the ground. I am so incredibly happy about that: for years, far too much fresh food was imported, while much of it could simply be grown locally, my hands were itching to get involved...

On a quest for unusual and special plants, I found these 3 varieties, which make a beautiful combination and will spoil you with their stunning appearance winter after winter! The plants are young and therefore very affordable. You can easily grow them into large, (free-flowering) plants yourself.

We've already sold a few hundred trees (on paper), so be quick... Have you ever heard of the Kiwiberry? It's a relative of the well-known hairy Kiwi, but without the hairy skin and much smaller and oh so tasty. You don't have to peel them and you can just bite into them...

As in 2021, we are once again able to make a special offer: with a heavy heart, a Belgian grower is parting with his (over) 500 mature parasol trees. They are 15-18 years old and already yield a good harvest annually. We are the mediating party and will not stock or ship them ourselves. The top varieties on the field are: 'Geneva', 'Weiki', 'Gefima' and 'Flipke'.

Do you have a large garden, a nursery, or a food forest? We'd be happy to connect you with the grower; the pick-up price is around €30.00 per tree. The minimum purchase is 10+1 pieces; you need approximately 1 male shrub per 10 females. For every 50 trees, the price drops to €25.00. This is incredibly cheap when you consider how much care and time has been invested in these young trees! Feel free to email me if you're interested (info@vreeken.nl); we're happy to arrange great deals between you and the grower.

The onion family is large and the flavours are diverse, but many a meal gets an extra "bite" by enriching it with a little garlic!
You can actually plant all sorts of garlic varieties (and other tasty, perennial allium species) throughout the winter, provided the bulbs or cloves are still in good condition. That's actually the only criterion. Our most popular variety 'Morado de Pedronera' (the Spanish cousin of Rose de Lautrec) is even offered year-round. If you don't like the harvest in the autumn yet, you can simply leave them in the ground, can't you? In France, you sometimes see beautiful, large clusters of fused bulbs in old garlic production fields! To prevent those bulbs from deteriorating in condition, we are holding a small sale of our garlic.

The clearance package consists of some of the following varieties: Garlic, Serpent garlic, Russian garlic, Mouse garlic, Persian shallots, etc. Are you interested?

I've mentioned it before: next year Vreeken's Zaden will be 100 years old! We are working on unique offers and nice gifts for you, the very first will arrive at the end of this month: hundreds of original mother plants of rare Daylilies or Hemerocallis. For years our grower has collected beautiful varieties, but due to circumstances the collection has to go and we were given the opportunity to take it over. We will announce the price later, but you can already expect that this will be a real rush for this one-time opportunity. So keep an eye on our Newsletters and homepage!