Diary (2nd August 2024)
The last day!
Today the polish ladies went back to Poland. On the last day of their eight-week seasonal work, the work finished at 3pm, after which the ladies took a bus to Poland.
My three-week seasonal work cum artist-in-residence is also over. Weekend for now. Cheers for now. Harvesting and shipping is still going on at this huiberts bloembollen. Thank you so much to everyone who has taught me many things there.
The work itself was harder than I had imagined. Somehow, I managed to stay positive, thanks to the good nature of the people who work on this farm.
I think it’s partly because I’m not used to it – my wrists and shoulders hurt, but especially my eyes. Paulina said, ‘When we hand-sort the bulbs on the conveyor belt, my eyes hurt’. When I first started working I thought, ‘why?’, but now I understand. My eyes hurt from looking too much at the huge number of bulbs that flow by. Do we really need such a huge number of bulbs? The market for organic bulbs is said to be 0.22 per cent, and the bulbs shipped from this farmer are only a fraction of the bulbs consumed in the Netherlands. Just thinking of the other 99.78 per cent of bulbs, many of which will be exported, makes my eyes hurt even more.
Will I forget the difficulty of this single task and the pain in my eyes when I see the beautiful flowers in spring? I will not forget. If I were to work next year, I would learn to drive a tractor. For me, looking at the same thing all the time is the hardest part of the work.
At the same time, working on a farm, you never see the same thing. When you go outside and look at a field of bulbs, the plants grow differently every day, every second. And you feel the difference in the weather, the temperature, the wind currents, the length of the day, more sensitively than in the city. It was hard work, riding in the weed-pulling car, but now I’m glad I had the opportunity to work in the field, rather than just repeatedly sorting the bulbs.
To see tulip flowers, you need bulbs. To make bulbs, you need soil. To make soil you need soil organisms. And to sort the bulbs you need migrant workers.
