Yesterday was an extraordinary day. There are normally 24 hours in a day. But our day yesterday was six hours longer. And apart from the few hours of sleep we got at night, we used every single minute of our first day in Canada well. When we got off the plane, we immediately made a start with our first company visits. And it couldn’t have been better. I could write two entire books about it.
‘No time to waste, I got to move with haste.’ Which band sang those words in 1994? I can’t remember. But those were the words that sprang to mind when we arrived in Toronto today. After a 7.5-hour flight, we quickly checked in at our hotel in Grimsby, and then went straight on to grower Jaap Staalduinen in Niagara on the Lake. We could have relaxed by the swimming pool, visited Niagara Falls, or gone shopping in Toronto.
But no, we were far too keen to get off to a good start with our mission. It’s good to keep busy anyway, when you’re abroad, far from home. I remember an earlier visit to Ontario – I was around 7 years old – when I got homesick. I missed my own room and my collection of things from my favourite football club AZ. No better way to beat that kind of feeling than the distraction of a full programme.
And that’s what we got. On the way to Jaap Staalduinen, we were trying to remember something important about him. Upon our arrival, we’d heard the result of the Ajax vs. Feyenoord match. Was Jaap an Ajax supporter, or did he support Feyenoord? Nobody remembered. Luckily, our guide, Canadian grower Otto Bulk, had brought an article that was published by this trade journal before Christmas. In it, Jaap had stated that he supports the club from Amsterdam. His brothers support the other club.
So, he’d be pleased to hear our news and when we arrived, Jaap and Paulien of Dutch Flower House gave us a warm welcome. “It should have been 5-0”, he muttered and said that he hadn’t heard much from his brothers that afternoon. But despite all that, Jaap was happy to see us and spoke about his business with great enthusiasm. The former Brinkman salesperson gained his knowledge about the cultivation of container plants in the Netherlands and is keen to share his knowledge with others now.
Quite remarkably, the 60-year old is about to start an extension, because demand has simply been bigger than supply the last couple of years. There are no other patio plant growers in the region. And there’s someone waiting to take over. His son-in-law. Despite the increased acreage, Jaap is planning to take it easier. Things like conveyor belts and automatic pruning are to make his work a bit lighter.
He started small in 1999, with a few sections, and in his first year, half of the plants weren’t sold because he didn’t have any distribution channels. What encouraged him to continue was the positive feedback he got from the market. After a low during the crisis years, things really started to take off.
Is pioneering at such a small scale still feasible in Canada nowadays, I asked him. His initial response was a wholehearted “Of course, why not?”. But a little later, he admitted that all the rules and regulations do get to him. The planning permit application for his new greenhouse is a cumbersome process and the environmental requirements are also getting more stringent. He described a Kafkaesque scene. About civil servants who have never visited his company and nonetheless feel free to make all sorts of strange decisions.
From Jaap, we went on to Sjef and Marloes van der Berg of Timbereno Flowers. They grow azalea and gardenia. This former crop consultant also had an interesting story to tell, which made a big impression on me. He started out in Canada in October 2001 – he bought a 2-ha nursery, which was doing extremely well.
But it was the time of the attack on the Twin Towers and Bush’s war in the Middle East and by 2003/2004, his plant sales to the USA had come to a total stop. His most important customer over there went bankrupt and subsequently, Van der Berg went bankrupt too.
Thanks to two Macedonian brothers-in-law – Boris and Jimmy – he could go back to hiring the company for a small amount. In 2014, the storage house was hit by an ice storm and eventually, because of the sons of Boris and Jimmy, he said goodbye to the company for a second time. In 2016 he started a new company. With the help of the bank and some insurance payments. Low budget. He’s doing alright at the moment, but Sjef, aged 60, won’t be able to retire any time soon.
There are many more details to this beautiful story. I’m going to keep those for some other time. I’d better get some rest now, as I’m sure we’ll be ‘moving with haste’ again tomorrow. Oh yeah – the song was by T-Spoon. And I’m not too afraid of getting homesick this time either because at night, when it gets pretty cold here, my AZ hat is keeping me warm and cosy.
Arie-Frans Middelburg
