Munster Kwekerij Siem

The tour of this tulip farm was one of the highlights of our cruise. I didn’t review it at the time because the wifi on the ship was spotty. It was an extra excursion and I thought it was quite reasonable at 49 €. We traveled there by bus. When we arrived we were greeted w/​coffee, tea and pastries and then were given an illustrated presentation by the farmer’s wife. It was educational and interesting. We then went into one of the greenhouses, watched a special flower bunching machine and visited a cold storage room where bunched flowers awaited their trip to the flower auction and from there to the countries that bought them.
After going through the greenhouse and cold room we walked through the nearby field, admiring and photographing the tulips growing there. This was where I learned that the tulips in the fields were being grown for their bulbs, not their flowers, while the greenhouse tulips were grown for the flowers. There was a shop selling tulip-​related artwork, wooden tulips, other knickknacks and live bunches of tulips. A couple of women bought bunches of fresh tulips and I regretted not buying one too, because it would have been lovely to have them in our cabin for the duration of the cruise, but I didn’t decide I wanted them until it was too late and I was already on the bus. A byproduct of this trip was that when I reentered the US I had to declare that I had been on a farm. They asked if there had been any animals and whether I had brought back any plant materials. The answer to both being no, there was no problem.