A view of some fields and housing in the back.  These large areas of reclaimed land are called polders.

We were in the country a week or two before the cows are released back into the fields. Apparently on that day, the cows act crazy, leaping and jumping everywhere because they are so happy to be free from the stables after the long winter.

Some of the water control waterways in the fields. And junk on the lens.

Most of the trees are relatively young and in clearly man-made rows. Since the polders are about five meters below sea level, most everything was destroyed when the Germans blew up the enclosing dike at the end of WWII.

This is the closest that we got to the endless fields of color you see in the postcards. A tiny strip of yellow tulips.

Unfortunately we were also a few weeks early for the infamous fields of tulips. Alas, such is life. Sadly, even the stunning Kuekenhof Gardens were closed. I highly recommend googling both the fields of tulips and Kuekenhof gardens – both are stunning sights I hope to one day see. But since we couldn’t see those things, we visited the tulip greenhouses of Kwekerij Siem Munster in Slootdorp.

Here they force thousands of tulips for the Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, the largest flower auction in the world.

Most weren’t in full-bloom, since you want them to bloom in the buyer’s house, but this pretty reject was left behind.

It takes about three weeks from initially forcing the bulbs to market-ready almost-in-bloom tulips.

In this shot you can see tulips that haven’t bloomed in the foreground, and spent ones that have been culled in the back.

When they are ready, the good ones are plucked and brought to the processing area.

Workers spread the tulips out a bit, so the bulb-crushing machine can crush the bulbs away from the stems.

Tulips get more money when they have longer stems and the stem continues inside the bulb for a couple millimeters, so it’s worth it to crush the bulbs away and free the stem.

Then they  go through a fancy, cutting-edge x-ray machine that culls tulips that are to short, and lines the rest up precisely to be cut to an even height.

Then they are stacked in piles of ten and bound into a bunch. Five bunches go in a “paper” of tulips.

More tulips waiting to be processed in a cold room. The cold room is where the bulbs go through a simulated winter before being forced in the warmer greenhouses.

Workers in the “field.”