Today we started our events by visiting one of many famous tulip farms in Voorhout. The fields were absolutely goregous and super fun to take pictures in! While we were there, we learned a lot about the sustainble farming practices used to support the over €100M tulip industry. The farmer informed us that tulips take a year to harvest, and that every year they must be planted in a different spot in order to keep the soil healthy, giving it time to replenish its nutrients. He does this by creating a yearly crop rotation with his other yearly flowers, daffodils and dalias.
The main way he keeps his farm healthy is by priorititizing healthy tulip bulbs. This is done by cutting the flowers as soon as they bloom and leaving them on the ground, enriching the soil with the bloom’s nutrients and growing the bulb bigger and healthier. Then, at harvet, the bulbs are kept cold until the next growing season and the flowers are sold with a bigger bloom than when they were initially cut. Another important part of this is cutting out any sick flowers, such as the firery bloom shown below. Even though many people find this bloom pretty, they must be cut out to keep the soil and other flowers healthy, so the sick ones are removed and farmers breed healthy imitations to sell instead.
Our next stop for the day was Schoonship to visit the float neighborhood built there. We were lucky enough to get a tour by the partner of the neighborhood’s founder, Michiel Snijder, who told us the story of the project’s history and how they have grown from their single home, to a community of over 40 homes. Each home was built custom to what their inhabitants designed, prioritizing different types of sustainable materials and components of the home. Some of these design aspect include charred wood & green roofs for good insultation and strong concrete slabs to support the homes with some containing a basement or additional storage.
Throughout the tour, I kept asking our guide questions about the logistics and challenges that came with completing and maintaing a project of this scale. All the information about these buildings are open source and online for free with the goal of encouraging others to be innovative and follow in the footsteps of these people. Each time I asked him about a challenge, he would answer with something following that same idea; when faced with a challenge, allow youre restrictions to feed your creativity and simply create what you want. If the problem is with other people, find a win-win situation for everyone involved. I found his simplicst answers to what I thought were big issues to be very refreshing, and a nice reminder that if you want something bad enough, just don’t stop until you get it.
We also had some fluffy guests take the tour with us, I hope they found it as enjoyable as I did!
We ended our visits with a breif industry tour at Edge, a architecture and design contracting company focused on creating the most sustainable buildings for office spaces. They showed us all the different things they must considerwhen creating their designs, such as air flow, sunlight, recreation, collaborative spaces, and biophilic design. I never realized all of the things that need to be accounted for when designing buildings with social and industrial sustainability as the most important priority. I found it very interesting and it made me curious enough to research co-op opportunitites in the area.
At the end of the day, we were fortunate enough to observe the country’s memorial day service because of how our trip lined up with the date (5/5). At 8:00pm, everyone stops what they are doing for two minutes to pay respects to those who were murdered in the Holocaust. When I looked out the window, I saw that even the cars and trains had paused exaclty where they were to join the country in reflection and rememberance. I thought it was very moving and a good reminder of how taken forgranted many parts of life are.