The taste of sand and clay

You can taste the best of Brabant in Halderberge

Right across Halderberge runs the border between sand and clay. You will find one, the other and mixes of both. There is good farming everywhere. Of all the fruit and vegetables that grow in the Netherlands, you pick the best in Halderberge.

You taste the earth

When you talk about wine, everyone gets it. Sure, you have the grape variety. But how does that grape grow up? How much lime is in the soil? What minerals does it get, how many building materials? Bordeaux makes the bordeaux, Champagne makes the champagne.

The sweetest beets you pull from the clay. The tastiest leeks come from the sand. It raises fewer tongues with other agricultural products, but that doesn't make soil any less important. A seed from the wrong soil, tastes like nothing.

Where do carrots take root?

A handful of clay is sticky and solid. It is packed with nutrients and retains moisture well. The latter is nice in summer. In the wet months, you suffer from it. You need plants with strong roots. Clay is indispensable for tasty pumpkins and beautiful celeriac.

Sand flows along your fingers. It is dry and light. Nutritious it is not, nutrients wash away with the water. The spit goes through it quickly, as do plant roots. Asparagus and strawberries, among others, grow on the sand.

And then you have the transitional areas, varying mixtures of sand and clay with their own character. Turnip greens like loose soil, rhubarb grows best on mix rich in humus.

Everything grows well in Halderberge and the better cooks and shopkeepers know exactly where to get it all.

Cistercians brought the

Anyone traversing the region today can see the soil reflected in the varied landscape. Polders, peat deposits, meadows, forests and moors. And, of course, the necessary fields and meadows.

It has not always been like this. Monks of the Cistercian order trekked through an almost inaccessible wasteland some seven hundred years ago. The few they encountered lived off a small peat polder or small-scale peat extraction.

The Cistercians made their way through marshes, past lakes and over wasteland to settle on a higher dry piece of land, atop a donk. With spade and scythe, they realised farms and a tithe barn on the cover sand ridge. The fields and pastures around the donk extended further and further and became the region of Halderberge.

Good life on the donk

Back through the swamp for the weekly market? Impossible. Anything the Cistercians wanted to use had to come out of the ground on or around the donk.

The coincidence - or blessing - is that the boundary between sand and clay runs straight across the donk. In terms of taste, the monks were not short of anything. In fact, they could grow everything themselves. It was hard work, sure. But then it tasted great!

Not surprisingly, the bishopric of Antwerp had an outpost built on the donk in Hoeven, so that the bishop had a nice place to leave the hubbub of the city behind and come to his senses. Later, when the border between the Netherlands and Flanders was drawn, the bishop of Breda chose the Hoeven donk as his residence. He preferred to be there, rather than in the city.

The savage beginning

Running through the area of sand and clay that would later be called Halderberge was a cover sand ridge formed during the last ice age. The area to the west and north was ravaged by the sea. The salt water washed away pieces of land and left behind layers of sea clay.

On the other side of the ridge, rivers and streams sprang up, bringing sand and boulders. These streams regularly dried up and then the river sand rose. This created ridges of young cover sand.

That's the story in very broad terms. You can see it reflected in the forests. On the sparse cover sand ridges, conifers grow. Where the sand layers are mixed with loamy layers from the sea, deciduous forests with beech and oak grow.

You see it in the landscape of polders, sand ridges, rivers and moors. And you taste it in the rich flavours of Halderberge.