The vanillery is exactly 3 years old now. This Spring, for the first time, we’re seeing full flowering on all the rows. This is great news for vanilla production here, our last two years have seen fairly small harvests. At this rate, there may be many hundreds of pods in here for next winter’s harvest.
Having this many flowers does require a significant time investment to get them all pollinated. This is the peak of the flowering cycle, and we’re seeing 1 – 1 1/2 hours of pollinating each morning, and that will keep up for 2 – 3 weeks. You definitely have to plan your morning around that.
In the first season of fruit in the vanillery, I let a couple of beans ripen naturally, as I sometimes do when they’re too small or overripe. When they ripen on the vine, they split open, turn black and eventually the tiny, tiny seeds come out. I guess if things are just right where those seeds fall, they will germinate and grow into new vines.
This is, in my experience, pretty unusual. Most of the time none of those seeds sprout, and the little vines that emerge aren’t tough like full-grown vanilla, they’re extremely delicate. It wouldn’t take much going wrong for that sprout to not survive.
Near one of the bamboo posts in the vanillery, it looks like the conditions were just right, because a whole cluster of little vines formed in that one spot. You can see that in this photo, although the seedling vines are tucked way in. They’re beginning to climb up the bamboo post and the other vines.
I wonder if these vines will be different? Almost all of the vanilla plants here came from a single vine my grandmother planted some 40 years ago. These new vines will have some genetic variation…who knows how much, though, because the pollen came from the same plant. We’ll see.
Took the beans out of their box today: it’s time to grade the harvest. The last beans came off the open-air drying racks two months ago, and they’ve been conditioning in their box since then. The beans are graded at this point, divided into the two grades by size, moisture content, and appearance.
The grade A beans are bundled and placed in the conditioning box for another 7 months, so there is a total of 9 months of conditioning after the drying is complete. The cured beans are sold to the culinary trade for direct use in recipes. They are brown in color and filled with fragrant, oily “caviar,” the seeds and pulp of the vanilla pod after curing. This is where the fragrance of the vanilla bean is concentrated.
The grade B beans in part will be sold as grade B beans, but most will be used to make extract. We make two different types of extract: one, a 100% local extract using Koloa Rum, made on the west side of Kauai. The second is an organic extract using Prairie organic vodka. The beans sit in the alcohol for a minimum of 6 months before we begin to sell them.
It’s a good harvest this year, I’m very proud of it! The beans are in beautiful condition.
Today, we hoisted our Ambient Weather WS-1400IP sensor unit atop it’s mounting pole. I’ve always wanted to keep our own local weather data, and with the addition of this device, we are officially collecting data and sharing it on the net. We’re still working out some of the details, but this is a exciting development as far as I’m concerned.
We call the station “Queen’s Acres,” which is one of the names used for our neighborhood on the back side of Nonou Mountain near Kapaa. Our data stream is visible on Weather Underground at KHIKAPAA19
This morning I came across two racemes in the vanillery that had seven open blossoms on each of them! This is really quite unusual.
When the vanilla vines are really growing strongly, the flowering racemes can come out double or triple or more. Usually, the raceme is a single stalk of flowers with 1 – 20 flower buds on it. The buds will open usually one at a time over a period of several weeks until they have all opened.
When there is a huge amount of vitality in the vine, though, the raceme can include branches of racemes, making it possible for a large number of flowers to sprout from a single node. This is a very good thing, because each node can only produce once (if at all—most don’t): and it will be either either a new vine or a flower raceme.
Of course, not all the flowers on a raceme should be pollinated, it’s important to only pollinate as much as will develop into full-size pods. Pollinate too many, and you’ll end up with a lot of uselessly-small pods. But with so much vitality in the vine, the number of flowers you can pollinate increases. We’ll probably get 15 full-size pods on these big racemes, while a typical raceme will usually only produce 5-7.
This is one of the big racemes early in the season, you can see it branching at several places.
Vanilla blossoming seems to come in waves: you’ll have days where the blossoming is sparse, and days like today, where nearly every raceme on all the vines has one or more flowers blossoming. I don’t know what governs these cycles, perhaps weather, perhaps the moon. We already know that the vines are quite sensitive to lunar cycles.
This morning, I pollinated 49 flowers in the vanillery. An impressively large number considering it’s age…this is really the first year we’re having flowers on vines that grew in the vanillery. Perviously, all the flowering was done by vines that were a couple of years old when they were transplanted in. The vanillery is finally coming in, but this is only the beginning.
I say today is the peak of the 2016 flowering season because in all, I pollinated 153 flowers today. Looking at the racemes out there now, I doubt we’ll have as big a day again this season. All the racemes that are going to emerge have done so by now.
Flowering took place several weeks later this year than last year. Not sure why, but there is a strong possibility it is due to a very dry winter here. Meteorologists are calling it a drought, although it wouldn’t resemble what most of the world calls such a thing.
Last week, the rains returned, lucky us, and spring weather is back to it’s soggy normal here. For us, these flowers mark the beginning of typically eight weeks of early-morning trips to the vines to do the pollination. Flowering in the vanillery was slow to get started, but it looks like it’s going to be good. This is the first year we expect to get a decent harvest out of it, and it’s going get better every year for several years.
It occurred to me today that counting new shoots might be a good way to monitor the flowering potential of the vanillery. I was inspecting the vines and thinking about ways to quantify the success of each planting. For each cutting we planted, most sprouted one new shoot, a few more than one. Enough time has passed so that some of the original new shoots have thrown off new shoots themselves. Since each node of the vanilla plant can either grow a new shoot or flower once (if at all), it is necessary to keep the vines constantly growing. Maintaining a good number of growing tips means more potential flowering locations for the next season.
First year vines are smooth and soft to the touch, especially the growing tip, which is quite soft and tender. As the vines age, they get darker, harder and end up being quite sturdy with a dull, waxy sheen. In the first year, the vines are going for distance, tending to climb as high as possible without wasting energy on side shoots. In the second or third season, the mature nodes are likely to branch or flower if there is sufficient vitality.
In march of 2015, I counted 38 growing tips in the vanillery.
While the first vanilla pods of the season are coming in, the first flower buds are also appearing. Some of these spurts of new growth will result in new vines, branching off of the mature vines, but most of these will form the flowering racemes. The early spring is when a lot of new growth occurs, and the vanilla farmer (me) watches with some apprehension as the flowering racemes appear (or not!) determining the size of the new season’s crop. In a week or so, the morning ritual of the hand pollination will begin.
The flowering season of 2014 was light for us, several areas never went to flower, so the 2015 harvest season will be small. One of the things we’ve learned about vanilla is that while it will grow lush and green in the shade, it requires part sun to come to flower. As the forest grows around the vines, they can end up in shade too deep to flower. This year, I cleared branches above and around the forest trellises to let more light in. We’re hoping for a better flowering season this year, and indeed it’s starting strongly.
Last year, I noticed a couple of very small vanilla shoots in the bed under one of my vanilla trellises. Looking closer, I realized that these were clearly the almost miraculous appearance of vanilla seedlings! I tried several internet searches to find out: was this common, had other vanilla growers reported this? I found no reports, nothing about finding or successfully producing a vanilla seedling or that a vanilla seed had germinated naturally. All I found was that it could be done artificially using a general technique for starting orchid seeds called “flasking,” which is basically creating sterile conditions for an orchid seed to grow.
And yet, here they were, 3 vanilla seedlings that had started spontaneously in the mulch under some of my vanilla plants. The one in the photograph here is the only one that was easily photographed, the rest were growing up a wooden trellis, too crowded in by other vanilla vines to be clearly seen. You can see that there is some damage to the stem near the ground, looks like some kind of nibbling creature got to it. Since it had rootlets developing, I decided to cut it and move it into the nursery where it could continue to grow.
the seedling transplanted into the nursery
I would guess that a big part of the reason this isn’t reported is that typical vanilla culture doesn’t support allowing the natural seeding process to occur. Vanilla pods (I don’t like calling them “beans” for some reason) are mostly harvested before they are botanically ripe because pods that have ripened and begun to open are of a lower grade. In any case, all the pods are harvested, split or not. Sometimes it happens that pods get overlooked and left on the vine, and I will sometimes leave a pod or two on the vine if they are small and have gone too far. These pods split open, become dark brown and dry and emit a delicious fragrance. Once you see this happen there is no wondering how vanilla as a scent and flavoring was discovered! The aroma is strong and easily detected several yards away from the plant.
As a hobbyist, I planted vanilla in the garden under trees on trellises, leaving the ground and surroundings alone. Vanilla is a forest plant, it wants protection from wind and sun, a lot of humidity, and a deep bed of mulch and humus in which to spread it’s roots. I like to think that the environment around and under my vanilla trellises is completely natural to the species, and therefore a viable location for seedling development. It seems the vanilla plants agree.
Vanilla Genetics
Vanilla is generally propagated vegetatively, it’s relatively easy and the resulting plant can be productive in the second year, occasionally the first. There is really no reason to do it otherwise, vanilla grows rapidly so there is always plenty of material to take cuttings from. I suppose that there are vanilla breeders out there that are working with crosses to see if other characteristics could be developed, but most vanilla growers aren’t so concerned with things like variety and genetics. There is almost no discussion of vanilla genetics on the web, it seems to be a relatively uninvestigated subject as far as I can tell. I wonder what that says about the genetic diversity of vanilla as cultivated worldwide?
There are two species of culinary vanilla, but well over a hundred species in the Vanilla genus, so the potential for hybridization is considerable. Vanilla orchids in general have been shown to be capable of hybridizing, but despite it’s importance, Vanilla planifolia (the main vanilla of commerce) has not been hybridized for the purpose of agriculture, at least not as far as I have been able to find. Vanilla x tahitensis (Tahitian vanilla) is a hybrid of Vanilla planifolia and Vanilla odorata, but it’s not known how that came about. The origins of Tahitian vanilla are a bit of a mystery, but the cross could have occurred naturally as these species share similar regions.
This doesn’t shed light on the genetics within the species, however. Are there local variants of vanilla in it’s natural range (Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean)? Probably, but I haven’t come across any discussion of this subject. What I do know is that even when a flower self-pollinates (as Vanilla often does) there will be some natural genetic variation. This means that the seedling vines I have here are going to be slightly different from the parent vines. I’ll be watching the vine that I have transplanted for any discernable differences, and report my findings here if anything interesting is noted.
(Some of the background information for this post comes from Vanilla Orchids: Natural History and Cultivation by Ken Cameron)
Took the beans out of their box today: it’s time to grade the harvest. The last beans came off the open-air drying racks two months ago, and they’ve been conditioning in their box since then. The beans are graded at this point, divided into the two grades by size, moisture content, and appearance.
