Part 2: Ripening and harvesting the pods
Our first harvest season was carried out with very little practical information. The research I was able to gather at the time was pretty short on detail, geared mostly toward helping vanilla farmers improve their crop and determining the viability of vanilla as a cash crop. We needed to know things like “when are the pods ripe?” “what do we do with freshly harvested vanilla pods?” “how are the vanilla beans stored?” and other practical questions most vanilla farmers didn’t need explained.
Short of interning on a vanilla plantation, we would need to go on what little was available in the research, common sense and experiment. So what if a few beans got wasted, it was at this point just a hobby.
How Vanilla Pods Ripen
When the vanilla flower is pollinated, you can see the next day that the whole structure of the flower has changed. The “stem” (which is actually the ovary) of the flower lengthens and expands while the flower wilts and turns brown. If, on the other hand, pollination has failed, the whole thing, stem, flower and all, drops off of the raceme. During the pollination season, you know pretty well how many flowers have been successfully pollinated.
Over the next week or so, the fertilized ovary continues to grow rapidly until it reaches full size. At that point, the growth stops and very little seems to be going on for the next 9–10 months. All the action is inside, where the seeds are developing slowly.
Here on Kauai, the final stage of ripening begins in late February, with pods becoming ripe over a several-week period through April. At first, there is a general lightening of the color, then you begin to see the pod lighten at the tip. Within a few days, the tip begins to turn yellow. That is the earliest point at which we harvest our vanilla, but it’s not unusual for a ripening pod to escape the notice of the picker and continue.
As the pod ripens, the yellow area moves up the bean, and the tip begins to split in two. It is at this point that the fragrance becomes very noticeable. (It’s often said that the pods don’t smell like anything until they’re cured, but that’s only because they’re usually picked earlier. We like to let them ripen a bit more than that.) As the ripening continues, the split opens up, and the split part of the pod dries and turns dark brown.
Eventually, over a period of about a week, the split moves all the way up the pod and the pod turns completely dark brown. It is somewhat dry, supple like a dried fruit, with the seeds exposed in an oily resin that is highly fragrant. We call this a naturally cured bean, and we have experimented with pods cured this way to see how it compares to the hand-cured beans. I think that the hand curing methods originally mimicked the natural cure but in a more controlled way and at an earlier stage of ripening. The curing of vanilla beans was not an accidental discovery, but a logical improvement (from a human standpoint) on what happens naturally.
Harvesting
The pods come in a few at a time over a period of about two months. Every day, the vines are checked for pods ready to be picked. The pods are securely attached to the raceme, so they must be clipped with a sharp shear. The cut end exudes a clear sap that is sticky and irritant. The cut pods are collected in a box and brought in for the first stage of processing. That story is told in part 3.
Aloha,
Read all your processes on your site thanks for the info. We had a vine we let go in the jungle in 1999 It grows like crazy here in Nahiku , Maui. I was in the yard and kept smelling vanilla. To my surprise it was vanilla beans on the ground. They are a 100 feet up and pollinated somehow on its own. Any how we dried the beans all the naturally and they are just dried. I will make extract. A friend has some vines he hand pollinated and we have a gallon ziplock full. Excited to use your method.
So if I understand correctly we can freeze them and wait until the last is harvested and do the whole process with all beans from this harvest when they are all don?
What happens when I had a handful from last month that are just drying out with no killing? Can we do the process now after a month? We are gonna propagate the vines this year from the wild vines. So exciting.
Thanks Doug
Spontaneous pollination of vanilla is pretty rare, I’ve seen it a few times, mostly on vines that are high in the trees. A naturally cured bean can be pretty fragrant, you did the right thing by drying it and making extract, beans like that don’t keep well.
For the other beans you have, freezing is something I recommend if you are getting small harvests (like less than 8 ounces), but if you have more than that ready to go, you should skip the freezing and put them in the killing bath (3 minutes at 150ºF) then into the sweat as described on our vanilla curing pages.
The curing process needs to happen within 24 hours of harvest, if not, you risk getting off flavors. If the beans were dried, and smell OK, I’d suggest you continue slowly drying them, going through the trouble of doing the cure probably wouldn’t be worth the effort, since it is intended to work with freshly harvested beans.
Hey Roland, I appreciate your knowledge and respect your effort in vanilla cultivation. It is something that I’ve always been fascinated with, and have actually been growing vanilla for the last few years now. I have a few vanilla vines in my small greenhouse in Arkansas, and one of my vines which grows on an avocado tree has reached maturity, and now has flower raceme formations. I’m excited about it, but confused as to what I should do since this is my first year of flowering. I would love it if you could inform me on what to expect during pollination and flower development, and also information on watering and fertilizing methods during this time. Thanks, Klayton
Hey, congrats on getting vanilla to flower so far out of its natural range! That is quite an achievement. If you haven’t already done so, you should check out any one of several videos that show how to pollinate vanilla flowers. It usually takes 1 month from the first appearance of the buds until the first flower will open. Each flower on the raceme will open in turn and last for only 1 day. If you’re going to pollinate a flower, you have to do it on the day it opens.
If the pollination is successful, you can tell the next day because it will hang on to the flower. In the days after that, the “stem” of the flower will start growing and eventually become a green bean. The bean will take 10 months to mature, so you won’t need to do anything with it until then. You’ll see it yellow when it ripens.
It will be hard for me to advise you on growing conditions and feeding, your situation is very different. Vanilla orchids are epiphytes, which means they get their nutrients out of the air. However, in a greenhouse situation, the air doesn’t contain enough natural dust to feed the plants, so probably a foliar feeding will be needed. General instructions on the foliar feeding of orchids should apply. Also, make sure the “feeder” roots are going somewhere where they will be in the mulch, kept moist and protected from the sun. Feeder roots are the ones that wander down, sometimes over long distances, looking for moisture…make sure they find it or your beans will never develop.