Out in the vanillery, we’re starting to see the fresh flower buds emerging on the mature vines. Always an exciting time of the year as we anticipate the beginning of a new cycle. These little guys will be sprouting flowers in a couple of weeks!
The ripe beans are coming in more and more as we harvest the vanilla pods out of vanillery. This is a process that takes over 3 months as each bean is individually picked as they become ripe, and the ripening season extends for as long as the previous flowering season. Last year, we were pollinating from April through June, so it’s been 9 months since the first flowers were pollinated…so right on schedule.
Roland,
I have “stressed” my 5 year old vanilla vines by cutting the growth ends back 4–6” and have ceased watering them. Last year racemes developed in mid April (south Florida) and I had flowers to pollinate by early May. This year, racemes developed even before stressing the vines, and only the same 3 vines have them ( I have 8 vines over 5 years old). I have watched several Indonesian vanilla videos, and some seem to “crush” the vine at the node with their fingers; I believe this might be to encourage new racemes or multiple racemes. Do you know what this is all about, and how can I produce mor racemes on my vines? Thank you
As far as I know, this is the same as pruning the growing tips. I don’t know how it might relate to multiple racemes, but I have seen that pruning the growing tips seems to encourage flowering. I have not seen any research to support this, but it’s widely practiced. I don’t prune all of them, there are too many in our vanillery for that, I am probably pruning half of them.
You may yet see more flowers come from your other vines, in my experience, the flowers emerge over a 3‑month period.
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Thanks for your interest, and I realize that I did not provide a way to sign up for that.
So, I added it, you’ll find the signup form on the right side of any page on the site now.
Yay! I cannot wait to see some flowering when we arrive in a few weeks! This will be so educational for us and it will be a highlight of our trip.