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Harvesting & The Vanillery is Getting Ready to Flower

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.

Ripening beans
The sec­ond vanillery is grow­ing new shoots too!

5 thoughts on “Harvesting & The Vanillery is Getting Ready to Flower

  1. 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

    1. 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.

  2. Do you have a email newsletter/etc for updates to the shop/blog?

    1. 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.

  3. 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.

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