The vanilla vines are flowering and it’s time to pollinate. The flowers are really beautiful; we have grown the plants up our coconut trees. In our experience, the flowers open in early morning and start closing by about 10am so there is small window of opportunity to pollinate. In past years, we tried to leave it to the stingless bees (meliponia) to do this labour-intensive work for us but we have only managed to get about 2 to 4 pods a plant. If hand pollinated correctly, each plant can produce about 50 to 100 vanilla pods.
We are hoping to get a few more vanilla pods this year so Gnome has been carrying the ladder from vine to vine to pollinate.
It’s a rather delicate operation whilst trying to balance yourself on a ladder too…another Gnome job to add to his lengthy curriculum vitae.
The vanilla will be flowering for for the next 2 to 4 weeks. So, we’ll be up early every day messing around with the vanilla for a while. What Fun. 🙂
Oh and another Gnome Haiku describing this experience:
his aluminium
wings shudder with strain while bees
bathe in yellow pollen
0
Creamy Vanilla entangled gently through coconut…..early morning rewards 🙂
THIS is a plant I sooooo wish to be able to grow here!!! Do the flowers smell like I imagine they might? Mmmmmmmm 🙂
Sorry…the flowers don’t smell much of anything!