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Vanilla Orchid Plant Vanilla Planifolia Cutting
Packet containing 1x freshly harvested rooting cutting with several nodes!
Everyone knows the glorious flavour of vanilla.
What you may not know is that real true blue vanilla comes from the bean of an orchid and this is the reason for it’s scarcity and exorbitant prices in the shops.
The much cheaper Vanilla flavour, Vanilla extract or artificial Vanilla essence is made from a concoction of wood pulp, coal tar, or other much less expensive suspect stuff, whereas true Vanilla extract is an extraction from the bean made by just soaking it in alcohol and water.
In my experience it is an easy to grow plant but it needs a warm local environment and it does best in the top half of Australia. Low temperatures and frost will reliably kill it every single time.
I use a sandy well draining soil mix and I grow it in pots with short thick wooden stakes.
On arrival remove the cutting and plant it paper end down one or two nodes/joints deep in a warm sheltered position out of full sun. Ignore the damaged leaves and minor patches of rot as they will dry out in no time and it won’t effect the plants later growth at all.
As they grow I wrap it around the wooden post like a vine in a never ending coil. Once I have a couple meters of growth I snap off the tip to promote branching and stress the plant into forming flowers. These flowers must be hand pollinated for successful fruit set just like they do commercially because here in Australia we don’t have the right pollinating insect to do the job effectively.
Without hand pollination the male bits can’t reach the female bits as the little doorway just stays shut and you won’t get any pods form. That said, it’s a very simple process.
There are heaps of videos on youtube but basically you just scrape a little pollen off with a toothpick and lift up the little doorway on the inside of the flower, then fold it over and push it shut the seal in the pollen and allow fertilization to begin. If the flower doesn’t fall off in a week or two, then you have a winner and it will begin to swell and form a pod which is the vanilla bean.
The beans are allowed to mature and fatten, then they are removed while green, dipped in hot water or steamed, and that cooks and kills them allowing them to blacken and ferment on the inside. This is the flavour development stage.
Once that has happened and they are soft like a very over-ripe banana and they are dried to concentrate these flavours and allow long term storage.
You can then eat them, use them in your baking or put a pinch in your coffee(tastes awesome!) and a little tiny bit goes a very long way!
Grown by me and the Mrs organically, no chems, no nasties, no problems!!!
