Those who succeed in eliciting lush flowers from a vanilla orchid and pollinate them manually will be rewarded with aromatic vanilla pods. The high demands of a Vanilla planifolia in terms of location and care cannot be easily met. These tips would like to contribute to a successful private vanilla cultivation.

Vanilla needs tropical-humid site conditions

This is how you wrestle a rich bloom from a vanilla orchid

The better it is possible to generate the tropically warm and humid conditions at the location, the easier it is to motivate the vanilla orchid to flower. Cultivated as a normal houseplant, you will hardly grow vanilla yourself. It is better if you offer the plant a place in a year-round warm, light-flooded greenhouse with 25-28 degrees Celsius and a humidity of 70-80 percent. This care sets the course for a rich harvest:

  • Water the plant moderately with lime-free water, whereby the substrate dries up in the meantime
  • Spray every 2-3 days with soft, filtered rainwater
  • Fertilize every 2 weeks from March to September with a low-salt orchid fertilizer

Tie up the tendrils regularly according to their speed of growth. Each cut lengthens the waiting time for the first flowering.

Manual Pollination Guide - How To Replace Bees And Hummingbirds

Gardeners who want to grow vanilla themselves should be careful during the flowering period. Within a flower cluster, a bud opens daily in the morning hours. If it is not pollinated now, it will die by the evening and the hope of a vanilla bean is gone. This is how manual insemination works:

  • Using a pointed chopstick, like a toothpick, carefully slit one side of the flower
  • The male and female sex components are separated by a membrane in the hermaphrodite flower
  • Pick up the yellowish pollen and transfer it to the pistil below

After pollination has taken place, between 6 and 9 months pass before the former flower turns into a long, green vanilla bean.

tips

TV chefs always cut open vanilla beans to scoop out the seeds. In fact, the pods contain more flavor than the contents they enclose. If your efforts in growing your own vanilla are crowned with success, do not throw away the capsule fruits. Cut the peel into small pieces or grind it after drying in the oven to enjoy as well as the pulp.

Category:

Indoor plants