Greetings of the day everyone!
I hope everyone is having a great start of the week!
Did you know that vanilla is from the orchids family!???
Let me show you the plants I have at the backyard of my restaurant!
Vanilla Orchids!
I was always under the impression that VANILLA comes from a normal plant...until one day (more than 20yrs back!) I met with a vanilla specialist and he explained a lot about this product which is used around the whole world!
He was the one who told me about vanilla being from the Orchids family!
I am lucky to have couple of vanilla orchids at the backyard of my restaurant!
It is not that simple to produce vanilla pods actually...the flowers need to be pollinated by hands!!!
If you want to have a try, check out this link to get an idea how to do it!
We have never tried this process with our plants, we are still waiting for them to start having flowers first!
Propagating more vanilla plants/orchids
For now our main focus is to grow more of the vanilla plants, the 2 plants your are seeing below are aged over 10yrs old!!!
Vanilla takes a lot of time to become beans that we all love to put in food...and a lot of knowledge and patience too!
So next time you have a vanilla bean on hand...imagine all the difficult processes behind!
And this is why vanilla beans are so expensive! Yes we have a lot of fakes out there...I am talking about the real stuff!
Dry Coconut Peel as planting medium!
Yeah...this is another thing about vanilla orchids...we put only little soil in the pots and fill up with dry coconut peel - Vanilla loves coconut peel to grow healthy!
And yes...they don't love too much water!!! Hmmm!
I still have a lot to learn on the vanilla world...and it would be great if someone reading this post could share some more info on them if they know something about vanilla!
Ps. If our plants start to flower...I will surely make another post on it! But for now...we are still waiting!!!
Wish you all a great day/evening ahead!
Best Regards!
@progressivechef
