CULTIVATION

Though vanilla beans come from many different areas, beans are processed in similar ways: flowers are pollinated, beans grow and are quickly picked when ripe – after which they are cured. This may sound straightforward but in fact the entire vanilla production process from planting to market can take five to six years.

It can take 18 months to three years from planting to flowering. Beans, actually seed pods, spend about nine months on the vine. Then the curing and ageing process takes a further 3 months before the beans are ready to be sold.

Plantation
The vanilla species used for cultivation are climbing vines. Like all climbing plants, it needs support to grow to reach its full height. The advantage of growing on a tree is that it is provided with shelter from excessive exposure to the sun and strong winds. The tree must have deep roots so that nutrition in the upper soil layers, where the vanilla takes root, is not depleted.

In their natural environment, they will climb several metres up forest trees, thanks to climbing roots at the base of each leaf. At the plantations, cuttings are set into a vegetable mould close to a previously planted climbing tree (the so-called 'tutor'). The vine is not allowed to climb freely up the tutor tree, but is regularly guided back to the ground to promote the growth of new roots in the soil. This method provides an ample supply of nutrients and triggers fast vegetative growth. Approximately two to three years after the vanilla vine was first planted, its head is pruned together with other parts of the plant, which in turn triggers physiological stress and induces flowering.

In Madagascar, the vanilla tends to attach itself to acacia-like trees; in Réunion, between the sugar cane; and in the Comoros, it thrives under the cocoa trees. The plant starts producing fruit after four or five years and is usually exhausted after ten years.

Flowering and pollination
The greatest problem facing vanilla growers is the highly complex pollination procedure. Although vanilla flowers possess both stigma and stamen (the flower's male and female reproductive organs), self-pollination is impossible because the two organs are separated by a thin membrane. In nature's own process, the blossoms are pollinated by certain melipona bees or hummingbirds which are to be found only in the native regions of the cultivated vanilla species (Mexico). Moreover, this process does not result in the systematic pollination of all blossoms of a flowering vanilla vine. To overcome this biological (and commercial) barrier, vanilla is pollinated by hand. This labour-intensive method has to be applied daily throughout the four-month blooming season, simply because the individual vanilla flower is open for less than 24 hours and is receptive to pollination only for a brief period of eight to twelve hours.

Vanilla flowers and the resulting pods grow on several panicles per plant. On each panicle only a limited number of well-developed beans are allowed to mature; this ensures good quality beans of the desired length (10-25cm). A single vanilla plant can produce up to 150 pods per harvesting period.

Harvest
The green vanilla beans eventually mature and are ready for picking when the colour of their base turns from green to a yellowish hue – approximately seven to eight months after pollination. Harvesting the beans at this stage will provide the best flavour quality and vanillin content in the processed vanilla beans. If they are picked too early, the beans will have a lower vanillin content and are more susceptible to mould during subsequent processing and storage. Beans picked too late develop well in flavour and vanillin but tend to burst at the base and are thus inferior in appearance, which has a detrimental effect on their sale price.

Not all vanilla farmers cure the harvest beans themselves; they may sell them to larger vanilla processing outfits that see to curing, conditioning, and export. The harvested beans are conveyed to local markets, quite often on foot and over long distances. Then, following transportation to the vanilla curing company or co-operative, the beans are first sorted by quality. Unripe beans are removed and treated separately, split beans are typically processed together with well-ripened beans and sorted out after the curing process – the next phase in vanilla production.