Fertilizing a Vanilla Bean Orchid

The world has changed in the last year since I posted.  Instead of giving a summary based on my own opinions—which would of course be awesome—I’m simply going to tell you about a strange way to cope with boredom.  I found it in the bosom of my own family, but a quick search of YouTube shows that farmers in hot countries all over the world have perfected it.

I’m talking about fertilizing Vanilla Bean Orchids.  Vanilla beans grow in pods that form after the orchid ( a beautiful small yellow flower which lasts about a day) has been fertilized.  It’s a cash crop throughout the Caribbean, Hawaii and other hot humid places, but it rarely grows in greenhouses and it’s quite labor intensive.  The little bee that fertilized the flowers naturally is extinct so the vast genius of the farming hive-mind has come up with ways to fertilize the orchid by human hand.

All this is a lengthy process:  a vine Mr. Bellissimo bought years ago at a Rare Fruit and Vegetable Council (great t-shirts!) sale had broken free of its mundane terracotta pot by day 25 of the COVID sequestration and started a run to freedom across an old fence.

After a brief discussion of options which included training carpenter ants to take over the job of the sadly extinct bees,  and another choice advanced by myself, which offered forgetting about the whole  thing, we decided to take a wooden skewer and mess the pollen about inside the flower to see what happens.

We won’t know for about three years whether our carefree afternoon of fertilizing flowers worked.

                  Final Step

Please consult experts if you should decide to try this at home.  Fat fingers destroy the little flower which would have dropped off the vine in a matter of hours.

So now we wait, and slowly reenter a world which may call for the kind of patience and adaptability that fertilizing Vanilla Bean Orchids provides.