vanilla

Sept 20, 2014  Vanilla plantation-Tonga

One of the things that we never got around to doing in French Polynesia was to visit a vanilla plantation so when I met a man in a bar who invited me to help him pollinate his vanilla plants, i leapt at the chance.  I know, it sounds like quite a pick up line but it was actually legit.  8:00 Sunday morning Ian showed up in his truck and we headed out of town, down dusty, bumpy, twisty roads through the jungle.  It all looked alike to me and I have no idea how he could tell one piece of jungle from the other but eventually he pulled over and announced that we were there.  Once out of the truck, he picked up a fallen palm branch and using a wicked looking knife carved a tiny stick, a little bigger than a toothpick which he handed to me.  This was to be my pollinating tool.  So equipped, we headed off to find the blossoms. 

This was not neat tidy rows of vines growing on wooden trellises.  This is overgrown jungle.  Apparently much of Tonga was planted with vanilla and then abandoned and the jungle has taken over.   Little by little Ian is clearing away the extra growth, leaving the vanilla vines and their supporting ficus trees. The plants twine around the trees and the trees provide just the right amount of shade.  In order to force the plants to bloom, the tops of the trees are cut off allowing more sun to get in.  This way the growers can control which part of their farm is producing and move from section to section in a steady rotation rather than having all the plants get ripe at once.  The occasional palm tree provides coconuts for mulch and a hedge of pineapple plants is just getting started which will help keep out the wandering pigs.

Meanwhile we stomped through the jungle looking for blossoms.  There are a pale yellow green, almost the same color as the leaves and not easy to spot.  They can be above your head or almost on the ground or anywhere in-between.  Aha! first blossom spotted.  Now to learn how to pollinate the flower.  Hold the stem carefully in one hand while bending the petals gently back to expose the throat.  Then with the toothpick in the other hand, bend the lip down to expose the tiny pollen bud.  Very carefully slide and roll the stick from the pistil onto the stamen, or possibly the other way around, and give it a little squeeze  Gently remove the stick and let go of the flower, leaving it looking a little bedraggled.  After a few tries I was judged competent to do it on my own.  I am not so sure that I actually successfully moved the pollen from pistle to stamina every time but at least some of them worked.  Each flower is ready to pollinate one day so you either get it or you don’t.  Apparently if every blossom produced a seed pod the plant would die of stress so it did not really matter if i missed some or did not really get it pollinated right.  In a truly natural setting there is a little bee that does the job of pollinating but vanilla is native to Mexico and when they brought it to Tonga they forgot to bring the bee along.

And so, for the next 2 hours we moved through the undergrowth looking for blossoms.  Ian would point out a couple of large trees as markers and we would work our way along until we met up again and then he would lay out a new section.  Little by little the blossoms became easier to spot and the pollinating went quicker.  Birds sang and there were butterflies everywhere.  I ducked under vines and climbed over them and went around big clumps of them. Sometimes there would be a single blossom and sometimes a whole cluster and then nothing for a long stretch. It was possible to sort of see the old layout of the rows and to imagine what it will look like in a few ears as the weeds are pulled out and the big trees removed.  Finally ian declared we were don.  We had done over 250 blossoms between the two of us.  Wish I could be here to see the results but we will be leaving Tonga in a week or so. 

So you see, sometimes it’s OK to trust a guy you meet in a bar on a tropical island, even if he has an outrageous pick up line