In a recent newsletter to their members, Lorna Glover Abungu of the Nevis Historical and Conservation Society (NHCS) graciously featured Gina's inspiring journey to Nevis and her lifelong dream of establishing a vanilla farm. At that time, Vanilla Paradise Nevis was just starting out, but now, after a year of growth and development, it has transformed in such remarkable ways that it's barely recognizable! We invite you to explore the original interview and get a glimpse of Vanilla Paradise Nevis’ beginnings. We look forward to  inviting the NHCS for an update interview to show the progress we have made since then!

Read the original article where Gina Empson, Vanilla Paradise Nevis’ Founder shares her story and passion for vanilla.

VANILLA PARADISE – LOCALLY BORN AND RAISED VANILLA BEANS!

New member Gina Empson moved to Nevis with a dream to grow vanilla, and shares with us here more information about this important ingredient and how you may soon be able to source it locally’.

Is vanilla your favourite ice cream? Is Coca Cola your favourite soft drink? If you answered yes to either question, then you know vanilla is an essential ingredient to your favourite sweets. But do you know what vanilla really is? And did you know vanilla thrives here on Nevis? Vanilla is a climbing orchid that needs a tree to give it physical support, shade and organic material. It is one of the few of the many thousand types of orchids that give fruit and the small flower is a discrete lime green colour.

This little flower has to be manually pollinated, and the fruit is a long green bean which takes nine months to ripen before it can be manually harvested and dried in the sun. After drying, the vanilla pod turns black and produces the wonderful aromatic scent you smell in shops and products.

A truly tropical plant, vanilla orchids (the genus is Vanilla Planifolia) grow between latitudes 20 degrees south and 20 degrees north. Moving to Nevis to farm vanilla, my plan was to import cuttings halfway across the world from the Indian Ocean islands of Reunion and Madagascar. I didn’t know that I would be lucky enough to find it growing wild on the island!

But how did vanilla get on Nevis? Let's go back five hundred years.

Hernán Cortés, the famous Spanish Conquistador, was invited by the Aztec Emperor Montezuma in 1519 to drink a mix of cacao and vanilla. Only kings were allowed to drink this “xocoatl” and the Aztecs considered it a divine beverage, that not only had healing properties but was also an aphrodisiac!

The Spanish brought cacao and vanilla as well as indigo, tobacco and potatoes back to Europe, but they stopped en route and probably left sample plants, or they arrived in Europe, saw that vanilla hates the cold and brought it back to the Caribbean. It is possible, and I am researching this hypothesis, that vanilla was growing on Nevis even before sugar cane was introduced in 1643.

In any case, Nevis is absolutely a vanilla paradise with the right temperature, the right rainfall, the right altitude, the right amount of sun and shade and everything except a pollinator for its little lime green orchid flowers. And thankfully, this is where humans come along.

The pollinator in Mexico was a very small bee called a Melipona bee (melipona beecheii), which is basically extinct and thus the flower has to be hand pollinated. This is trickier than it sounds because there is one flower a day which has to be pollinated early in the morning, otherwise it dries and drops off. So the work of pollinating is very manually intensive as is the farming; the plant takes three years to give flowers and the bean takes nine months to mature, which also explains why it is the world's most expensive spice, after saffron.

Vanilla, or vanillin the flavour from the vanilla bean, has a very complex chemical structure with some 250 different components. Vanillin can be synthesised but lacks the complexity of real vanilla which is why the price and demand for real vanilla remains high. The next time you eat a vanilla yogurt, ice cream, cake or smell an air freshener, check to see if you are enjoying real vanilla or the synthetic copy.

I started my vanilla farm this year, and now with proof of concept in my nursery, and having pollinated some 60 flowers, the first beans will be ready to harvest at the end of this year. I have 500 cuttings ready to be planted, so now I am ready to ramp up production and show that Nevis is really a vanilla paradise. Locally born and raised vanilla beans!

I would like to sincerely thank the Department of Agriculture, Nevis Investment Promotion Agency and the Department of Tourism for their aid and support in launching the farm and subsequently the eco-tourism that will accompany the project.