Beyond the Flowering Season at Vanilla Paradise Nevis

Gina hard at work preparing newly harvested Vanilla vine cuttings

Embarking on the Second Half of the Farming Year at Vanilla Paradise Nevis

The end of the flowering season does not mean that it’s holiday time for us at Vanilla Paradise Nevis. Certainly, the laborious early-morning hand-pollination of the orchids is over, and our beans are growing, but now the second period of high intensity work on the farm begins.  This consists of maintenance and making new cuttings for next year’s growth of flowers. 

Maintaining Nature's Balance: Weed Management

Of course, maintenance is a year-long endeavour but now we have more time to dedicate to making sure we eliminate weeds from our trailing vines.  As we are an organic farm, we do not use any pesticides.  Weeding is manual and prevention is covering the ground with upturned coconut husks to stop growth. The wild tamarind and acacias are our most tenuous weeds. The land we are farming was once, some 400 years ago virgin forest but hard wood, such as lignum vitae, was taken to build galleons and then the land was cleared for crops and sugar cane. After each clearing of the land, the strongest weeds come back very fast. So weeding for us is keeping down the wild tamarind and the Accacia tree which is also known as the Thorn tree. It has really nasty spines! The quickest way to get blisters on your hands is to spend an hour pulling up wild tamarind roots and Acacia!  Only the goats and giraffes can eat it and while we don’t have giraffes on Nevis we do have plenty of goats!

Backbreaking work!

On an organic farm the only way to weed is by hand!

Weed-control and watering

Coconut husks prevent new weed growth and the overhead irrigation pipes replace the trusty old watering-cans!

Irrigation

Vines are checked individually and watered: up to now, we have done most of the watering by hand, using trusty watering-cans, but now we are connected to government water and are starting to fill the cisterns that are close by. Rather than using drip irrigation we have gone for  overhead mist producing nozzles that we can put on manually or programme. Vanilla has a root system that is superficial, and the drip system delivers the water some 20cm below the surface which is too deep for the vanilla orchids but just perfect for the weeds! So in fact with a drip system, we are watering the weeds and not the vanilla orchids. Another important point in favour of mist irrigation is that it allows us to reduce the temperature in the shade house by about 6 deg Centigrade and this is not possible with a drip system.

Expanding the Family: Propagating Vines

We now have time to concentrate on making cuttings from existing vines in our shade houses, which we will supplement with local vines.  We have been extremely lucky to have found small pockets of vanilla plants growing naturally in the forest and we will be hiking up to find them and take cuttings.  Of course, we respect nature and want to adhere to our pledge to sustainability, so we always take cuttings that allow the plant to carry on thriving (and giving!).  Our objective is to have 5000 orchid plants in order to have a commercially viable quantity.

Intrepid Gina!

Taking vanilla vine cuttings from the forest on Nevis

With the arrival of the second phase of our working year at Vanilla Paradise Nevis, we are building on the success of the first phase of flowering and pollinating, making sure the beans are healthy and growing, and putting in the groundwork for the next pollination season.  We often hear that “A Farmers Work is never done”:  we totally agree.