Today I finally got to try the vanilla that I planted in the ground almost 6 years ago. Even though the bottle date says otherwise, this vanilla was actually pollinated almost 3 years ago.

It takes almost 9 months after pollinating for a vanilla bean (technically a pod) to be mature enough to harvest. After harvesting, it takes almost another 6-9 months to ferment and then fully cure (depending on how traditional you want to be with the cure). After that, it takes an additional 9 months to a year of soaking in vodka to get a concentration high enough to be considered vanilla.

This being my first attempt at curing (or at least 2 years ago it was), I know I could have cured them longer and gotten more potency. We have a mother that this was decanted off off where we put 20 beans into 2 liters of vodka.

My partner and I did a testing today and I have to say it was magical. We compared it with the Costco brand Madagascar vanilla and it completely blew it away in terms of flavor... if the Costco vanilla was more concentrated (probably I didn't cure my beans fully).

It was much.. brighter and much more floral than the Costco vanilla. Also, and it wasn't until we went back and forth between the Costco and our vanilla to compare a few times, but because we now had this much higher quality vanilla to compare to, we actually started tasting off notes in the Costco vanilla. Which was interesting because we have noticed that before,but thought it was something else. After tasting ours, and comparing it, we could clearly taste a 'moldy' or forest floor flavor in the Costco that ours didn't have any hint of.

So just posting because this is an accomplishment almost 6+ years in the making. The number of beans harvested has gone up every year and this year we probably had 20x the number of flowers of previous years because our vines are finally becoming fully mature. We're hoping to have enough to actually sell some (just cured beans) starting maybe holiday season this year.

Thank you for engaging with this post.

(! necessary gratuitous vanilla flower and vine shots)

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[–] InvalidName2@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

However, thats not to say that much smaller vanilla plants aren’t “fully mature”. The plant doesn’t need to reach these great heights to be considered fully mature.

Keep in mind that my comment wasn't written to be part of a dissertation or for a scientific journal so the terminology isn't overly pedantic or precise. The colloquial label "mature / fully mature" is a well-established concept in the trade in my part of the world, though. Even top breeders/growers will use that kind of terminology when speaking about these plants.

There's a difference between blooming sized plants versus mature / fully mature plants. Blooming size is typically is used for plants (especially orchids) that are old enough and large enough that you can reasonably expect them to bloom in season. But, blooming size is not the same as mature, where these plants are reaching their full potential. Fully mature is where they are large and old enough that they're blooming reliably, but also reaching their full potential in terms of number of spikes, number of blooms per spike, and flowers are reaching their full size potential, and so on.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Well I'd be super interested in any resources you can offer for how/ what people are doing in your part of the world. I've toured and met with many of the vanilla growers in my neck of the woods, but we're genuinely pretty 'micro' in the world of vanilla production. Even all of the vanilla growers across all islands don't even add up to a mid-small size producer in some where like Mexico, Madagascar or Indonesia.