I was looking through a binder that the inn left in the room for guests, and came across a Vanilla Farm that does tours. One of the guidebooks I referred to didn’t seem too impressed with the tour, but I decided to do it anyway. They had 2 choices – have lunch and do the tour, or, just do the tour and get coffee and ice cream after. So, I decided to just do the tour.
First, here is a link to the place: http://www.hawaiianvanilla.com
The directions they provided were really good so I had no trouble finding it.
Amongst other things I learned on the tour, I found out that this building used to be a slaughter house. Gruesome.
The oldest son of the family gave us our tour. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to take his photo. Oh well. Here are some other ones:
To get to the farm itself we had a short walk down a fairly steep hill from the main house.
This area is one of four similarly sized growing tents. Vanilla is part of the Orchid family. If you look at the leftmost row, you can see mulch in the raised bed – this allows for better drainage. They can also take down the darker ceiling shades to let more sun in.
here’s a close up:
And a different view. I didn’t know this until I did this tour but vanilla only grows within 25 degrees of the equator. Hawaii is at 24 degrees. Other countries that grow vanilla include Madagascar (some of the best vanilla), Micronesia (Tahiti) and Mexico.
If you look at the webpage for this farm, you’ll see that it’s family-owned and run and the first commercial vanilla farm in the US. The father died earlier in 2021, and the oldest son has full-fledged taken over operations, including changing some things that his dad used to do. For one, you can see that the plants are spaced about 6 ft apart, so they’re not touching each other. But, apparently vanilla plants like to grow more in a community. These were placed far apart so if one plant gets a fungus or something, it can’t make the other plants sick. The son (I sure wish I could remember his name … Travis? maybe? I guess I’ll use that for now until I find out otherwise). Anyway, Travis plans to start growing them closer together. That will increase their yield. And he has a room/enclosure with vanilla plants that he knows for a fact don’t have any funguses or viruses, so, he could always start over if necessary.
Each vanilla flower has to be hand-pollinated. And once the flower blooms it must be pollinated within 4 hours. The timeline during which the vanilla blooms is about 2 months so they have to be at the ready to pollinate for two months. The flowers don’t bloom when it’s dark out so at least they don’t have to be on top of it 24/7. There is one vanilla bean in the photo below – pretty much right in the middle of the shot. It’s still green.
Here’s some dried up beans that were left on the vine. The vanilla bean is actually picked when the tip of it turns yellow. Then they are sundried for about 9 months. They have to be careful that the beans don’t split so great care has to be taken to make sure they get enough sun but not too quickly or they’ll split. So, they’re rolled out on burlap in a sunny area. This farm trucks the beans to wherever on the island is sunny! At night the burlap is rolled back up and the beans are put in a ‘steam box’ (they’re using fishing coolers) where they continue to give off heat and steam from the drying process. This helps the beans remain supple.
After the tour it was back up the hill – I looked back and saw a nice view of the ocean so decided to take this photo.
Then had my little cup of coffee and ice cream while sitting in this area. Very nice!
I really liked these wood and resin tables
The drive back was pretty. Here’s some photos. Many of the non-main roads in Hawaii are not very wide. Including this one.
If you look very hard, you can see the chicken that had just crossed the road (little black thing on the left) presumably to get away from the wild turkey on the right.
Later the full moon came out – it was really bright and looked larger than usual. I didn’t get any good eclipse photos though. I loved seeing the reflection on the water.
So, this was Nov 18. Stay tuned for more updates – til then!