Vanilla Cultivation

Vanilla is a kind of orchid plants. More than 20,000 varieties of orchids, vanilla is the only one that produces something edible.

This plant is a species of vines that require some sort of buffer, and a little shade. Vanilla plant is usually spread on trees in tropical wet forests in the lowlands.

In Mexico, traditional plantations using indigenous plants such as pichoco as a buffer. But recently, the orange tree is quite successful to be used as a buffer of vanilla plants.

Vanilla produces greenish yellow flowers that look like waxy and grow in clusters. Each flower only blooms for a few hours one day a year only.

The Indians Totonak known as people who are very carefully pollinate the vanilla plants.

They only pollinate a few flowers in each cluster, so that the plant's energy is not depleted, which can weaken it and make it easy to crop pests.

In like manner do the Indians, the results are very good, a long green fruit with very small seeds. The fruit are harvested by hand, from six to nine months later, before completely cooked.