 Good morning my name is Bob Price I'm the curator of the Bayard of Botanical Gardens in Bayard of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and this morning I'm going to pollinate a vanilla flower to show you how to make your own vanilla beans. Okay so let's get going here. So normally of course this would be connected to a plant I've taken one off for the purpose of our demonstration but this is the vanilla orchid flower you can see it's a classical looking orchid it's a very very delicate orchid in the flower of the orchid or vanilla orchid last just one day. Okay so normally I would just work on the plants but I have picked one off here just to show you when you're pollinating the orchids you can go ahead and remove two petals to make it easier for you to work. I've prepared a toothpick by breaking it in half and creating a small blade and so we're going to get in here and we're going to actually remove part of this flower to get into where we need to be and to work on pollinating this vanilla orchid. Now this is done best in the morning between the hours of 11 and two in the afternoon or maybe a little before you could probably start at 10 and they're very sensitive the orchid blooms last one day so you do have a cut a small little window of opportunity we usually do them in the late morning and so the inside of the flower will cut away here we'll reveal we've got what's called the column which is this part here this is the column this is the anther cap this is called the rustleum cap and in between both of them is where you're going to find the pollen so first of all the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to fold back the anther cap and get our pollen out of there. A lot of times they only have a small amount of pollen so you want to try to get it off off of the tip of the anther cap that is the pollen that is the pollen from the vanilla orchid. Okay once we have our pollen on the tip of our toothpick what we do is we take it in and we put it behind the rustleum cap which is the other part of the bloom and I sort of just massage it in there just a little bit and then I press down on it and you are done. Okay and six months later you're going to have it all goes well you'll have a vanilla bean on your plant it takes a little bit of practice to get get up your speed you really do have to take the flower apart like this to be able to work on them fast sometimes in here we have several hundred flowers that we have to try to pollinate so we've devised this method to work fast and to ensure that we can see what we're doing so if you would like us to see over here we have some vanilla beans that are pollinated already here in our garden the vanilla beans bloom in May and April this was pollinated yesterday this one will be pollinated later this morning these are some that were successfully pollinated you can see that the stem of the flower is beginning to swell that indicates that successful pollination has occurred this this will actually here not be turning into a vanilla bean takes about six months on the plant and yeah and you're ready to go you're ready to make vanilla ice cream and desserts crumberlay anything that you need that might need vanilla thank you come to visit us in Port of Ayarta