 Greetings! Beautiful warm sunny day here in Hawaii. Today's project is I'm gonna work with my Vanilla orchids. The stage of my production at this point is making more plants. I'm trying to increase the orchids that I got. Some years back a friend of mine let me strip some down from his trees down in lower Puna and I started out by just sticking them in the soil beneath the few of my coffee plants and citrus trees and letting the orchids begin to grow up. Well that was more or less successful. The orchids seemed to contract some sorts of wilds or viruses on occasion when they came in contact with the earth here. So I switched my program a few years ago and I started growing all the orchids in soilless mediums and containers sitting on top the ground and just letting them scramble through the trees. That's been a lot more successful and it's been really easy from way to. We can cut these orchids up into little pieces and propagate them if we wish to but if the rate that I need the orchid plants and that I can get to them the simplest way for me is to do what's known in the gardening vernacular as pegging. I just take the vines which will grow almost six foot and six months around here. Pull them down because that's part of the basic process and growing vanilla as you have to keep the vines tamed if they have something high that they can go into. I go after them with a stick and I pull them down from the plants and then I bring them down low and loop them around kind of the same way I do my blackberries. Pretty similar actually. Then some of the vines I will take them and I will set them back into more containers and just put a rock on top of them so I get a new vine that I can cut loose and move over to another plant. At this point here I'm growing the vanilla in coffee trees mostly. The coffee trees for me have been the most successful place to plant them. Tom Sharky down by Hilo I see he does them up his cattal. I tried them in citrus and found the canopies were too dark to dense. The orchid didn't do well. Coffee is a little better the shade is spotty and so it works. The orchid doesn't like full hot intense sun but it doesn't like it when it's too dark either. So I've chosen to trellis them in my coffee plants. Of course you could take on a more technological aspect to this and build trellis is there's a party over there by Captain Cook. I know it has an elephant farm. Everything is in shade lab inside of a house and they're using artificial mediums on PVC pipes and so on. It's totally high-tech stuff. Here I'm working with a much more naturalized approach to growing the orchid. That's right here is coffee plant and it has an orchid trailing through it all over the place. Right here you can see there's a little bit of soil on these roots. I had to pull this up the orchid. It scrambled from the coffee tree and had gone over here and was actually anchoring to the saw horse and this is next to my carport and so like I say periodically grabbing these vines and coiling them back into the plants where they're supposed to be as part of the maintenance. My preference is using either two or three gallon nursery pots. This one here has a band of copper around it. It's going to keep the slugs out. Well keep them out for good but it's a good start. Anyway inside the pot I have filled it with chopped coconut. This is the hole from the coconut and the outside. The bring it here to the island in huge quantities. Most of it comes from Cirlanta. They have an industry there where they produce this product. A lot of us like to use this instead of spag-n-peat because it's much more sustainable. I like using it because it's soilless. It doesn't have any diseases in it. It's pretty cheap. It's lightweight. It's a really good thing to use. It's easy. Comes with big bales. I don't pay a lot for it. Anyway I've taken it and I put it right here into a container. Now the next thing I'm going to do is find a piece of the orchid that I want to put into this container to peg. That didn't take me to one. Here's one right here. This has scrambled. Oh no the plant. Down on the ground here a while ago. I'm going to take the orchid and I'm going to place it into a container at the base of the plant where it's a little bit shady down there. I've got my container down here at the base of the plant. You'll see the orchid produces these aerial roots. They grab onto everything. I'm going to take part of it that's produced a rut. I'm going to drop it inside the container here and I'm going to push a little bit of the coconut hole on top of it. Then I'm going to take a suitable stone. Place the stone on the top of the orchid to make sure that it doesn't come loose from there. I'm pushing it backwards here into the shade just a little bit so that it has a little bit of rest. Okay well just a case you didn't see that the first time was do it one more time. Here I have another bucket again filled with the coconut hole. Right here I had one great big old vine. This one. There we go. Yeah that's a big one. Alright so I'm going to put the pot right down there in the shade. Okay so once again there's the tip of the orchid right there. I've got a piece of it here that's got the root on it. About right there should work. There we go. Okay now I'm just going to pick up some of the cocoa hole. Drop it right on top. Put a rock on it to keep it in there. Oh then just to keep things from getting too messy. I'm going to take this and position it here somehow in this plant like that. Then I'm going to put a tire out it right there so it can't come loose. I don't know if I want here somewhere. There we go. There's one more. I think we'll tie it right here too. I'll put a couple of these others. Now once these get started scrambling up the plants there's no real need here to worry about attaching them because if you look here under my finger this is one of the aerial roots. There's another one here and now I tell you these things literally glue themselves down to a surface. Once they find something they can attach to. See here this one's growing out comes out here and hooks right down the trunk. It gets pretty firm on there. They literally glue themselves down to the surface. Alright here's a container that I did a year ago. This was pegged right down the row here off the same plants. I'm using in this one I used a little different medium. I have a mixture of the coconut hull and peat moss and pearlite but basically soil is again. The orchid was set in here. It pegged itself then I went and I pushed a stick from prune of my coffee in here. Look at lean the stick up against the side of a coffee plant and then the orchid just obliged by taking off and scrambling all through the plant. It's all over the top here. This one hasn't gotten quite big enough in a year that I have to worry about pegging it or getting any more out of it. It's just managed to climb up to the top of the coffee. So there you have it pretty simple. This is really not a hard plant to grow. Delicious, delicious vanilla beans though are a whole of these story. Vanilla beans here almost like cherimoias. You have to go through and handpollinate every little flower and so that will be a retirement project for me as I run around and act like a bee and create the vanilla beans here. But well worth it almost all of us love vanilla. Hawaii is the only state in the United States where we can grow both vanilla and chocolate here plus coffee. Oh the good stuff in life is all here in Hawaii. Can't do it in Connecticut. Sorry not without a greenhouse. The orchid could be grown under hot house conditions. I've seen some in San Francisco for instance in hot houses producing. Since I have to be hand pollinated anyway it does work inside of a greenhouse. It's just it has to be a pretty big one and you have to be going to give up quite a bit of space because this is a big orchid. As I said six months in this climate I have six foot of vine off the orchid and my plants aren't that old yet. I think I started this project about four or five years ago and at first it wasn't very successful. I had a few problems. Now I'm starting to get her down. It's working out well. I'm looking forward to continue propagating these orchids. I want to see them pretty much in all the coffee trees all the way around the the edge of my life over here at least near the house where I can walk out and work with them. They bloom once a year. This area usually around April to May and then you have to go in and hand pollinate those little flowers. There is a whole process in carrying the nelebiens and all that stuff too. So this is as much work as a combination between growing raspberries and growing cheromias I believe both together. It's probably as much work as Vennel if you were wondering why it's so expensive in this store. That'll answer it for you. Anyway it's working out well over here. I'm liking the project. It's becoming one of my favorite orchids and I can't wait to start making my own Vennel extract over here either. Happy gardening. Enjoy.