An article in French daily paper Le Monde informed us of a chronic deficit in the offer of natural vanilla beans. At the same time we found a large Vanilla Pompona endemic plant along a path in our property in Costa Rica.
The project to grow vanilla plants for commercial purposes became obvious. At the time, we had no idea of how much work this was going to be, we simply got started without much planning.
How shall we get a decent number of plants for our plantation was our first thinking? How do we get the basic information and training on Vanilla cultivation?
We searched the internet. There was no vanilla plant offering among Costa Rica’s plant nurseries. Looking for in vitro multiplication laboratories, our luck was to meet Marco PAEZ, the owner of Cristal Vitro. “I am ok to invest in vanilla multiplication” was his answer!
He selected a v. pompona hybrid and made 5.000 clones of it for us. 18 months later Gaby his head of production called: we are Ok to deliver the first batch of baby vanillas.
These very young plants were installed in a nursery at Hacienda las Vainillas.
After one year in the nursery they had become strong enough to be moved to the rain forest.
Next thing then: we each individual plant was installed in the forest on a support…
