Tahaa - Vanilla Farm
To view any thumbnail picture full-size, click on it and it will appear in a new window.
Christine and her husband were French cruisers that visited Tahaa and liked it. They didn't stay though. They continued to cruise for several more years until they decided that they had finished Fiji. They then wanted to settle down and picked Tahaa as their paradise to live and raise their children. Being French, they could buy land and set up home. They started the Vanilla farm and a small Tour business around the island. Her husband knows the flora and fauna intimately. Unfortunately for us he was not there the day we visited, so we missed his tour. But Christine gave us an impressive insight into vanilla farming.
1. The cat waiting for the baby chicks
to finish eating the fish before she has her turn
2. Looking down from the vanilla fields at their wonderful house and it's
beautifully manicured gardens. Several small buildings go to make up the sprawling
house
Christine gave us a small tour of their
farm. It consisted of the hillside behind the house with rows of vanilla plants on
their host plants. Vanilla plants are orchids and require a host plant to grow
on. They use the stronger limbs of the host to reach for the sun.
1. A vanilla plant in bloom almost ready
to be polinated. The vanilla plant is "A" sexual. In other words it
has it's own male and female parts. They are manually polinated using a small
stick. A good worker can polinate 2000 plants a day. The plant has to
polinated the same day it blooms or it's pods will not turn into vanilla beans.
2. The vanilla plant with it's beans after polination, its seeds have turned
into the vanilla beans that we all love so much.
Views of the orchards of vanilla plants on
their host trees. You can see the vanilla plants at the base of the host trees.
Jerry and Christine on the hillside with the
vanilla farm behind.
Just some of the wonderful colour that can be
found in the wild here on Tahaa
A beautiful pineapple growing in their back
yard