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Tahaa - Vanilla Farm
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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Views of the orchards of vanilla plants on their host trees. You can see the vanilla plants at the base of the host trees
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Jerry and Christine on the hillside with the vanilla farm behind.
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Just some of the wonderful colour that can be found in the wild here on Tahaa
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A beautiful pineapple growing in their back yard
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