My favourite flower is the orchid. I’ve always liked the orchid, and my fondness for this flower only increased when I learned vanilla comes from a type of orchid, namely, the vanilla orchid. As I’ve taken to cooking in the past year, I’ve come to highly value vanilla. Not just a degrogatory term for boring sex, it can also be used to flavour many a dish, and I have grown to love it. So when I learned about the vanilla orchid, I became vaguely determined to acquire and grow one.
Then I read this article. The vanilla orchid, it seems, is a bastard to grow, and not at all as pretty as the orchids I normally admire. Appearently it needs to be hand pollinated, unless you happen to be growing your vanilla orchid in the vanilla region of mexico, which is home to the only sort of bee that can pollinate the plant in the wild. And you need to wait till the damn thing has grown more than 3 metres till you’ll get any seed pods, and then the curing process takes several months. All in all, a much more arduous way of obtaining vanilla then just heading to the super market to buy some vanilla extract, or some vanilla bean pods.
I think maybe I should start with something a bit more simple, like growing that chilli plant i bought a few years ago.