"White Monkey" wrote in message ...
"Small apartment" and vanilla don't exactly go hand in hand. Vanilla
requires high humidity, high heat, and won't flower until it is a
significant number of metres long.

Thanks for telling me this. The heat will be a problem, so I may not get one
after all... but as for it getting to a certain size, they climb, right? I
was planning to train it all over the kitchen window and environs; I have a
wire grid there already anyway. That room is so humid I need to open the
door to make tea, or I suffocate. Well, not quite that bad.... Does the
whole plant require high heat, or only the root system? I've heard very
interesting stuff about growing some warm-root vegetables with their top
leaves actually frosted, if the roots are kept warm. I suppose this is too
much to hope for with a vanilla orchid? Another point is that I don't plan
to live in this apartment forever; when we eventually moved, having grown
the plant awhile might give it a jump on flowering... ?

Umm... as White Monkey says, Vanilla planifolia has to get -really-
big before it flowers and needs more space and light than a kitchen
window can provide.
It is a -tropical- plant; the whole thing has to be kept warm. It is
essentially a greenhouse item. They are grown outdoors in Madagascar.

I hope you aren't considering it as a source of vanilla "beans". The
process of making vanilla pods is a kind of lengthy fermentation that
takes lots of heat and sunlight.


J. Del Col