Q My vanilla orchid flowers profusely in the spring. My dilemma is pollinating the flowers. I understand it is a timely process to achieve an actual, usable bean. I would still like to try. I have my trusty soft paintbrush. Any method that I have tried so far has yielded nothing and 1 have not seen anything that remotely looks like pollen. Please explain how to ollinate vanilla.

A You can put away your trusty paint brush. Orchids have a discrete pollen mass so they must be pollinated by a clump of pollen rather than a smattering of individual grains. While I am hardly an expert on the process, this is what I would advise. If you look at a flower, the central protruding area, or column, will have at its tip a creamy cap that you can carefully dislodge with a toothpick to reveal the pollen masses (called pollinia). You lift these off with the tip of the toothpick and, on the underside of the column, just behind where the pollen was attached, you will see a shiny and sticky area, which is the stigmatic surface. Place the pollen on this area and it will adhere strongly. If you have a successful pollination, the flower will collapse in the late afternoon as usual but the "stalk" of the flower, which is really an immature ovary, will start to swell and grow into a vanilla bean, as it is commonly called. The only other thing you need to do is make sure you do not sleep in on days your vanilla vine flowers, because it seems as if the earlier in the day the newly opened flower is pollinated the better your chances of a successful result. —Andy Easton.