Here is a link to everything you ever wanted to know about the vanilla orchid.

Vanilla information

Seriously, to get fine tuned advice you need to tell the readers here where you are in the USA.

Oh, right. Sorry about that. I live in the Philippines and right now we are in the wet season: hot and humid with moderate to heavy rainfalls (if there is a typhoon/monsoon). Temperature ranges from HIGH 70s to MID 80s for a regular day. In a few months (about Nov. or Dec. until February to mid March), it will get quite cold; HIGH 60s to LOW 70s. I'm not sure which part of US that our climate would be comparable to.

As arthurm says, without knowing where your parents are going to be growing the plant, all this may be an exercise in futility.

Many years ago I grew a Vanilla vine successfully in a small greenhouse. At various times the greenhouse was located In KS, FL, VA, and SC. I flowered the plant, and produced several beans. I will tell you what I did, an you can modify to suit your conditions.

Vanilla is a rambling vine that requires considerable room or some difficult training to grow.

I used a piece of Palmetto log to grow my plant in. The log was found in a fresh water environment (logs found around beaches might contain salt). The center of one end of the log had rotted out to form a cone shaped depression. I filled the depression with orchid fir bark mix, and placed the log on the ground at the end of one of my benches. The greenhouse was set up to grow primarily Cattleya type orchids. Fairly high light, and minimum temps around 55 deg. F.

I started with about four joints of vine that had leaves and several roots a few inches long. I removed the leaves from the bottom half of the plant and stuck it down in the bark mix.

The plant sprouted with two growing tips. I would let the vines grow over the side of the log, and pin the top part of it to the log, and when the trailing vine got long enough, would slowly train it back up into the "bowl", and let it root into the bark mix again. Eventually I had a log covered with vines.

The first time we had to move the greenhouse, I discovered the roots had grown down through the log and were happily growing deep in the Kansas soil.

The plant is basically an epiphyte, but the roots will happily adapt to growing in soil...... They simply grow a thick covering of root hairs in soil.

The plant seems to bloom best on pendant vines, so I allowed my vines to trail down to the ground, and (after I discovered they would grow in the ground) placed pots and aluminum foil under them to prevent them from attaching to the ground, (or anything else) then would drape them over the top of the log again for a fresh start.

There is a trick to pollinating the blooms which is far to complicated to go into here, but once you discover where the real stigma is, it Is a simple matter to hand pollinate the blooms.

I never even tried to cure the beans......arthurm's link explains why.

Hope this helps.

Bil

I'll be using it as a garden plant. This is my first time growing an orchid. So is there a certain height it needs to be before it will bloom?

They like to be long, but no specific length. My first ones I didn't know they were flowering until one of the tops broke off and fell down. It had a lot of flowers and buds. That was from about 20 metres up. Later I placed others on shorter tree stumps and they flowered at about 6 or 7 metres length (height). So they seem to need some length and then when they run out of growing space they flower.

Is it possible to plant my vanilla on a 4-inch or 6-inch diameter pot filled with sphagnum moss, AND build a minimum of 4 or 6 meters of trellis lined with sphagnum moss for it to grow on? We have limited vertical space.

I might consider a bit larger pot....Over time the roots will fill it, and some of those roots will find their way out a drain hole, or over the side of the pot, or down from the vines above, and establish themselves in the soil, making the position all but permanent.

Some bark mix in the pot might help also.

I would build the trellis with wood....not treated, probably Cypress. train the vine on that and when a vine wandered off and headed for the ground, when it got long enough, gently train it back up onto the trellis. You will soon have a tangled mass of green vines.

The company I worked for had a trellis build of wood frame and "chicken wire" built in the center of one of their benches. It was about 8 feet long and about 6 feet above the bench. You could hardly see through the vines. Many roots had grown down into the ground, and you could no longer determine where the plant was originally planted. When a customer wanted a piece, they simply whacked off several sections of vine with roots, and sold it to them.

Bill

Why where you are is important information."it will get quite cold; HIGH 60s to LOW 70s" smiled when I saw this.

In an orchid society with about 90 members only one grower has a vanilla and he has a heated house where he grows Phalaenopsis. It grows as described by the previous posters with a rambling habit and is hard to know where it starts and ends.

I've never grown them in pots but what I did notice was when I planted stems in soil the part of the stem under the soil always rotted. Higher up one or two roots would come down and go into the soil. Now, about 10 years after putting in my first plants, their stems start about 4 or 5 metres above ground with only 3 or 4 roots coming down to the ground. One that I planted on a 1.5 metre tall stump (along with other plants) has looped around all over but has never flowered. I've heard of people growing them indoors and having them grow up the walls and along the ceiling. They will attach themselves to painted surfaces (no need for sphagnum). Of course it damages the paintwork when they're taken down.