One Week to the VIP Chocolate Festival Evening

Can you believe it's only one week away until the VIP party?  I'm bringing this plant with me to show people how much cacao can grow and what it looks like as a plant.  Last year there were a couple around the showroom but none of them were quire this large.  Maybe I'll have some competition and get to see a plant from last year come back.  That would be awesome!  This guy wasn't even... Ok so it was concieved.  I mean it was already in pod form so it was concieved seeral months earlier.  But it wasn't planted until after last year's festival.

Since last post of this guy, it's grown over 4 inches.  This kinda looks like a split photo a little to me with the taller and shorter split by the cubicle wall.  If you look on the right of the shorter one though there is an offshoot that has also grown a few inches and will likely overshoot the main plant trunk.

If you look behind the plant on the left you will see one of the vanilla orchid pots.  I decided to give it a little more sun so I rigged up a solid copper wire hanger. I knew keeping a bunch of copper wires would come in handy some day.  It's in the shape of an iron hanger with the loop that goes around the pot but it's so much easier to work with copper.  I had that thing bend into shape by hand in no time.  Yet is's strong enough to hold the pot with no issues.  Can't say the same for holding a larger pot but a little three inch pot is fine.

Recent Cacao Cookery

Before making anything with a cacao pod there are different things you need to do with it.  In this case we're not making chocolate but cacao pulp and husk additives for flavor and pectin.

Also we unexpectedly found out that you can also eat part of the pod itself.  It's not very flavorful and it's quite slimy but in the end it can keep you from being hungry if you have nothing else.  It reminds me a little bit of the pad of a prickly pear cactus, minus the spines.

Vanilla Orchid Progress

This is only one of my vanilla orchid pots that I got back in January.  They've tripled in size and are still growing.

To see just how fast that is I've decided to do a time lapse set.  I will be taking one picture a day for a currently unspecified time from about the same location and see how these little guys are really doing.

I have a newly acquired lamp shining on this on now so it can imitate getting better lighting  that it has been getting.  Maybe it'll help it grow a little faster and with larger leaves.  The current new leaves are significantly smaller than the ones it came with.  It's at least still growing though and faster than I figured it might.  The control pot is still just getting the office fluorescents. Really how can you tell if something really helps or not unless you have a control group.  This not only tells me if the extra light helps but if fluorescent light is good enough for growing vanilla orchids in general.  The light I'm using has three settings, off, low, and high.  I start and end (not including off) with the low setting for half an hour to mimic the sun rising and setting.  Unfortunately it doesn't move.  That's a bit more realism than I', willing to put the work into doing.