Vanilla in Dutch Greenhouses: A Discovery – From Research to Production

In the Netherlands many (semi‐)tropical crops are grown under glass and, after many years of research and growing of these crops, it is now possible to achieve higher production than ever before. The research started by reading some “basic” vanilla‐information in order to try to understand this plant, and getting some cuttings to begin growing vanilla on a small scale. Two years after starting growing Vanilla in the greenhouse, two of the plants began to flower and that was promising. Currently, three growing systems are being compared. These growing systems are a high wire system such as used with tomatoes, a short looping system and a long looping system. The advantage of cultivation in a greenhouse is the ability to control growth parameters and optimize the combination of these parameters for each stage of the plant's growth cycle.