Maclauchlin river, Castle Bruce, Commonwealth of Dominica

On-going Vanilla Plantation development to 1 hectare 🌱 Subscription open

Maclauchlin river is where Sylvanilla® was born in February 2015, from few Vanilla pods cultivated in the Clarke family farm on the East coast of the Nature Island of Dominica. Maclauchlin farm has been continuously transmitted for more than 10 generations now and is planted with coconut, banana and avocado trees, mango trees, sugar cane, guava and orange trees, cocoa, coffee trees, vanilla vines, cherries and plums trees, ginger and turmeric, dasheen and tannia, and I'm certainly forgetting lots of them. It's a mesmerizing abundance of fruits, roots, vegetables and aromatic herbs, nestled right inside the rainforest and crossed by the river which descends to the rivermouth and the Atlantic Ocean, loaded with fishes, shells and crayfishes.

This is where we, Don Clarke aka @TheCaribbeanGardener and Sylvie Polano aka @Sylvanilla®, met and established in February 2015 and continuously cultivate since, in limited quantity, a few different species of Vanilla vines. With focus on quality, our aim is to continuously develop 1 hectare parcel of Vanilla and to gradually increase and diversify our production, as we are meantime re-building what we've lost in the last hurricane. A little wood house with a storage room, a few sliding trays, some wood boxes and the bamboo pipeline for pure water straight from the river, is all we miss and always have to re-build.

Coming from the professional gastronomie and hotellerie world, with a solid expertise too in commodity trading, it is when I met Don and explored the family farm nestled in the heart of a tropical forest populated with fruit trees, sugar canes, vanilla vines and crossed by a river leading to the immensity of the Atlantic ocean, that I finally could link my area of expertise and vocation. Don is a fisherman and farmer and I am a gastronomie professional and natural resources trade operator. What else we needed? Our agroforestry fellow farmers all together. What I was previously doing for mining and trading companies, I could finally do it for organic and agroforestry farmers and directly connect agroforestry producers and professionals of the gastronomy and culinary world.

We both also work aside, Don is a professional fisherman in Castle Bruce, Saint-Sauveur and Marigot and farm since his young age. He also used to grow micro-greens by UMAMI in Zurich Switzerland for couple years, while I am continuously learning about Vanilla cultivation, train new vanilla farmers and organise vanilla cultivation and refining processes training as well as cooking sessions with chefs, professional end-users and private customers, and devote my full-time to trade specialty Vanilla since.

With a little work in symbiosis with the nature, Maclauchlin farm starts to reach back to dizaines of kilos of vanilla pods produced and cured, and many more organic crops to come by 2025 and 2026 already ! To make it happens you too can participate to Maclauchlin' Farm development program by Sylvanilla® from 5-Francs already🌱