A Great Papaya

Just recently I was introduced to a papaya that is the tastiest, sweetest one I've tasted. I thought I've had some good ones in the past, but this one is better. I haven't the foggiest idea what the name of this variety is, but the man I got them from said he was told it was from Thailand. He grew his own trees from seed he had saved from the fruit. So I'm trying the same. I know that papayas will cross with others around them, but since his trees are fairly isolated, I'm hoping the seeds grow pretty much true to type. 

This papaya is large and elongated. Red inside like a strawberry papaya, but far more sweet and flavorful. The tree starts producing early and low along the trunk. This makes picking far easier in the beginning. 

I have several hundred seeds that I've saved from the fruits I've eaten. Two weeks ago I sowed my first batch in some moist peat moss, kept them warm, and just now some of the seeds are starting to germinate. It takes that long for papaya seed to sprout. I just potted up my first 150 germinated seeds. Exciting, isn't it!!! 

I'm not sure if this variety will be successful in producing good papayas on my farm. My place is rather high in elevation and cool at night. But we shall see. The vast majority of my seedlings will end up at a farm a few miles down the road, at a lower and warmer elevation. It should be successful down there. Any if those farmers are successful in getting tasty sweet papayas from these trees, it will give them a year around income boost. Right now their farm income is rather seasonal and sporadic. 

I'm starting the sprouted seeds in cans......mostly old Spam cans, but also some cat food cans. Papayas are shallow rooted, with roots that spread laterally more so than vertically. So they will do ok starting out in these cans. I will be gently using a fork to extract them from their cans when it comes time to transplant them.

future papaya trees

Male Papaya With Fruits!

Papaya trees, for those who have never grown them, come either as a male, a female, or a hermaphrodite (both male and female in the same flower). Male trees produce just flowers that produce pollen, female trees produce fruits (usually quite large in size) but not pollen, and hermaphodites have flowers that produce both and have "normal" sized fruits. 

Normally male papaya trees do not produce fruit. That's pretty simple to understand. But sometimes they do! For real! 

I have this male tree, above, growing along the driveway. It's not in my way and I simply haven't bothered to remove it. It's fine with me if it grows there for a while. But I noticed something odd. It has fruits dangling down at the end of long stems that were once flower stalks. The very last flower on the spray of flowers on that stalk turned out producing a fruit. Amazing. 

Not every flower stalk ends up bearing a fruit, but several have thus far. The fruits have been hanging there for weeks, gradually getting bigger, though none have ripened so far. I'm curious if they will ripen and if they will have seeds inside. 

Papaya Experiment

I love to experiment. I suppose you noticed that by now. Well, someone asked me how to propagate a papaya tree so that it would produce true to the original fruit type. You see, if I save seed from an exceptionally nice papaya fruit, that seed may have been produced with pollen from some other less desirable tree, therefore giving less preferred fruit in the next generation. Papaya doesn't come true to seed, and unless one intentionally controls the pollination process, you never know what you'll get. Maybe similar to the mother tree, maybe not. 

So here I am. I find myself with a tree producing a nice flavored fruit. How can I clone this tree? I suppose I could reproduce it via tissure culture, although in not sure that works with papayas. But regardless, I don't have the equipment nor the skill to do tissure culture propagation. Or I could purposely pollinate a female flower with the tree's own pollen and hope for the best. This tree came from seed given to me, so I don't know it's genetic background. So even self pollinating it may not give me the type of fruit I am looking for. This tree could be like a mixbred mutt....a combination of assorted DNA. 

Air laying is a possibility if a tree produces side branches. I've never heard of anyone air layering a papaya. But it's something I plan to try in the future if my current experiment fails. The other day an elderly neighbor suggested the "tropics method" of simply taking a cutting and sticking it into the ground. Ok. That's the easiest method, and surprisingly it works for a lot of tropical plants. Will it work for papaya? I haven't the foggiest idea. Sooooo, why not give it a try? 

Above is the papaya I will experiment with. It has grown two side shoots coming off the "trunk". 

Here's a closer photo. Stepping up to the tree, I bravely and firmly snapped the too shoots off from the tree. Having never done this before I wasn't even sure if the shoots would come off. Would I need a saw? Would they just bend? Surprisingly they came of easily and cleanly. 

So here are my two shoots. The stalks are firm and somewhat woody at the base, no longer green. When I removed them from the trunk, they came off with a "collar" at their base. The collar is a decided raised band around the stalk where it joins the trunk. In some plants, roots grow out from the collar zone, so I wonder if this is important for papayas too. I was careful to leave the collars intact and undamaged. I next removed all the leaves except for the top few baby leaves.

I then planted about 10 inches of the stalk into the ground and watered them well. By the next day the leaves had wilted. I had expected that they would. So I again watered the shoots. The past several days have been overcast with light drizzle, which is excellent for this experiment. The ground is staying moist. There has been no wind to dry the shoots out. And importantly, no sun. The weather conditions are giving these shoots their best chance at rooting via this simplistic method. 

I don't know how long it will take for roots to develop, assuming that roots will actually grow at all. But 6 days have passed and the leaves still look perky and the stalks haven't rotted yet. We will have to check back in on this experiment in a week or two and see what's happened. 

If this experiment fails, I plan to try using some rooting hormone on the next attempt. Well actually, I plan to consult a friend who is retired from agricultural research. He may be able to give me options to try. 

Papayas

I've decided to grow plenty of papayas for livestock feed. They are really easy to grow here. And since me or my friends eat a papaya every day, I have access to scads of seeds. 

Each papaya contains dozens if not hundreds of seeds. The seeds are those round little black things.

By the way, papayas come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. I have the yellow-orange and the pinkish ones growing in my area. The animals like both equally. 

Which livestock animals eat papayas? Every one that I have. Chickens. Rabbits. Pigs. Goats. Sheep. Horse. Donkeys. Only our dogs and cats don't. And quite honestly, I haven't tried it with the dogs. 

I was surprised to find out that the entire plant is edible. Our goat and horse educated me on this score. Leaves, stems, fruits, flowers. They devour them all. The only thing left behind is the woody truck. Of course I wasn't intending to feed my trees to them when they were giving me my papaya lessons. Those scoundrels escaped the pasture and wiped me out, and not just the papayas. The four footed destructo-team also cycloned through a banana patch. That's how I found out that the entire banana tree was edible too, at least as livestock fodder.

So now I grow papaya seedlings for the rabbits and as a treat for the others. And I always leave a few of the most robust seedlings to grow into trees. The fruits are welcomed not only by my animals, but they also make for a good breakfast for me and my friends. 

The little tree above I saved from pulling out because it happened to come up next to a baby coffee tree. It will provide a little intermittent shade while the coffee seedling is taking hold. When the coffee seedling starts growing I will harvest the papaya tree. That will be in a month or two, before the papaya interferes with the little coffee tree. 

Sowing the seeds is easy. I use the seeds fresh out of the papaya. I don't bother to clean them, nor dry them. I'll use a handpick or a trowel to open up the soil, I'll spread in some seeds, then cover them lightly with soil. I don't mind sowing them fairly thick because I have plenty of seeds and not all they seeds germinate. They can be crowded since they get harvested for livestock feed while small. Depending upon when I need them, I'll pull them out or chop them as the soil level when they are anywhere from a foot tall and up.

At times I have too many fresh seeds to deal with planting them my usual way. When I'm busy, I'll just fling them here and there. Any that happen to germinate and survive, so be it. Surprisingly I get quite a lot of young trees that way, but they don't come in thickly like they do when planted in a bed and covered with a tad of soil. But the labor effort is zilch, so that's a  plus. 

Occasionally I find papaya seedlings scattered about the homestead nowhere near where I planted them. I can only assume that the seeds got there via wildlife or via the livestock manure. Either way, it's fine with me. No labor animal fodder! But sometimes I'll allow a volunteer papaya to stay, like the one now growing in the community garden. By the way, it's doing great because of the enhanced soil fertility. 

It's leaves are large and glossy green. The truck thick. It's loves that spot. I hope it turns out to be a good tasting one!