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| Our Papaya Trees |
Have you ever grown your own fruit or vegetables? We don't do it with any serious commitment, and it started mostly by accident. We have a compost in our small back yard. First some of the seeds from the fruit we buy spilled out of the container (not many) and others were carried off by ants (there are thousands of ants around here.) Later more fruit and vegetables sprouted up from our less-than-completely decomposed compost when we spread it out through our newly created garden.
The first result of this accidental process was a papaya tree. At first I thought it was just a big weed; weeds around here get HUGE. But I hesitated to pull it up, because I had seen a similar plant in a neighbour's front yard, which seemed to be there on purpose. So I asked the neighbor, and he told me it was papaya. So, of course, I let it go.
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| Our first ripe papaya - today! |
That was about a year ago, and now we have to little trees (about as tall as me) growing side by side. The smallest one was the first to grow fruit, but most of the little papayas kept falling off, very tiny and green. Finally, about a week ago, a larger one fell off, and we left it in the sun to ripen.
By "larger" I mean 6 inches - hardly the right size for a papaya. It's ripe now, and tomorrow morning we're going to try it. We're excited! This will be our second home-grown food; although the tomato plants showed up later, they produced fruit much quicker (last summer) - they were delicious!
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| Green papayas still on the tree |
About 10 more papayas are currently growing and are already longer than this one, although they are thinner; hopefully this means they will fill out and become full-sized papayas.
I'll pictures and posts of our other plants over the next few days, both accidental (tomato, pineapple, avocado, beans and Mexican Marigolds - the famous Cempoalxochitl, pronounced "CEM-pa-su-chil"or flower of the dead) and planned growth (Bougainvilleas, and miniature roses.)
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| A papaya flower |
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