Papaya Trees

My papaya trees are growing like giant weeds! They are now taller than me and one is producing fruit!

When they started budding, I decided to learn more because I had been told that papayas are separate sexes, unlike most plants which are hermaphrodites.

As it turns out, papayas can be male, female, or both! Male papayas produce stalks with clusters of small flowers, while female papaya flowers are very large, pear-shaped, and sprout from the trunk of the plant. Bisexual flowers are supposed to be large, distinguished from females, because they are cylindrical rather than pear-shaped. I have both male (LEFT) and female (RIGHT) papayas blooming. Female papayas must be cross pollinated by either bisexual or male plants, but bisexual plants are self-pollinating.

The type of papaya that I have is native to tropical America, more specifically a Mexican cultivar, but were spread south by Indians, and to the Caribbean by Spanish explorers. Papaya trees regularly grow 20-30 feet tall, so mine are doing well at a less than a year old and being 8 feet tall. Plants usually begin bearing fruit at 6-12 months old, which takes 5-9 months to mature. Papaya fruit look like large oval yellow-orange melons, are soft to the touch. The interior flesh of the fruit is several inches thick, orange in color, and surrounds thousands of little black seeds that resemble caviar. Apparently Hawaiian papays are sweeter and smaller than the ones grown here, but I don't think it really matters in the grand scheme of things.

What does matter about Hawaiian papayas is that they (the Solo cultivar, introduced to Hawaii from Barbados in 1911) produce no male plants, only bisexual and female in a 2 to 1 ratio. Currently Hawaii is the only state in the USA to commercially produce papayas successfully; however, the Hawaiian industry has declined due to Papaya Ringspot Virus. This virus devastated the Florida papaya industry in the early part of the 20th century, and threaten papaya crops elsewhere around the tropical globe.

Fortunately, biotechnologists at the University of Hawaii inserted a gene into the papaya making the Sunrise Solo cultivar resistant to the Papaya Ringspot Virus! This successful adaptation into Hawaiian agriculture allowed papayas to be the first genetically modified fruit crop used for human consumption.

Sources:

California Rare Fruit Growers, Inc.

University of Georgia

Wikipedia