Papaya

I’ve been pretty discouraged about houseplants recently. Last summer, I brought all of my houseplants outside, where they did very well until it was time to come in for the fall. I thought it was about time to give up on houseplants.

Then I learned about papaya. I saw a papaya tree when I visited the Como Park Conservatory last June, and since then I’ve had a desire in the back of my consciousness to grow a papaya tree – mostly just because I really like the look of them. They have neat spikey leaves, which grow like palm leaves do: the leaves cluster just at the top of the tree, and the whole trunk is scarred from fallen leaves. A few week ago, I randomly decided to search the Internet for growing papayas inside. I was completely amazed at what I found. There were many forums with people discussing growing their papayas indoors in New York, people asking for help because their seven-month-old tree hadn’t started flowering yet, and pictures after pictures of 8-month to year-old papaya trees loaded with fruit – many of which were grown inside. Here’s an underneath shot of a one-year-old papaya tree. There are a lot of people who buy a papaya from the grocery store, throw the seeds in a pot, and (seriously) watch their papaya grow to more than a meter high in 8 months, start flowering, and produce fruit.

I just couldn’t resist. I had Chris pick up two papayas in the Cities when he was there a couple of weeks ago. I’m fairly certain (after a lot of picture-browsing and reading) that I’ve planted seeds from a Meridol Papaya and a Solo Sunrise Papaya. If they grow (they haven’t, yet), then I guess it’s possible I’ll have some papaya fruit as early as November. But even if they don’t fruit, I’ll be happy enough if I can just get them to produce some pretty leaves. These things grow super fast.

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