Papaya / Carica Papaya Hybrid Plant

Description

Papaya is cultivated for its ripe fruits, favored by tropical people, as breakfast fruit, and as an ingredient in jellies, preserves, or cooked in various ways; juice makes a popular beverage; young leaves, shoots, and fruits cooked as a vegetable. Latex used to remove freckles. Bark used for making rope. Leaves used as a soap substitute, are supposed to remove stains. Flowers eaten in Java. Papain, the proteolytic enzyme, has a wealth of industrial uses.

Erect, fast-growing, usually unbranched tree or shrub, 7-8 m tall, with copious latex, trunk about 20 cm in diameter, soft, leaves clustered near top of plant, alternate, long-petiolate, blade suborbicular, to 80 cm long, palmately 7-11-lobed; lobes glabrous, toothed, flat; plants dioecious in nature, some monoectous cultivars; flowers aromatic, male in drooping axillary panicles to 80 cm long, with a 5-toothed green calyx and 5-toothed cream to yellow corolla; stamens 10; female flowers solitary or cymose in axils or below leaves, with 5 yellow nearly free petals to 5 cm long; ovary with 5 stigmas; fruit a large yellow to greenish-orange berry, oblong to nearly globose or pyriform, about 7.5 cm long and bitter in wild types, up to 45 cm long, with flesh 2.5-5 cm thick, sweet, juicy and of orange color in cultivars; seeds numerous in central cavity, rounded, blackish, about 0.6 cm in diameter, each enclosed in a gelatinous membrane (aril). About 8,000 seed/lb (ca 17,500 seed/kg). Fl. and fr. nearly continuous all year.

Cultivation

Seeds retain their viability for 2-3 years when kept air-dry in airtight containers. Seeds may be sown in coldframes or boxes during January or in the open in March. Early planting is much to be desired to make a vigorous plant before the beginning of following winter. Seeds germinate in 2-3 weeks. When 2 or 3 true leaves have formed, seedlings should be transplanted, spacing them 5-7.5 cm apart in seedbed. When plants are 7.5-10 m tall, they can be set in their permanent places in the field. Usual planting distance is about 3-4 m apart each way, giving about 1750 trees to the hectare. In selecting plants for field planting, the more vigorous growing plants are usually the males and may be safely discarded except for a few. By planting 2 or 3 plants in a hill, there is a chance for further selection and elimination of excessive males when first flowers appear, about one male plant to each 25 or so females is sufficient. Transplants must be watered and shaded. Mulch gives much better results than clean culture, keeping down weeds, preserving moisture, shading the soil from hot summer sun, and preventing the burning out of humus and nitrates in the top soil layer. Heavy applications of stable manure or commercial fertilizers can often be used with profit. Attempts at grafting and rooting shoots have not been successful on a commercial scale.

Harvesting

Trees from seed sown in early spring should fruit the following winter and continue to bear some fruit nearly every month in the year thereafter. Bloom to maturity is 5-8 months. Average life of a papaya grown under Florida conditions is 2 or 3 years, but trees may live in the wild 25 years or more. Yield declines after the first few years. All inferior and wild male trees in a region should be destroyed so that their pollen cannot fertilize blossoms of trees from which seed is to be selected. Seed for new plantings should be saved from perfect-flowered plants whenever possible. For fresh fruit, they are harvested just as yellowing commences. Fruits should be twisted gently, the harvester wearing cotton gloves so as not to bruise fruit surface. On trees where fruits are not crowded, fruits are cut off with a knife. Fruit should be placed directly in a picking tray that is well padded on sides and bottom with shredded paper or other soft material. The blossom end is more resistant to bruising and so fruit should be packed with this end down. Since papayas are injured by chilling, they should be kept at about 7°C with relative humidity of 85-90%, and may be kept for 7 to 21 days under these conditions. They should be ripened at 21-26.5°C as needed for marketing. Papain is harvested, like opium, by tapping the unripe fruits. Latex drips into a suitable container and is sun dried or oven dried at 55 to 60°C. The Same fruits are tapped in different cuts at weekly intervals. Tapped fruits are ultimately edible, so that both fruit and latex are harvested.

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