There has been so much going on this past week that I haven’t had a chance to post about our first papaya harvest. Mary has done what she calls a “papaya documentary.” Taking my usual shameless advantage of her photography, I’m going to use her photos here.
Because of various fruit predators–both winged and four-footed–when the papaya began to ripen seriously, I protected it with an old orange bag. Then, when it was just about all yellow, we decided to harvest the papaya–we’d seen far greener papayas at our fruit stand.
Harvest helper Lucy
Luscious fruit
But the proof is in the taste, so..
The left half and the guilty spoon show where I, who will never set records for patience, had a taste test ahead of the documentation. It was delicious! Much better than equivalent papayas we’ve bought. But it wasn’t entirely ripe. You can see at the top and just underneath the skin that the flesh is a lighter color. It could have used at least one more day on the tree. So, we know with the next one. But most of it was ripe and what was made up for what little we lost.
We have two more on this tree and I think five on the one Hawaiian, one of which is definitely starting to ripen.
"Hawaiian" papayas
Our little farm is beginning to bear fruit.
Filed under: Potrerillos Arriba, gardening in the tropics
Oh, that looks delicious. The ones I buy in the market have a lot less seeds. No doubt they are old or something. I’m dying to try a Hawaiian papaya, I’ve no idea if they are even available here as I only see one kind in the stores. Silly me, when I was traveling to Hawaii all the time I thought I didn’t like papaya. That was before I discovered the joys of a little lime juice.
Jonna, I’m sure there are many different varieties of papayas. So, maybe the ones you buy are simply a variety that has fewer seeds.
Why the small ones are called Hawaiian papayas, I can only guess. It seems to be the case that the small varieties are tastier–I first noticed that in Brasil, when my Brasilian friends, at the huge open-air markets, would choose the smaller ones if they were available. We eat the larger varieties from the fruit stands with lime juice, but we didn’t have to with the one we harvested from our tree! Yet, all the papaya trees we have were grown from seeds from papayas we bought in the markets.
Joyce