Prize Papaya

New to the environs of Sanawari, I stood in our doorway in awe of my surroundings and I watched a cheeky mousebird bury itself in the fruit of a papaya. I had done my research on papaya: Papai for the fruit in Swahili and Mpapai for the tree. Botanical name: Carica papaya and if you want to be picky, the tree is not actually a tree but a herb. I read that it’s reasonably easy to propagate, the fruit is one of the most nutritious. I guessed it would be easy to grow in the rural villages where we going to work.

Talking to locals, I found there’s a bit of a problem when it comes to papaya plants, and science has a word for it. The tree is dioecious which means it may be either male or female. So other than for pollinators, everyone wanted to plant female, fruit-bearing trees. There are exceptions, occasionally a male tree will produce fruit but rarely. To be sure about the sex of the plant you need to look at the flowers, a bit impracticable in the nursery situation because by the time the tree flowers, it would be too big to plant out!

There was a theory promulgated about the white seeds being male, but I found them to be unfertilized, therefore unviable. There were some who reckoned they could tell the sex by the shape of the foliage – yeah, well my eye for plants is as good as the next bloke, but I couldn’t spot any difference. My way around the issue was ‘probability’ - provide three trees per person/school kid. The useful life of a papaya tree is short, perhaps only five years. I had already noticed most of the village trees don’t bear good fruit because they either old or had grown naturally, from dropped seed. I suspect there’s a bit of inbreeding too. So in order to produce a worthwhile fruiting crop, I bought nice papaya fruit from the market and gave them to kids in our neighbourhood on the understanding that they return the black seeds to me. The kids were delighted and I had my seed supply.  

Out towards Mateves, lived a mate of Joshia’s, a young Maasai man called Stephen who was passionate about the environment. Tucked away in a corner of his property, he had an orchard of several varieties of papaya - all had fruit at least the size of my head and flesh that was almost red! These were ideal to propagate from to supply to the rural villages. So, on a regular basis I bought fruit from him and the local kids did the rest!

Perhaps I’ve never explained about my version of seed sowing: Papaya seed needs to be fresh, but dried (f.y.o. some other plant species require soaking, others nicking and others stratifying in a fridge). We used five centimetre diameter tubes, cut to length from rolls so there was no bottom on them. The soil mix (three shovels of soil, one of sawdust and one of dry, powder cow manure) is packed tightly into the bottom couple of inches. The rest is not packed so tightly; as I told my students, 'you don’t plant seeds into a brick!’ Leave about an inch unfilled. In the centre, make a depression with your finger, just a depression. With papaya, I put in two seeds because the viability is good, some other species maybe three is better. If two germinate cull one out. Cover the seed with half an inch of sawdust (Difficult to get sawdust? Shred newspaper or even toilet paper – it’s the same thing) and on top of that we used marram, volcanic ash, but small stones or gravel chips work just as well. The stones stop the sawdust washing off during irrigation, and the sawdust holds the moisture and reduces the need to weed. This method is better than sowing into trays and pricking out because in hot climates the seedlings become stressed and need a lot of water. They are also prone to fungal and insect attack. Anyone can use this method – it’s even good for vegetable growing! If I have inspired one person to give this a go, I’m happy, especially if they happen to grow a tree! Go on!

Sorry for the digression… I had four hundred papaya plants sitting in the nursery ready for outplanting and we intended to plant them the next week. I arrived back from the planning session at Mkonoo Primary School to find Big E, young Heri and a couple of other guys loading the last of those prize papaya seedlings into a stationwagon! My early arrival put a guilty look on Big E’s face, a look I knew very well.

Heri was being educated at a church-run secondary school and while the fees were modest, Big E had trouble, ongoing trouble to come up with the cash. So here he was ‘donating’ those prize papaya plants to the school in lieu of Heri’s school fees! The bugger had done the same thing last term with one thousand mchongoma hedge plants!    

Here’s the thing. Big E was my boss in name perhaps, but let’s not go into that! He was the Director of Hifadhi and sure, what he was doing was dodgy, depriving village families a source of vitamin C and other nutrients that they didn’t have access to. On the other hand students at the secondary school would benefit from the fruit and you can bet your boots a good number of those plants would find their way to teachers’ houses and to ‘favoured people’ so in fact it was another way of distributing the plants. Which is why I wasn’t too concerned, besides, I could always grow more.

Personal gain is not what the project was about, and as for perks, Big E was well and truly perk-over-endowed! However, we were there through his behest, if not his goodwill. Dealing with him was a constant game of chess, a challenge, but it was important for me to recognise that we weren’t home in New Zealand, so when in Rome or Sanawari….