Papaya Archives - The Gardening Adventure

Garden journal – October 2020 part 2

The spider mites invaded about half of my eggplants. I removed most of the leaves and I will wait to see if they will recover this late in the season, usually they have no problems regrowing the leaves and producing fruits during the summer and early autumn months.

Below are a few before and after pictures.

I removed most of the celery plants that were growing between my pepper and eggplants to give them more light now that the days are sorter and the weather gets cooler.

Another project was to remove the leaves that were attached by the spider mites from my potted tomato plants and spray them with neem oil.

I removed the papaya plant which dried out and rotted. I was surprised by the look of the roots and how easily they came out of the ground.

Because this year I had a lot of Fuyu persimmons I dried many of them. I cut the fruits in half, then cut them in slices about 1/4 inch thick and dried them for 12 hours at 135 F degrees. My food dehydrator was very busy this year since it was a very good year for fruit trees.

This month I also planted my garlic between the cauliflower plants.

Relocate mature plants Garden journal – September 2020 Part 2

During the second half of September, we had a few days with temperatures in the 80s and I was able to do some work in the garden. I had to relocate mature plants to make space for the cool season plants. I didn’t want to be late with my cool season plants like last year, so I decided to start early.

One of the tomato plants was getting infested again with a lot of spider mites. The spider mites love the heat and low humidity weather that we’ve had lately and they multiplied fast. I removed most of the leaves and sprayed the plant again with neem oil.

The cucumber plants that were in the ground stopped producing fruits for some time. So I decided to remove them to allow more sun to get to the peppers and eggplants.

In order to make space for the cool plants in the garden beds, I removed and relocated a few mature plants. I removed the celery, arugula and strawberry plants from the garden bed where the big tomato plant is. I purchased a new type of garden soil, Amend from Kellogg, and I mixed it into the existing soil. Afterwards, I planted parsnip, carrots, beets, onions and radishes.

Because my seedlings are not ready to be transplanted outside yet, I purchased 6 seedlings of purple broccoli and transplanted them in the same garden bed.

I used the homemade compost in another garden bed. Because it was enough to cover only about 75% of the space, I will use planting mix and manure for the other 25%.

Relocate mature plants

Last year I compromised my cool season plants because I didn’t remove or relocate mature plants and I planted the cool season crop between a few leftover plants from the warm season. Another mistake was that I transplanted seedlings too late in the fall. Hence this year I decided to do it right and start fresh with my garden beds and a little earlier.

Relocate strawberries

As space is always a problem in my garden, I was planing to relocate the strawberry plants in pots. But after I read an article on Greg Alder’s blog in which he had transplanted strawberries next to the fruit trees, I got inspired to do it the same way.

First I prepared the new location next to my apple tree, by removing the layer of wood chips. Afterwards I watered the place a few times to be sure the water gets at least 4″ deep and made holes for the strawberry plants to go in.

Next I removed the plants from the old location and cut all the runners to have only individual plants and placed them in holes in the new location.

Next to the strawberries I had a few arugula plants that needed to be relocated also. I decided to move them into the other bed with homemade compost. I also watered the new location until the water got at least 4″ deep into the soil, and then I relocated the arugula plants.

Relocate parsley

Because I moved my blackberry plants from the 5 gallon pots into bigger ones, I also had to relocate the parsley plants. As a result of that, I moved them next to the arugula plants as the space was already prepared.

Transplanting blackberry

I created the new potting mix needed to transplant the blackberry plants. In order to do that I took the old potting mix from the parsley plants and mixed it with bark, peat moss, perlite, fertilizer and garden lime. The experiment with the potting mix tried during the quarantine wasn’t successful, so now that I could get all the ingredients, I did it by the original recipe.

In the beginning of the month, when we had the record heat wave, I moved the blackberry plants in the shade next to some trees. And surprise, all the tips the touched the soil developed roots. I cut them and placed them in 4″ pots, hopefully I will get more plants by next year.

I decide to transplant the other Blackberry plant directly into the ground, so I can see if it will be a difference between the plants next season.

Blackberry plant transplanted in the ground

Transplanting raspberry

A friend planted a few raspberry plants last year and he harvested a lot of fruits this year. Since my kids love to eat berries, I want to give it a try. The variety that I found is called Willamette.

Next year I should have strawberries, blackberries, blueberries and raspberries if everything goes well. We’re all looking forward to it!

Another project was to fertilize the papaya, dragon fruit and artichoke plants. I finally found some chicken manure at Armstrong gardens.

This month I tried for the first time the air layering of cherimoya and fig trees, hopefully I will have positive results in a month or two.

Garden Journal – August 2020 part 2

The first papaya tree looks worse with each passing day. I picked up the fruits as they started to change color, but the taste is not that good, so we made compote. We boiled them with water and a little bit of sugar and it came out quite good, similar to pumpkin flavor. There are a few pictures below showing the difference between the 2 papaya trees.

This month I harvested the seeds from the two large sunflowers. These are my first sunflowers since I started gardening in the Los Angeles area. As a teenager I had my share of sunflower harvest as my grandparents grew thousands of sunflowers to make oil from the seeds.

Some of the tomato plants died and I removed them. As a result I have only 2 plants left in one of my tomato garden bed.

The peppers and eggplant seedlings were ready to be transplanted. They are volunteers which sprouted from the compost that I used for my tomato plants in containers.

I removed the celery from one of the rectangle containers to make space for the seedlings. Then I tried to purchase some manure to amend the potting mix, but chicken manure is nowhere to be found at any store. I’ve been told at Lowe’s that they haven’t had any in the past few months. Armstrong Garden had only steer manure, but one of the workers told me that it has a lot of salt in it, so I went home empty handed.

Searching in my storage, I found a bag of Osmocote. I didn’t use Osmocote in a few years, but with the shortage in manure, I decided to use this bag.

This month I started planting seeds for the winter season. I have cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce and artichoke seeds so far. I hope that the artichoke seeds will sprout, but I’m not 100% sure since they are about 6 years old.

I started preparing the eggshells that I’ve collected for the past few months and I will grind them at a later time. There are quite a lot of them and it will take me a few hours to make the powder.

My first papaya trees

Today I will share with you the story of my first papaya trees.

I’ve been trying to grow papaya for a few years from seeds. I planted the seeds in containers and I had a few seedlings, but they died over the winter months. After I lost papaya seedlings two consecutive years, I stopped trying to grow them.

First papaya trees

I gave up on growing papaya, but it seems that papaya didn’t give up on me. In the fall of 2018, a month after I removed a tomato plant, I noticed that something was sprouting in its place. There were 8 or 9 seedlings of papaya! It’s like after all these years they were telling me: “We don’t like the pots, this is the place where we want to grow” 🙂 I amended the soil for the tomato plant using my own compost and these papayas must have sprouted from there.

I was excited, but didn’t get my expectations too high. The winter was coming and from my last experiences, the chances of survival were small.

First winter

The first winter I let all the plants grow in hopes that they will keep each other warm with the extra leaves. As a result, the trees survived their first winter.

Below are the plants on February 26 2019. I don’t remember exactly when I removed the extra plants, in the picture I have four plants.

The next step was to study more about growing papaya. One of the main things about growing papaya is that you need one male tree to pollinate the female trees. I also found out that some papaya trees are hermaphrodite and have female and male flowers. Since they grew up from my compost from the fruits that I purchased from the store, it was impossible for me to know what type they were before they had flowers.

I decided to leave 4 plants to grow until they had flowers, hoping that some will have male and others female flowers. Below is a picture with the plants on June 7, 2019.

Papaya trees on June 7 — Papaya trees – 8 months old

The trees started flowering in August 2019 and all the flowers looked the same. So, I removed 2 of the plants because it was getting crowded and the recommendations are to keep at least 5 to 7 feet between trees. I was ready to break that rule, but with no more that 2 trees.

Below is a picture with the remaining 2 trees, on August 7 2019.

Papaya trees on August 7 — Papaya trees – 10 months old

On September 30th I noticed my first papaya fruit, as it can be seen in the picture below.

Papaya trees on September 30 — Papaya trees – 1 year old

Second winter

Now that I had fruits it was much more important than the first winter that I don’t lose the trees to cold. Since we had near freezing temperatures on 2 occasions this winter, I built a structure and covered the papaya trees.

In November 2019 I started writing this blog and papaya became the star of my garden update posts. Every monthly update starts with an updated picture of my 2 papayas.

I harvested the first 2 fruits a few days ago, June 2020. They weigh 2.2 lbs.

Now it’s the beginning of summer and the trees seem to be continuously flowering and they also have a lot of fruits. It’s very exciting to see how well they’ve been growing and how many fruits they keep producing, especially given that they started as our surprise baby plants.

Homemade eggplant stakes

In this posts I will talk about my homemade eggplant stakes and other small projects that I did in the second half of May 2020.

Homemade eggplant stakes
Removed all eggplants from last year
Fertilized the papaya trees and the dragon fruits
Replaced the watering wand

Homemade eggplant stakes

Because this years eggplants were doing so well, it was time to install a support system for them.

A few years ago I made some stakes from wood and inserted them in the ground. By the end of the season I noticed that most of them started to rot because they were getting wet when I was watering the plants. So next season I came up with an idea and purchased 3/4″ PVC pipe and cut it at an angle in about 1.5 foot long pieces. Then I inserted my wood stakes into the PVC pipe so that only the PVC is touching the ground.

Below are a few pictures with the installed stakes. I use twine to tie the plants to the stakes.

Removed all the eggplants from last year

The second year eggplants experiment din go very well. I had 8 plants left from last year and they produced only 2 very small fruits on them. In the meantime, the plants from this year have at least 2 fruits each and much bigger.

The plan was to keep the plants from last year since they were bigger and can support much bigger fruits, some fruits can get to almost 2 feet long. But the old plants were attacked by spider mites and their growth was affected. Because the spider mites started to spread to other plants, I decided to remove all the plants from last year.

Fertilize papaya trees

I try to fertilize my papaya trees once a month. I think 2 months have passed since the last fertilization and I used about a half bag of chicken manure. They have a lot of papaya fruits. The first 2 fruits are starting to get yellow/orange, and in a few weeks I will harvest them.

Replaced the watering wand

My old watering wand started to have more and more problems. In the end I was not able to stop the water from the wand handle and it was getting very inconvenient to water the plants and the trees. I didn’t plan on spending a lot of money on a new one, but I saw many people recommending rain wands. It wasn’t cheap, actually it was almost 3 times more expensive than my old one, which had 9 different watering modes.

With my old wand I had to be very careful not to brake the plants when I was watering. The head didn’t have too many holes, which created high water pressure and the multiple settings made things even worse.

The new Dramm 14804 One Touch Rain Wand with One Touch Valve, 30-Inch, Green handle is a little bit shorter than my old one, but it doesn’t seem to affect my watering in any way. In conclusion, I’m very happy with the new addition to my gardening tools.

Today in the garden Dec 20 2019

Today I built a structure around my papaya plant to be able to cover it with plastic foil at night when the temperature will get close to freezing.

I also removed the late planted pumpkin (the experiment has failed, I had probably 2 pumpkins that didn’t grow over 1″ in diameter and fell off). I decided to plant some radishes in its place.

I removed the top 10″ of the soil, I put two 5 gallons buckets of compost in the hole and covered it with the soil. The compost will help feed the tomato that I will plant in the spring in that spot.

Failed pumpkin experiment (the plant got infected with powdery mildew)

I covered the seeds with soil and watered them

Today I also planted more parsnip seeds. I think it’s the 3rd time planting in the same place, because only a few seeds germinated.