If you can plant aromatic flowering plants in your rooftop garden, many pollinators like bees and butterflies will come, and they will pollinate fruit plants. Through this pollination, I have obtained a lot of fruits in my rooftop garden. Female flowers can dry and may fall on their own. Due to a lack of pollination, female flowers cannot convert into fruit and fall prematurely. In this case, you can apply hand pollination. And we will learn how to pollinate papaya plants for better fruit production.
Hand Pollination
For hand pollination, I took a paintbrush. I inserted the paintbrush inside the male flower and rotated it gently. This can transfer the pollen onto the brush. Then, I placed the brush in the center of the female flower, collected the pollen, and transferred it inside the female flower. This type of hand pollination makes it certain to turn a flower into a fruit.
After 10 days of hand pollination, female flowers have converted into fruits. It took around 3 to 4 months for them to fully grow and ripen, depending on the growing conditions and the season. If the weather is cold, the fruit will ripen slowly, and if it is hot, the fruit will ripen quickly. After 7 months, the papayas have started growing. The tree has grown to 7 feet tall, and the next batch has started flowering near its canopy above. I have witnessed tremendous growth in its canopy with regular fertilization and proper care.
Maturity Stage
It has been 9 months since the papaya was grown from the seed. The tree has reached a height of eight feet. The fruit has ripened and is ready to be harvested. At the top of the canopy, small fruits of the next batch have started to form. These will also be ready for harvesting in the next 4 or 5 months. If I had grown it on the ground, it would have produced dozens of fruits by this time. However, we should not expect the same fruit yield when grown in a container.
I had grown seeds of an indigenous variety. If you grow hybrid varieties obtained from the nursery, you are guaranteed to get a lot of fruits even in a pot. Papaya hybrid plants are readily available in nurseries near you. When the papaya has started to turn yellow, you can harvest it and keep it wrapped in newspaper for 1 day or 2 until it ripens completely. So, let us now harvest the papaya.
The raw fruits of banana, mango, and papaya found in the market are ripened in 1 day with carbide chemicals. Moreover, huge amounts of toxic pesticides and chemical fertilizers are used to grow them. Such fruits can be harmful to health. However, these rooftop garden papayas ripen on the tree itself, making them very tasty and sweet. Let’s taste it.
