The Idiots Guide to Growing Papaya Trees

We have a two-year old papaya tree in the middle of our kitchen garden. We planted it there to provide some shade to the root crops and salad greens we grow below.

It’s an amazing tree that continually produces delicious, healthy fruit all year round.

The problem is though, it grew too tall and even with a pair of trusty step ladders we were not able to pick the papaya. The birds love the ripe fruit, but we wanted it too.

I searched high and low for an instructional video on Youtube to find out if a papaya tree could be cut back extensively, without killing it to produce more growth lower down. I didn’t find anything of use. There are plenty of videos about how to grow papaya in pots or from seed etc. but nothing that could help me. Anecdotally I heard it could be done, so with a new saw in hand, I cut it down.

The accompanying video is a comedy of errors of us cutting down a papaya tree.

From start to finish as Katae and I were filming, we were under attack from mosquitos, red ants, falling papaya and even a pointy leafy poking me in the eye. Not only that but when we felled the papaya tree it missed its mark and hit a small palm tree in the garden and destroyed an orchid.

So, this video we named “The Idiots Guide to Growing Papaya Trees” is brought to you by your friendly Thinglish Lifestyle hosts Dumber and Dumber AKA Perry and Katae. We hope you enjoy watching it.

We will post a follow up vlog/blog if our papaya tree lives on to produces new growth and new fruit, so please subscribe for updates.

How to Stop a Papaya Tree from Growing Taller

My next papaya tree growing experiment will be finding the best way to stop the trees from growing too tall. This will avoid us having to cut it down so we can live to tell other tales from the permaculture kitchen garden another day.

Have you heavily pruned a papaya tree. Let us know if you did and what happened after in the comments below.

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The Idiots Guide to Growing Papaya Trees