I don’t know if this is the biggest papaya in the world, but it’s the biggest I’ve ever seen:

I’m used to seeing great big papaya that are the long type – not round, melon-like fruit like this one.

Unfortunately I no longer have a scale so I can’t tell you what it weighed.

The cavity inside this papaya was pretty large:

Not really as much flesh as one might like from a fruit this size, but it was nothing to sneeze at.

I can’t take credit for growing this papaya – that credit goes to my friends here who have the mother tree on their farm. They tell me that some of the fruit on the tree are oblong and some are huge round fruits like the one they gave me.

I’ll bet you can guess what I did with the seeds.

This might not be the biggest papaya in the world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t BREED the biggest papaya in the world from some of its offspring, right?

I planted fistfuls of papaya seed along the edge of the wall by our gardens… the little seedlings are already coming up.

I should do a video soon on how to germinate papaya seeds. I meant to do that when I was in Ft. Lauderdale and taking care of The Great South Florida Food Forest Project but never got around to it.

So many ideas, so little time…

In general, you don’t really need to plant papaya on purpose where I now live in the tropics. They pop up everywhere all on their own. There are hundreds if not thousands of seedlings popping up down the hillside and by the creek. Papaya grow by drainage ditches and roadsides, backyards and waste spaces… they’re everywhere and come in all types from itty-bitty round fruit to big, long things.

I’ll let you know how these giant papaya seeds turn out. It would be great to have melon-sized papaya all the time, even if just for the curiosity of it.

UF has more info on growing papaya if you’re interested. Great tree.