Red Has Papayas Forming

I was worried about Red being far away from the male banana since she's on the south side of the property, but apparently either the moths/bees/bats are travelling over the 5 acres to get to Red, or she's a self-pollinating papaya.  Her fruit are very different from Pip to the north:  Pip has round fruit, Red has elogated fruit.  

Red has papayas forming

Red Papaya needs a boyfriend

This is the red papaya I bought from Ted at Green Earth (I call him bananaman).  She is doing great, making lovely flowers as a female papaya should.  But alas, the only male on the property is Pop in the back, 1/4 mile away.  

I planted more papayas next to Red... hopefully one of them is a happy male papaya.

Pip and Pop - Our Happy Papaya Couple

There's quite a story here in the back papaya patch.  This spot started out when we moved in as just a patch of shampoo ginger.  You can see the pretty green ginger plants growing from the ground up to 3 feet tall.  In another month they'll have gorgeous red cones on 2 foot stalks, with each cone filled with nice smelling sticky goo that girls in the tropics wash their hair with.

I dug out all of the ginger rhizomes as they were too dense from duplicating over the years, and replanted just the right amount.  I marked the patch with the white fencing and forgot about it.

A year ago when I started studying papaya and how easy it is to grow in Florida, I started a lot of papaya seed in the pool cage, caring for it and repotting each one when it got too big.  I became very familiar with the shape.  During that time, something odd happened.  Somebody (human or animal or bird) planted papaya seeds in the ginger patch.  Not a lot, just two.  Pip and Pop.  They showed up like weeds, and I'm sure anyone else would have cut them down.  But I quickly realized they were unplanned papaya and let them go.  I did absolutely nothing, even ignored them over the 6 month drought we had from November through May of this year.  They not only excelled, they turned out to be a female on the left and a male on the right.  Although I don't see any bees, I'm guessing the sphynx moths or bats at night are doing the pollinating job.  Regardless... look....  papayas!

Here's some back up papayas I actually planted from seed.