Carica Papaya - 0.5 kg Seeds

Papaya (Carica papaya) is a fast-growing, short-lived soft-wooded tree with a single hollow trunk crowned by large, deeply lobed leaves on long stalks. It is one of the most popular home and commercial fruit trees of India, bearing sweet, orange-fleshed fruit within a year of sowing, and is also a source of the enzyme papain extracted from its latex.

Native to tropical America, it is now cultivated throughout the warm plains of India wherever soils are deep, fertile and free-draining and frost is absent. Apart from the fruit eaten ripe or used green in cooking, the leaves, latex and seeds have well-known traditional medicinal and digestive uses.

• Family: Caricaceae
• Native region: Tropical America
• Mature height: 3-10 m
• Growth rate: Fast

Wash the gelatinous coating (sarcotesta) off fresh seeds and soak them for a day or two to improve germination. Sow about 1 cm deep in seed trays or polybags of light, well-drained mix kept warm and moist; germination usually takes 2-4 weeks. Transplant the seedlings carefully without disturbing the roots when they are 15-20 cm tall, planting several per pit and later thinning to the strongest.