Scientific name: Carica papaya
Common name: Papaya, papaw, paw paw
Malay name: Betik
Family: Caricaceae
Origin: Central and South America
Category: A short-lived evergreen small fruit tree
It is not easy to find a male papaya tree. Have you seen such a papaya tree? If you have a papaya tree that bears flowers like these, the chances are that you will never get to eat a papaya fruit from the tree. If will come to a 'false-start' if you have started growing this tree from seed and hope to get some papaya fruits. Well, it won't!
Here in Malaysia, we can use the male flowers in cooking, e.g. blanched and eaten as salad, stir fried with crab stick or made into egg omellette.
This is my entry for Blooming Friday hosted by Katarina of Roses and Stuff, the theme this week is FALSE START" and the link is here.
Very interesting ! I have never seen a Papaya-tree before. I thought it was much bigger. It´s short-lived, how short ? Don´t think I´ll try to grow it :-) Have a nice weekend
ReplyDeleteLisa/Lisas trädgård
Hahaha! This is a good one! Very male. I've been very lucky. I have mostly the 'bi'. The females are quite hopeless, you know. You see a fruit and they are all false starters.
ReplyDeleteSomrtimes the same plant gives both male and female flowers. Nice to know that the male flowers are useful too!
ReplyDeleteThis is a clever take on 'false start'. Am still not sure what to post.Happy Blooming Friday!
ReplyDeleteRosie
I have not seen such a plant before. Nice photo!
ReplyDeleteLuckily the proportion of male seeds is a lot less than females. Imagine if we grow just a single papaya plant, then it turns out as male. Huh, how frustrating.... I have 7 small papaya plants growing now, I wonder how many will end up fruiting.
ReplyDeleteClever post for the theme. Excellent! Something I never knew.
ReplyDeletethat was a new plant for me:)Nice Photo!
ReplyDeleteHave a nice day!
Such a lovely flower...love the soft colours.
ReplyDeleteHave a nice weekend.
This is so interesting - I didn't know there were such things as male Papaya trees, and neither did I know that the flowers were used in cooking. Thanks for enlightening me!
ReplyDeleteWe have lots of male plants under the coconut palms. They are volunteers and sometimes we cut sometimes just left there. We dont eat the male flowers here, somehow i think of experimenting on it, who knows maybe in the future food becomes difficult. But i havent done the papaya flower omelet yet. Maybe i want to taste it first before doing my own.
ReplyDelete