I actually have never bought a papaya plant. About 20 years ago I bought a Mexican papaya fruit at the grocery store in the late fall and extracted the seeds from it. I sprouted those indoors and transplanted them into the ground in the spring. The resulting fruit encouraged me enough to do this same thing again the next year. I soon discovered that the excess seeds I discarded from my fruit in my compost bin would often volunteer in my orchard wherever I spread the compost (they are quite heat resistant apparently). Now I simply rely on volunteers and no longer even need to buy papaya fruit at the grocery for the seeds. And I give away hundreds of dried papaya seeds every year to fellow gardeners at plant swaps!
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With hundreds of Citrus trees to protect I couldn’t even begin to provide supplemental heat to them (too much time to set up, too costly, too dangerous, etc.). Small ones, e.g. my dozens in-ground of finger lime seedlings, get covered completely with damp leaves and pine needles. Here are 12-18” tall finger limes under leaf piles, with snow on top:
Larger trees up to about 8’ tall get a moving blanket (either 6’ x 7’ or 6’ x 13’ size), then a blue plastic tarp (to keep any rain/snow off the blankets to make drying the out afterwards easier), then rocks/bricks to hold down the edges on the ground (our hard adjective freezes are usually accompanied by winds). My very largest citrus tree (circa 12’ tall orange and some surrounding kumquats in the middle of our circle driveway) get only a huge tarp (29’ x 39’ heavy duty dark brown) that is weighted down on all sides by landscape timbers and concrete blocks. Leaves right against the tarp will freeze, but even at 9 F in 2021 these trees were all fine afterwards. I think that the air inside heats up in the sun during the day, and there is simply so much air trapped in that huge tarp that it can’t cool down that quickly at night. It cost me about $150 for that huge tarp, but it has saved hundreds of dollars worth of trees (and fruit) during these last for freezes. Money well spent and the time to put it up is well worth it.
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Here are a couple of pages about freeze protection of Citrus trees taken from my formal presentation on growing Citrus in SE Texas:
. Note all the intact kumquat and mandarinquat fruits in the “after” photo of my driveway “island” trees. We dropped to 12 F in December 2022. And no banked mulch under there. I did that in 2021, but learned it wasn’t necessary for my “island” trees.
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nice. how long do you grow it in a pot before you put it in the ground? i had one in a pot but it grew so slowly and got killed in a freeze, it just turned to mush. then i tried with babaco (mountain papaya) but that got root rot from too much water (rainfall). between the freezes and heavy rain, i don’t know if i can grow papaya. i have to say i don’t like ripe papaya (weird smell/taste) but i do like to use the green papaya like a vegetable to make a fermented food called atchara.
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yeah, i had about 30+ in ground subtropicals that would have been impossible to provide external heat, so i covered with layers of moving blankets, frost cloths, and tarps/plastic bags/tents. the ones in the tents were the best protected and least damaged, except for my zone 10 fruit trees which i am surprised are still alive. the ones with just plasic garbage bags even though they had moving blankets underneath got the most damage but i just ran out of tarps and blankets. for lows below 20F, i would have needed more layers to really protect them.
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I have an oak leaf papaya in ground no protection but so far it seems alive (they are deciduous) one in a pot in the greenhouse which also looks identical but I’ll know better in a couple months if the one in the ground survived. Would be worth trying for you, I got it from planting justice
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Yes, cold-wet soil in winter is a killing proposition for papaya plants. The volunteer plants that survive winter here all seem to be the ones in raised beds (some of my citrus are at-grade in normal soil, some are in circa 8” tall beds that have some aged compost and coarse sand amended). Only papayas in the raised beds seem to survive for multiple years. Banking the lower trunks with mulch or damp leaves assures they will resprout in spring. I have never actually tried to cover the papayas with tarps/blankets. They were all “free” anyway, so so I expend my time-limited freeze protection efforts on “higher value” plants. I do think a dead-ripe papaya just harvested from a plant (perhaps with a little lemon juice squeezed on it) is really sublime. The store-bought crap that was picked green and ripened on route is a sad excuse for papaya. Wish you lived closer to me, you could have helped me eat 180 pounds of green papayas! 
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The coordinator of our local (Houston) rare fruit growers chapter (Bill Arendt) has oak leaf papaya. I may have to give it a try too.
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Yes, I have also used huge (50 gallon) plastic trash bags before, but decided they really are pretty useless. They offer no insulation and tend to blow off, which leaves the trees underneath less protected. I have used inverted large plastic pots and trash bins (with a brick on top to secure them), but these only work for very small plants. My stack of 50 folded moving blankets and about 80 tarps is about 6’ high in my garage!
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i had looked into oak leaf papaya and periodically check to see if seeds are available from trade winds fruit. i also looked into some of the hawaiian varieties that are supposed to fruit in 9 months from planting (but that is 9 months of tropical conditions, i only get 7 months in a year). but that still doesn’t beat the 5-6 months it takes to grow short cycle bananas. i guess if i tried to grow papaya again, i’d let it grow 1 year in a pot, keep it in the greenhouse in the winter then plant it in the ground in the spring of the following year.
yeah, i’m not going to use plastic bags again, it was just to keep the snow off so the blankets underneath wouldn’t get wet when the snow melted. tarps is the way to go. i have a low tunnel greenhouse that i covered with moving blankets and doubled over a 20 mil tarp on top, when it went down to 15F, that greenhouse stayed in the mid 30s.
i wouldn’t be able to use all those papayas, i’d ferment what i can, cook the green ones like chayote and give the rest away or compost it.
it gets too wet here even though i have sand for soil, i get torrential rains, especially in the summer. and i can’t prepare for them either, one night the forecast was for locally heavy rainfall, about 1-2 inches of rain, and i got 8 inches and i checked nearby weather stations and most reported 4-5 inches.
This what I am doing with my dwarf Waimanalo papayas. The surviving ones were in/around the greenhouse all last year, and are going to go in ground when the rains start. All the young ones I planted out last year got torched in the drought.
that is the variety i want since it’s supposed to be a dwarf, though i have read you can make any papaya a dwarf by cutting the main taproot by half while it’s young, but i haven’t tried this.
by chance are you growing moringa? mine is 2-3 years old in a pot, but obviously stunted from being in a pot, and i want to put it in the ground but maybe i should wait until the trunks are much thicker? it got killed back last winter and grew back multi-trunk.
I have 1 in ground and a bunch in pots, and then 1 Hildebrandt’s moringa in ground and a few in pots. It feels like they have a maximum size in pots, both species grew extremely quickly and then not grown since reaching a certain point (about 18’ tall in one gallons). My regular 1 in ground struggled when I first put it in ground last spring, but as soon as the rains came (and also when I hooked up irrigation) it took off. I had to cut about 3 feet off because of the hurricanes, and its basically grown all that back, has 2 extra main branchs and is flowering.
I would put it in the ground once its tall enough to transplant safely.
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Green papaya salad? Am I remembering that correctly from Filipino friend year’s ago?
the trunks are only about a half inch thick, probably still too young?
it’s like a condiment, not really a salad like thai papaya salad. it’s like sauerkraut. it’s made with green papaya, red onion, carrot, red bell pepper, chili pepper, garlic, ginger and it’s fermented for a week. the commercial version is not naturally fermented but just pickled with white vinegar and sugar.
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Half an inch is around the size mine was when I transplanted it. They seem to stop thicking up inside pots after a certain point, but explode in ground. You just have to keep it irrigated until its established. Not sure if your late winter/spring is as dry as ours can be.
ok, i was going to pot it up to a 10 or 15 gallon and see if it would get thicker. northwest Florida usually gets lots of rainfall year round, there is no real dry season here, similar amount of rainfall as New Orleans.
Our local (Houston, TX) rare fruit scion exchange was on Saturday. I decided to see if I could unload any of my green papayas there. I loaded up about 60 pounds in two large boxes and marked them “Free green papayas.” Every single fruit vanished! Hurray! I also gave away about 100 Golden Berry seedlings, 70 strawberry and lemon guava seedlings, about 60 Feijoa seedlings and a bag of Feijoa cuttings, yellow dragon fruit seedlings, goji berry seedlings, a 20 gallon pot-full of dragonfruit cuttings, pineapple plants, rooted grape cuttings, many bags of dried papaya seeds, and a huge number (perhaps 60 cultivars) of dormant scions (stone fruits, apples, pears, pomegranates, figs, mulberries, Asian persimmons, etc.). Sorry if this is a little off topic, but our free Texas Rare Fruit Grower group scion exchanges are our most popular annual meeting (about 100 folks showed up this year), and it turns out a great event to unload my excess green papayas! A few photos of my offerings:
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