It occured to me that no one would ever ask me how to force papaya trees to bear fruit. You put a coffee can upside down on top of the tree. Honest, it works.
I just thought there should be a place for answers even though there aren’t corresponding questions.
Now there’s a piece of information I’ll never use, but will be happily filed in the big cabinet in my brain labeled, “Who knows? It might come in handy!”
The answer: The cat
The question: What do you use when you can’t find a clean dust cloth?
OK - I’ll bite. Just exactly why would you know something like this? And who were the guys who were standing around, wondering how to force their papaya tree to bear fruit; when one was possessed to say “I know; let’s put a coffee can upside down on top of the tree”?
Now we DO need answers!
Know why dogs never whistle?
Their lips can’t make the required “O” shape.
My parents do something similar with their pineapple tree (bush?) and a paper sack. I always thought it was because the plant was ugly and no other plant would mate with it otherwise.
The last place I lived I had two papaya plants, both male. They would only bear fruit if I used a q-tip to get pollen from my neighbor’s female tree. This would only cause fruit to grow from the individual flowers that I pollenated and it caused much hilarity among my children to see dad Slothrop out in the back yard doing papaya sex on a step ladder.
At the house I have now, I have planted four papayas in a row and have both male and female trees. But they weren’t bearing.
So after much asking around and getting not much of any good advice, a friend of my mother’s told me about putting coffee cans on them. I tried it and all four trees then started to bear.
My mother’s friend got the info here in Hawaii when she used to live here in the sixties so I don’t know who the guys were who came up with the idea. Maybe they just needed a place to keep their coffee cans.