Planting Papaya Tree # 2

We went to a plant sale a while ago, bought a tiny papaya plant and left it in the backyard until my mother said we needed to put it in the ground because it was getting way too big for the pot. When the rain finally stopped Art was able go out to plant it. The problem is we don't know if it's a male plant or female. We might have two males. Then what? One of the botanists said we have to wait until it blooms to find out the sex of the plant. That bigger papaya tree has been there a whole year and I'm not seeing any buds yet. Am I sounding impatient? Meanwhile, the prices of papayas are going up.



Here's some information I found on the web:

"One often sees several papaya plants growing around a home in the tropics. This may be because the papaya is an important, regular fruit in the diet, but it is also often necessary because papaya is usually dioecious, so that at least one male and one female plant are required for fruits to be produced. There are, however, cultivars that are monoecious (separate male and female flowers on the same plant), and the popular cultivar Solo has perfect flowers (each flower on a plant has both stamens and a pistil). Male flowers are small and borne in long clusters, whereas one to several female flowers are produced on a short stalk in the axil of each leaf. Typically only one female flower per leaf develops into a fruit; the trunk is thereby so covered with fruits that one can barely see the stem. The oldest, mature fruit is the lowest one, and the youngest the uppermost one. Therefore, once a plant starts to produce, there is a continuous supply of fruits. All mom has to do is to send her tallest or best climbing son out to the family papaya tree to harvest the lowermost papaya fruit."