A Little Tipsy

It was those last two inches of rain--- after the dozen or so that brought the soil to saturation--- that really hurt. But I've always been one of the luckiest people on the planet, and in the end I came out almost unscathed.

We'll look at some of the other damage in a later post, but today is about papayas. You may recall the magnificent seven, back when we first planted them on March 1, and when they were going strong in June. They didn't like the tropical storm, no not one bit.

With their tall form and small, fragile root systems, papayas are just waiting to tip over when the soil becomes saturated. Here's what the magnificent seven looked like the morning after. The two broadleaf's--- not in this photo--- stood straight and true, and the two squat Costa Ricans--- the farthest ones in this photo--- were leaning just a bit. The taller Sunrises fared much worse, the middle one almost down and its sidekicks leaning precariously.

Now there are many options when a papaya goes horizontal. One is just to leave it be. A friend, with a better soul for permaculture than mine, has one that fell over some time ago, maybe back in 2013. It just stayed there, its new growth heading upward. There's not really any problem with this, once you get used to the unconventional look. In fact, there's the benefit of fruit much closer to the ground. Maybe she went out after last week's storm and pulled down the rest of her papayas.

My sense of order is a bit too strong for that approach, though, so with help from right-hand man Josh, I went to Plan A, the next most minimal option. One pair of hands straightens it up, and the other crams additional soil next to the trunk to prop it close to vertical. We tried this on all five leaners. The idea was that if we get no strong winds for some period of weeks--- actually a possibility in this land where 99% of the wind blows in 1% of the time--- the roots of these fast growers might regenerate enough to keep them upright.

I still have hopes this will work, for the four that weren't much uprooted, but a couple of mornings later the big one was down again--- this time in the other direction. Plan A chalks up one failure, so far.

Plan B is stakes, cables, or some other engineering improvisation to hold the weakened plant up. But that's a lot of work, and I don't need to try to save the fruit, so I went straight to Plan C: saw the trunk off at 4 feet, straighten up the stub, tie something waterproof over the hollow trunk to keep water out, and wait for it to sprout new trunks.

And if Plan C doesn't work, plan D is a new papaya in that spot.

All the papayas show some water damage--- lower leaves dropping off, and upper leaves that look perky in the morning but struggle in the afternoon sun. Flood-damaged plants have lost some of their roots, and can't supply enough water to the foliage. So, counterintuitively, they need more watering until they can rebuild their root systems. The irrigation timer on my papayas apparently wasn't watertight, and it died in the storm, so afternoons found me out on the soggy ground spraying water on my papayas. No doubt it seemed to some of my neighbors that I must be bonkers. But I reckon they already thought so anyway.