– By Ibraheem Dooba
1. Go to a fruit seller near you and request for papaya seeds. They usually throw them away. There’s an average of 400 seeds in a pod. Collect as many as they can give you.
2. Soak the seeds in water for 24 hours. Throw away the floating seeds and keep the ones that sunk to the bottom. They’re likely to be more viable
3. Collect used pure water sachets and plant the seeds. Two or three in a sachet.
4. The seeds will germinate in 1-2 weeks. Leave them for two weeks. Then sort the female seedlings from the male. You don’t have to wait until they flower to tell them apart. Only few people know this trick and they guard it as a trade secret.
5. After about eight weeks, your seedlings are ready to be transplanted into the ground.
6. Each hole should be dug 2 feet deep and 2 feet wide.
7. Get a 4-gallon bucket of well decomposed manure and mix with the soil. If you can lay your hands on rabbits manure you can use it fresh and not wait for it to decompose because it’s cold manure.
8. Plant the seedlings two meters apart. This means that you can accommodate 100 trees in a small space.
9. Water and weed when needed. You can start harvesting in the 7th or 8th month. Harvest the fruits when you see yellow lines.
10. Each tree will give you N30,000. That’s N3 million for 100 trees.
11. Now that you’ve grown your own seeds, use the seeds from the best fruits to scale your business.
Peoplesmind
