Almost Tropical Buttonwood Bay.

Sunny Buttonwood Bay may be hot and sunny most days but it's not quite on the equator.  It's about 1766 miles north of it in fact but as Leeds is 1700 miles further north again, that explains why it's 50F in Leeds right now and 83F in Buttonwood Bay.

I'm not doing this temperature and climate comparison just to have a gloat.  Perish the thought.

Knowing that in 9 days time I'll be heading back to those lower temps is already having a sobering effect on such gloating.  Then I'll be the 'gloated' and not the 'gloatee' and I'm not looking forward to that at all.

Anyway THE reason for all this meteorological mumbo jumbo is because the other day, when out and about on my walk around the park, I took some photos of these beauties......





Wanting to do all the work myself, I later surfed t'internet and decided they were papayas. Mexican papayas in fact - before you jump on me and beat me about the head with the Hawaiian variety.  And they're not paw-paws either, even though I prefer that name as it conjours up that Jungle Book song that I'm not going to mention or you'll be singing it all day and it might well push Agadoo out - opps sorry !!

But I wasn't 100% sure of my facts and so I jumped on the golf cart and zoomed round to the house in question and asked Angie, the owner, and she confirmed it was a papaya tree. 

I didn't have the heart to tell her that from my extensive surfing, I'd learned it's not a tree at all but a plant.  Just a very BIG plant.

As everyone here is jolly friendly indeed and she was a wee dote as well, she gave me one to take home with me.....and here it is with a pop can to give scale.


When it's ripe (feel for it going a bit soft when gently squeezed), I'm sure Deb/Den will give it a try but being a Leeds Lad, it'll be just way too exotic for me.  It's quite light, has loads of seeds inside and tastes like a mix of smokey bacon chips and Branston pickle.

No I'm only joking. It seems the taste ranges from 'soft, juicy and silky smooth with a delicate sweet flavour with a somewhat musky or sour finish' to another report describing it as like the taste of 'moist feet'.

I'm not sure what those taste like and I've no wish to try to find out. If any of you have tried one, do let me know. In the meantime, I'll stick to Tesco's apples and bananas thank you very much and leave papayas to Johnny Foreigner and Waitrose shoppers !