The Biggest Pawpaw Orchard in Utah?

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It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into.

--Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin conceived of achieving the "bold and arduous project" of attaining moral perfection. There are other projects that are bold and arduous and would seem just about as impossible. For instance, tracking down every pawpaw tree in Ohio or Virginia--undertaking that project would be bold and arduous and impossible.

But there are other states in the United States where it would be bold and arduous but not impossible to track down every pawpaw tree that lived in the state. Utah, far from the home range, just may be among those states.

Over the past week, I conceived of that bold and arduous project. I already knew where four pawpaws lived. Certainly, I thought, with just a knowledge of the pawpaws in my own yard, I might have already located around a quarter of the pawpaws in Utah. But I began doing a little investigating, and I talked to a professor at a local university, from whom I learned about some pawpaws that were planted in 2012 (the same year as my Shenandoah and KSU-Atwood) near Spanish Fork. I got the location and permission to go look at them.

I was surprised when I got there to see how many had been planted: 32, as far as I could tell, but 12 were dead. So that's a pawpaw orchard of 20 trees. Five times more extensive in terms of trees than my pawpaw orchard.

As you'll see in the photograph above, we drove down a gravel and dirt road and then needed to stop because there was some irrigation going on. We got out of the vehicle and ran through the water, hoping to find the pawpaws.

The scene seemed far from the pawpaw habitat you would see in the East, for instance in Virginia where we used to forage for pawpaws. And the fires in California were mucking up the air, interfering with visibility, as smoke was traveling hundreds of miles on the wind.

We walked along a canal.

And past fields

Finally, we arrived at a fenced in place and opened the gate.

Inside, we saw rows of corn.

And we also found the pawpaws! I was so surprised to learn of all these pawpaw trees out in the middle of the dry fields near Spanish Fork.

Most of the trees, or twigs, had the name of their cultivar still attached. But I recalled that the professor I had talked to mentioned that most of the trees had their grafts fail due to rough conditions, so the root stock had sent up new growth. Here was a Sunflower cultivar, or at least what was formerly a Sunflower, before the graft failed and the unpedigreed root stock undertook the bold and arduous project of growing here.

And here was a Shenandoah

And then a non-cultivar

Here was one of the more robust specimens. I've been talking about these as "trees" but that word isn't quite right.

Our son W stands next to one of the trees.

To give perspective, the pawpaw orchard is in the foreground, in front of my family, an assortment of twigs hanging onto two or three or in some cases ten leaves. Behind my family, you can see a persimmon orchard, which is thriving more than the pawpaw orchard.

The California fires did make the sunset look nice.

After looking around the pawpaw orchard, we went and looked at the persimmon orchard. NJ and I used to forage persimmons in Virginia also, even if pawpaws were our number one fruit.

This persimmon was the Prairie Gold cultivar. It seemed like the most robust of the persimmons. It's name fit the environment.

Persimmon tree with prickly pears

We moved on, looking at the prickly pears. Thinking about pawpaws and prickly pears growing together seems strange, like imagining a baby opossum being separated from its mother and raised by a family of gila monsters. 

There was also some agave

It was time to leave, and we walked back past the corn and to the gate as the sun set.

Back through the irrigation water

So as of late August 2015, the tally of pawpaws in Utah that I have seen: 20 in the biggest orchard, and 4 in our orchard. But as NJ pointed out, our orchard of four is bigger than the orchard of 20, and that's true in terms of biomass.

If there's anyone else out there with pawpaws growing in their Utah yard, I'm hoping to hear from you.