On the Uses and Abuses of Pawpaw Seeds

This far outside of the home range, the pawpaw's seeds (if you have any) become kind of sacred. If you know the pawpaw's habitat (growing in Eastern hollows and beside streams running along acreages of wildwood land nourished by humid air), you know you'd be more likely to find a hen's tooth than a pawpaw seed here in Utah. Consider what you know about the pawpaw's native habitat against these pictures I recently took down in Utah's San Rafael Swell, which we visited a couple weeks ago to do several hours of hiking.

Yucca with November shadows, hardly a likely ally of the pawpaw.

Looking toward the Henry Mountains way off in the distance, where buffalo roam.

S, sitting on sandstone, admiring a yucca that had distinguished itself by forming a particularly compact ball.

A closer look at the yucca of S's admiration.

Toward sundown, the shadows on the redrock cliffs, under a stark white Martian sky.

So here in Utah, the pawpaw's genetic material is pretty rare. But there used to be a time, in Virginia, when we had so many pawpaw seeds we didn't know what to do with them.

Before NJ and I ate our first pawpaws, we had read about the seeds, and we knew that pawpaw luminaries like Neil Peterson were working to reduce their presence in the cultivars. But when we ate our first pawpaws (wild), the seeds seemed so interesting that we held onto them--hard and black and shiny, a little bigger than lima beans.

We thought about planting them, but we lived in a condominium. And as we saw online, the process for preparing them to plant seemed a little involved (here's a write-up on stratifying pawpaw seeds in preparation for planting). So we let them dry out, which, if you looked at the write-up, you'll know breaks all the rules. They changed from black to brown, and they sat around our house in a bowl looking interesting.

That year was also our first American persimmon harvest, and we held onto those seeds as well. I had read online that people used to re-purpose persimmon seeds as buttons, so after the seeds dried out I used the awl on my Swiss Army Knife to bore two holes in several seeds. I sent a little bag of persimmon-seed-buttons to each of my four brothers and sisters and to my parents as well. And I replaced the factory-made buttons on one of my old shirts with persimmon seed buttons.

Here's the shirt, which still hangs in my closet.

Here's a closer view of the buttons.

I haven't followed up with my siblings and parents, but I'm pretty sure none of them sewed the persimmon seed buttons onto their clothing, though I could be wrong about that...

That was fine for persimmon seeds. But the pawpaw seeds didn't seem like they would make good buttons. (Dried persimmon seeds are really hard and dense, good button-making material, while the pawpaw seeds have a bit of a hollow feel to them, and their outer shell has some give; and that seems like bad button-making material.) I had read that some people have used the stuff inside pawpaw seeds as a treatment for lice. But we were blessed not to have any lice...

Then at Christmas time, it seemed to me that pawpaw seeds would make good tree decorations. I got some fishing line and a needle and thimble and forced the needle through the small opening at one end of the seeds, running the fishing line just beneath the outer shell to the other side. Soon I had made several strings of pawpaw seeds for our Christmas tree. And when Christmas was over, we didn't put them away. And they're still hanging around in our house here in Utah. (Oh the abuses of pawpaw seeds!)

Here are some strings hanging from a piece of furniture we have in our living room. You can see the strings close up and also hanging off the other side of the furniture. Note the way the seeds alternate directions on the strings, with one oriented to the right then the next oriented to the left, then the next oriented to the right and so on. That's not by design on my part. It's the geometry of the pawpaw seeds, interacting with the necessary through-line of the fishing line, forcing the seeds into an alternating pattern.

The painting in the background is NJ's, of Zion National Park here in Utah.

Strings of pawpaw seeds with: a painting of Zion National Park, a glass fishing float, a stack of sea urchin shells, a 1920s postcard from North Bend Oregon, an abalone shell, and (in the front right corner) two mallets for a Javanese gong.

On Pawpaw Seeds' Alternating Pattern

String'ed Pawpaw Seeds shining bright
On one of Utah's November nights:
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?  

Like I say, from here in Utah, it seems like such a waste of the pawpaw's genetic material to place them on strings of fishing line and hang them around the house. And even in Virginia, we became increasingly enlightened over the course of our four years of pawpaw foraging. One November evening, maybe during the second year we foraged, I was out by a gully near our condo, throwing seeds and gritty fruits that didn't ripen down toward the stream, hoping they would sprout during the coming spring. From across the lamp-lit parking lot, one of my students (I was teaching a course on twentieth-century US drama at the University of Virginia at the time) recognized me and came over and asked what I was doing. Even within the pawpaw's home range, the pawpaw is hardly well- known, and so my answer ("I'm throwing pawpaw seeds and gritty fruits into this ravine") was hardly an adequate answer from her teacher, as she walked back into the night with her friends. And then, the final year we lived in Virginia, in November or December we took our pawpaw seeds to a nearby park, called Ivy Creek, and we threw them into the fallen leaves along a wooded section of the trail that wasn't too far from the parking lot. We went back maybe in May or June 2008, right before we moved, and there were several (maybe dozens of?) pawpaw seedlings growing.

But here in Utah, we've become enlightened enough to try stratifying the extremely limited number of pawpaw seeds that were in our four pawpaw fruits (all from the Wells cultivar) earlier this fall.

Here's the plastic container, with four layers of moist paper towels, to keep the seeds from drying out. We keep it in the refrigerator because in addition to not drying out, pawpaw seeds need to be cold for a few months if they're to come out of dormancy in the spring.

These two seeds sit on the top layer; they're from our smallest pawpaw of the year (and the last one to ripen).

These three seeds are from the next layer down; they're from our second smallest pawpaw of  the year (the second to last to ripen). When I got to this layer while taking pictures, I could see there was some mold growing on the paper towel and a little mold on the pawpaw seeds, so I changed out the paper towels for new ones before putting the container back in the fridge.

These five seeds are from the next layer down; they're from our second largest pawpaw of the year (the second pawpaw to ripen).

These ten seeds are from the final layer, at the very bottom of the container. They're from the largest pawpaw of the year, the first to ripen. This was the solitary pawpaw in attendance at the First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival.

Here's the container, tucked away in a separate nook within the larger chaos of our fridge...

...while fifteen feet away from those privileged stratifying seeds in the fridge, there's a sobering reminder of other ways we might have made use of our pawpaw seeds during the waning autumn.