Shedding the Excess

Right now, each of the trees is heavy laden with small pawpaws. But the trees know they're trying to support too much fruit for their size, so they're throwing some of it into the mulch at the base of their trucks.

Gnarled Pawpaw Fingers

There was a California quail outside sitting on the handlebar of W's bike this morning.

 And I took some pics of the small pawpaws on the KSU-Atwood and the Shenandoah.

On the scale insects that I talked about last time....NJ and I picked most of them off on the day that we found them. And then the next morning I picked off a good batch. Since then, I've only been finding one or two on the trees per day. The trees are still pretty small, so doing this by hand works for now.

Pawpaw Pests: Scale Insects on Asimina triloba?

I've frequently read that pawpaws have very few if any pests. Often people will only mention one: the zebra swallowtail butterfly, but then in the same breath they'll say that some people plant pawpaws specifically to attract the butterflies. On the Peterson pawpaw page, the list of pests is a bit more extensive: the Pawpaw Peduncle Borer, leaf spot caused by fungus, occasionally slugs, and also of course the Zebra Swallowtail. People say the pawpaw's leaves and bark are too full of toxins to be palatable to most pests.

So yesterday evening I was surprised to be looking at our KSU-Atwood pawpaw tree and find the branches hosting several bumps--they weren't leaf or flower buds, and I picked one off and it was slimy inside, kind of yellowish, but it didn't have a smell. What could it be, I thought? But then I needed to run off to the pinewood derby.

So this morning after our run, NJ and I looked at the pests and spent several minutes removing all we could find from the KSU-Atwood. We also noticed that they were also (in lesser numbers) on the Wells and the Shenandoah. Here are some pictures.

They seemed most common on the outer extremities of the branches. And they often were in clusters.

For perspective, you can see their size compared to a dime.

On their exterior, they had a type of skin.

When we picked them off the tree, the skin was pliable and generally stayed in tact, but the inside, the part in contact with the branch, was slimy. 

Here are some more.

So you can see, this infestation is happening while the tree is still flowering, and while it is beginning to develop fruit.

Close-up of one.

With a dime for perspective.

Some final pics with the collection I picked off the branches.

Searching for more information this morning, I'm finding that these look like "scale insects," which I gather are pests because they eat the sap of the tree and hence sap its strength. And they can cause mold at the places where they been. Here's a document prepared by a Utah State University extension entomologist, which helps me identify these as "brown soft scale."

I've only been able to find a very few mentions of pawpaws hosting scale insects: here, here, and here. So it seems like scale insects on pawpaws isn't a very documented problem.

I'm so surprised!

Pawpaw Clusters--May 8, 2016

Just so no one thinks that the only thing I think about is pawpaws, here's a pic from a trip I took to a southern Utah town this weekend. I drove 4.5 there on Friday night, and then 4.5 hours back to our town in more northern Utah. As I walked the town in southern Utah, I saw this rock garden featuring tons of petrified wood. On the drive, I listened to Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot ten times. That was the only music I listened to, except for the Jayhawks's Tomorrow the Green Grass, once.

Okay, enough about that. Now back to the pawpaws.

It's not the case that all the flowers have bloomed yet. You can see the unopened flower bud on the right side of this pic. But some of the flowers have bloomed and their petals already fallen and have turned into fruit, as you can see from the left side of this picture. What a nice (albeit still small) six-fruit cluster of pawpaws! This is the Wells.

Pawpaw cluster with wheel well in background.

It's been a rainy Mothers Day all day today. 

A few things I like about this series of pics (beginning with the present and continuing until the scenery changes): the pawpaws of course but also the rainwater glaze and reflection of the branches and flowers on the flower petal. Also, the drop of water on the leaf to the immediate left of the pawpaw cluster.

Looking at these pics, I'm realizing there are still a lot of flowers on the trees. These days when I look at the pawpaws, I'm distracted by the fruit clusters.