On the Cusp of September

We were out in the front yard on Sunday evening and some of our neighbors, from Mexico, stopped and talked and asked, admiringly, how we got our avocado trees to grow here in the cold. Although it meant giving up their admiration, we had to confess they weren't avocados, they were pawpaws. What are pawpaws, they asked. We answered that they're a fruit that's kind of similar to the mamey sapote (since our neighbors are from Mexico, we were lucky to be able to draw our fruit metaphors from another pantheon of fruit, a pantheon that knows something beyond tropical fruits that are mangoes, pineapples, and bananas). 

So here we are on the cusp of September, the branches burdened under the weight of large pawpaws growing as twins and quintuplets and sextuplets. Next month we'll be harvesting these avocados! (NJ's are the hands that are pictured here.)

Seeing double on the Shenandoah

More Shenandoah
 

Shenandoah singleton

Shenandoah

I guess I didn't take any pics of the Atwood, since this is the Shenandoah also

Here's the Wells, which has a lot fewer pawpaws than the Shenandoah or the Atwood. But most of its pawpaws are bigger than the ones it produced last year. And this cluster is interesting because it's been turning yellow.

Transplanting Pawpaws

The week before last, after I got back from a trip, I went over and looked at how our new Susquehanna cultivar was doing, and I saw that two big shoots were growing up beside it, shoots that were stemming from the root of the lazy pawpaw tree that I removed from the ground in the spring, to clear a space for the Susquehanna. Of course, since they were shoots from the lazy pawpaw tree's roots, I wanted them gone, so I yanked and to my surprise, they came up out of the ground with maybe ten inches of root in tact.  

Since they had so much root in tact, I decided to have a go at transplanting them. I didn't do very much special for them, except placing them among the pawpaw seedlings that I've been growing (17 out of 20 germinated, by the way). I used a pencil to poke deep and narrow holes into the soil of two of the three containers whose seeds didn't sprout. And I threaded the long roots into the soil. Even as I did so, however, I thought about what I would do with the trees if they actually rooted. I remembered that these trees were from a root stock that wasn't worth cumbering the ground. So I determined that I would show no quarter to them if they did survive--this was an experiment in the interest of science and not a sentimental chance at redemption for the root stock. See below for the sprouts among the pawpaw seedlings.

Two days later, the root stock sprouts showed that they didn't have the stuff to survive in any case.

And it's probably the case that no pawpaw sprouts with 10-inch roots would have the stuff to survive, no matter how vigorous the plant itself were. Pawpaws, as you may know, are very tough to transplant successfully. (See here they are below, curled up on the cement.)

But I have seen at least one person online who has transplanted pawpaws successfully. It looks to me like she displaces about a ton of dirt in order to transplant plants that are less than about a foot tall. It's amazing to think about the work put in by these folks at Shady Oaks Butterfly Farm.

Pawpaw Leaf Problems: Follow-up

Last month, in an entry titled "Asimina triloba: Leaf Problems," I wrote about how the leaves of two of our pawpaws (the Wells and the Shenandoah) were curling and I didn't know why. I emailed with Sheri Crabtree (Horticulture Research and Extension Associate at Kentucky State University), and she suggested it could be a calcium deficiency and recommended we give the pawpaws some fertilizer with calcium. So I did,

But after I did, I realized I wouldn't really know whether the fertilizer was helping (or if anything else was helping), since the branches seemed to have already reached their terminal leaf buds for the year. So it seemed like there wouldn't be any new growth until next spring. I also realized that even if the fertilizer was helping, I still couldn't expect the leaves that had already grown in a curled way to begin uncurling. The only cure for those leaves would be to fall off the tree and decompose.

So, how to measure whether anything was having an effect? Fortunately, I was able to find a few branches that hadn't already reached their terminal leaf buds for the year at the time I put the fertilizer on. And the one or two leaves that grew after the fertilizer application seemed to grow without the curl. (But honestly, I don't know if it was the fertilizer that did the trick or if it was that some unknown stressor in the pawpaws' environment that disappeared.)

But in spite of all my ignorance, here are some pictures with good results. 

Here's a branch with very clear leaf problems in its July leaves; but look a little higher to the August leaves and see that they developed without the curl.

Look at that edge--a scalpel's edge almost.

I've got to admit, it's getting better.

Snip!

Last year we sold our Geo Prizm to a girl (I think 16 years old) who was an ice skater. I don't remember where she lived but she said it was in a different town. Today we were driving through our neighborhood, passing a neighbor's home and we saw the Prizm parked out in front. It figures--our neighbor is an ice skater too, so they have common cause. Okay, now on to the pawpaws.

You'll remember, I'm positive, the pawpaw called C3 aka Curly Q, which was one of the first to sprout but then got it's head stuck in the mud and stayed like that for weeks, so that the sprout cornified and hardened. And even when I helped C3 get its head out of the mud, its stalk stayed curled.

It was growing in such a pleasing swoosh that I thought I would just keep it that way, and then hopefully have a little pawpaw tree that would offer something unique, aesthetically speaking.

But the other day I touched C3, and one of its leaves fell right off. You can see the leaf in the soil below the curled stalk. And I realized it was failing to thrive. I also realized I might not be able to coax it into becoming the pawpaw bonsai tree of my dreams. So, what to do? What might optimize its chances of becoming a tree or at least some rootstock for a grafted pawpaw?

Oh my, look at that--a swoosh to make Nike jealous.

So I decided that if I cut the little trunk, there might still be energy in the root and time enough in the growing season for it to put forth some new leaves and get some growing done before winter.

After I made the snip, I regretted what I had done. How could I have cut such a curly tree? Before I cut it, I'd say it had a 25% chance of becoming the bonsai pawpaw tree of my dreams.

But after I cut it, the chances plummeted to nearly zero.

Hope.

I laid the curly tree to rest among other noble pieces of plant-matter: 1) a club of wood gnawed clean by a beaver; 2) a splintering piece of desert juniper with a bulbous growth that in life was a plant's plague but in death was a human's trophy; 3) a chunk of wood that was burned by a fire long ago but was then tumbled around among rocks until the black charred parts were worn away, leaving only the most lucky or fire-resistant portions; and 4) the root of a pawpaw tree that wasn't awakening early enough in the spring and was staying up too late in the winter, now reminding me of the mandrake root in John Donne's poem "Go and Catch a Falling Star." Upon this heap of worthy peers, I laid to rest C3's tenacious curl.