Three Remarkable Pawpaws: My Remarks

Back in June I wrote about a pawpaw on the Atwood that was hosting what I referred to as a parasitic twin. Take a look at the pics I posted here to see the parasitic pawpaw twin as it was in June.

Since June, the parasitic twin has hung on tightly but has lost its green color and gained a dark brown color. It also dried out, since I guess the host pawpaw found a way to cut off its nutrients.

On Wednesday this week we had a guest over who used to be an organic farmer (I say "used to be," but not to worry, dear organicists: he hasn't taken up inorganic ways, he's just moved on to profession that doesn't involve farming). We went out to the pawpaw trees and I picked the two remaining pawpaws from the KSU-Atwood: one fruit for him, and the parasitic twin's pawpaw host for me.

Here's the host, sitting on the window sill. The host is the first of the remarkable pawpaws that I'm remarking upon today.

Here's the parasitic twin, sitting on the host, sitting on the window sill. The parasitic twin is the second of the remarkable pawpaws that I'm remarking upon today.

And this evening I picked the biggest pawpaw that the Wells cultivar has produced this year. It's a remarkable pawpaw (the third of the remarkable pawpaws upon which I'm remarking today), mainly because it's probably the biggest pawpaw we've harvested from any of the trees this year, bigger than anything on the Shenandoah and the KSU-Atwood as far as I can tell. And that's remarkable of course since, to put it in terms of cell phone technology, the Wells is probably a 2G pawpaw while the Atwood and Shenandoah are 4G pawpaws. To me, getting such a big pawpaw from the Wells feels kind of like all of a sudden realizing you can browse the internet on a phone like this.

NJ calls dibs on this pawpaw, and all other pawpaws from here on out--as many as it takes to accumulate a cup of pawpaw pulp, which she says we should make into a pawpaw cake for my birthday. More on that later. Meantime, enjoy the pics of this third remarkable pawpaw upon which I'm remarking.

A Moveable Fest: Second Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival--Part 2

Now that NJ is back, it was time for the main event of the Second Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival.  So on Friday, Sept 23, we had the revelers over.

A few stats on the Second Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival:

• There were 10 pawpaws to share: 1000% growth over the 1 pawpaw of last year.
• There were 11 adults and 7 children at the festival: 450% growth over the 4 that attended last year.
• It lasted from 7pm to 10:30pm, so 3.5 hours: 14 times longer than the 15 minute festival of last year. 

(For the First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival of a year ago, click here.)

Some of the revelers had already had a small taste of a pawpaw previously because last year we did some drive-by pawpaw tastings. But these two revelers had never tasted a pawpaw and said it was as if someone had made some custard and stuffed it into a fruit. The reveler on the right had lived in Hong Kong for 1.5 years and said it tasted "like egg tart in China."

The two revelers on the right had tasted pawpaws before, not only picked from the wilds of East Tennessee but also at a previous sub-event of the Second Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival.)

The reveler on the right was so dedicated to the festivities that even the trials of family life couldn't keep him away: because his and his wife's toddler was having a rough day, he alone from his family was able to make it to the festival.

We set the kid-sized revelers up downstairs, watching The Cat from Outer Space. Some of them tried the pawpaw and some didn't.

At an ideal pawpaw festival, the revelers would be able to fill up on an overabundance of pawpaws. But because we only had ten to share, we asked people to bring a few other snacks. Here's the spread. The half-pawpaw sitting in the front middle: we were saving that for the last arrival of the evening, and I needed to snatch it from W's hands at one point to make sure that the last arriving reveler would have some pawpaw.

As any organizer of a pawpaw festival knows, there's a lot of clean-up that takes place after a festival. Here's a view of some of the extensive post-festival scene we were faced with.

Pawpaw Folk Art

Several years ago NJ read a passage in Isaiah: "all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." And to her, it seemed like a great metaphor for bearing fruit. And so she made this painting. It has a folksy feel to it, so I asked her if it would be okay if I put it in a blog post titled "Pawpaw Folk Art." She said that would be fine, as long as I included an asterisk saying that when I say "folk art" I actually am talking about very high and very finely wrought art.*

*When I say "folk art" I actually am talking about very high and very finely wrought art.

The painting generally is displayed on top of a book shelf near the ceiling in the kids' playroom/TV room. I wandered in there tonight and took it down to photograph it. The kids saw me and were roused from their vegetative state in front of the TV, keen on contemplating the vegetative state of the trees clapping their hands. When W learned that NJ herself had painted this piece of folk art*, he got excited and said, "Oh I know what all of those kinds of fruit are." He pointed to the fruit floating near the top right corner and  said, "That's a pawpaw." And then he pointed to the fruit floating near the top left corner and said, "That's a...that's that kind of fruit...what kind is that?" "It's a mamey sapote," I told him. And then with confidence he pointed at the two fruits descending the right side of the painting and said, "And those are...what are those?" "Persimmons," I said, and all the trees of the field clapped their hands that he at least knew the number one fruit in this house.  

If you like this pawpaw folk art*, you might also like looking at some "found art" depicting some pawpaws. I found this pawpaw art a few months ago in a colleague's office: Found Pawpaw Art.

Shenandoah Pawpaws--Harvest Finished, Sept 21

Today I came home from work and found three Shenandoah pawpaws on the ground. I picked them up casual-like, since it's become so commonplace to be pickin up pawpaws. I brought them into the house and set them on the table and didn't even think immediately to mark them on the Shenandoah harvest chart. But then later in the evening, my native conscientiousness returned, and I took up a pen to record the day's harvest. And it turned out that I, with neither pomp nor circumstance, had harvested the final Shenandoah pawpaws of the year. Here's a pic of the tree's completed harvest chart:

Still two more to harvest from the Atwood. And several--about ten as I remember--to harvest from the Wells. And several on the Wells are still rock hard.

Wells Pawpaw Cultivar: Ripe Sept 18

The Shenandoah and the KSU-Atwood have shed quite a few ripe pawpaws over the last week. I'm including pictures of their ripening charts below. There was a bit of a wind storm on Sept 12, so you'll see a lot of pawpaws fell that day--nineteen, as I mentioned in a previous post. Since then, not many have fallen, though quite a few are still on both trees. I think the wind knocked down some pawpaws that would have been happy to wait to fall until later in the week. So now we're waiting on the Shenandoah and Atwood fruits that prefer to wait awhile longer.

But you can see from the third chart, below, that we haven't yet harvested any from the Wells cultivar.

While there haven't been any ripe ones, the Wells has been nourishing some genuinely big fruits. The big ones on the Wells don't seem to be the rule, but rather the exception. And these ones seem doubly exceptional to me because they're about as big as the biggest of the Shenandoah pawpaws this year, and they're bigger than any of the KSU-Atwoods. (That said, this is the Wells' second year bearing and it's carrying 13 pawpaws, while the Atwood and Shenandoah are a year younger than the Wells and are bearing around 25 and 40 respectively.) One of the cool things about this cluster of three Wells pawpaws is that the fruits seem to have continued growing over the past few weeks (over the past few weeks, the Shenandoah and Atwood seem to have been done growing and just concentrating on ripening).

So those exceptionally large Wells pawpaws aren't ready to come off the tree, but at least two (and maybe all) of this cluster of four are ready to come off the tree. These are still pawpaws of a fine size, even if they're not the biggest. NJ is getting home from Brazil today, and I think one aspect of the celebration will be picking the first Wells off the tree and sharing it.

Big Day: 19 Pawpaws Harvested

I came home from work today and didn't find any pawpaws under the trees. Once I got inside, I learned that W had collected them--eleven of them from beneath the Shenandoah. Then during dinner, another fell, this one from the Atwood. And tonight five more fell. All this on top of the few that I found under the trees this morning before breakfast. So if my tallies below are correct, and I have no reason to suspect they're not, we harvested 19 pawpaws today. For a total of 44 pawpaws to this point in 2016.

I've started keeping them in the fridge, hoping to store some up against the day when NJ gets home and we can have a legit Utah Pawpaw Festival.

A scene from the fridge. Behind the pawpaws in the unlabeled jar: some really good rhubarb and jalapeno jelly some friends gave us from their garden. And behind that: a labeled jar of preserves that seems like it decided to start floating while I took the pic.

A Moveable Fest: Second Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival (Part 1)

One of my favorite books is Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his early years in Paris, titled A Moveable Feast. The book has an epigraph, a quotation from Hemingway himself, that says: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." (Imagine being so famous that your books can begin with epigraphs that you yourself have written.)

Hemingway's idea was that a person can carry Paris around, and that Paris moves as the former inhabitant moves through space, whether to Spain or to Idaho or to Indonesia, Paris is always moving with you. But he took the idea of "a moveable feast" from something that doesn't move through space but moves through time. A "moveable feast" is an annual religious celebration that happens on different dates each year. Easter, for instance, would be a moveable feast, since it happens on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the spring season. In the United States, Martin Luther King Day would be a secular moveable feast, since its date changes every year, depending on when the third Monday of January falls.

We started small last year, when we threw the First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival, with only one pawpaw and four people in attendance. This year, we have a few dozen more pawpaws on hand than that, but the problem is that NJ has traveled to Brazil to give a keynote address, right during what ought to be the week we hold the Second Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival. So, in analogy to Hemingway's, and Christianity's, and the US Government's tradition of the "moveable feast," I'm experimenting this year with a "moveable fest," a Utah Pawpaw Festival that is a bit more dispersed in time and space, comprising a series of events over the course of this week and next, that may take place at a series of locations. Once NJ gets back, we'll have a main event at our house with guests. Meantime, though, there will be some moveable fests.

The first event in 2016's Moveable Utah Pawpaw Fest took place at my parents' house this evening. We had dinner and I brought over four pawpaws to share afterwards.

Source of the pawpaws in the moveable fest: yesterday we were out looking at the KSU-Atwood and we noticed that one of its leaves was turning yellow. I pulled lightly on the leaf to see if it would come off. The yellow leaf didn't budge, but five pawpaws plummeted to the earth!

Here are some of the participants in this evening's moveable fest. One participant didn't want to be in the picture, I guess because she had eaten only a small portion of one of the pawpaws and said she didn't want any more, and so maybe she didn't feel like she had earned a seat at the feast table.

I'm going to transcribe what the feasters/festers had to say about their pawpaw tastings:

W, who has been eating a lot of pawpaws, says, "I could eat pawpaws all day and never get tired of them."

My parents have tried pawpaws once before, maybe in 2005, when NJ and I found some pawpaw trees near their home in East Tennessee and told them when they should go harvest them. We couldn't go with them because we were in Virginia during September, so they went alone with one of my sisters and one of my brothers (at least I think one of my brothers was there). They shook the trees over near Boy Scout Camp Pellissippi and brought home a lot of pawpaws. But it turned out no one really liked the pawpaws. So, eleven years later, here's what they had to say tonight. My dad having tried the Atwood and the Shenandoah: "Both of em--I was pleasantly surprised because the only other pawpaws I tasted were wild--from Camp Pellissippi in East Tennessee....[The Atwood] had the texture of fine butter that melts in your mouth. The taste: I can't describe it. [The Shenandoah] had a flavor more like a peach. A stringy texture--I was pleasantly surprised by the stringy texture. More like the texture of a mango." A few people jeered when he said he liked the stringy texture, since stringiness isn't usually something that gives a pleasant surprise. But he seemed to be saying its stringiness reminded him of a mango, which he likes, and I imagine few would have jeered if he just had said it had the texture of a peach. My mother had this to say after trying the Atwood: "Like banana--it's sweeter than a banana and it has a better texture."

My sister tried it--just a little. She's pregnant and bananas currently make her gag. And she's had a rather tortured relationship to fruit in her life, as evidenced by the fact that she didn't eat an orange until she was about 14 years old: once on a family hike my sister was crying and I asked my mom why the tears. My mom answered that my sister at age fourteen had eaten her first orange, and she hadn't enjoyed peeling it, and she hadn't enjoyed how surprised her siblings were to learn that she had never peeled nor eaten an orange before. This is what she had to say about the Atwood: "Banana with a hint of pine sap," and then she added: "But I'm pregnant! The texture was like butter. You could scrape it off and spread it like a jam."

My brother-in-law tried it also, eating half a pawpaw: "Texture much like a very ripe banana [my sister, who gags if she thinks of bananas, said "eew!"]." He continued: "Same mouth-feels as a very ripe banana. [Another "Eew!"] But taste-wise, it almost felt like a little bit of coconut. Sweet like a coconut but also something savory."

Shenandoah Pawpaws Ripe!

You'll recognize this pic from my previous post: two twin clusters of Shenandoah pawpaws...

...displaying their fault lines, getting ready to fall. That was the state of things just last night. And last night I went to sleep thinking about raccoons and skunks prowling the neighborhood, opportunistically eating unattended pawpaws.

But last night is history.

This morning I went outside thinking I would pick a couple fruits from this set of two twin clusters, wanting NJ to be able to eat one before her upcoming business trip to Brazil. But the pawpaws saved me the work of picking: "And finally the broken stem / The plummeting to earth; and then..."

Here they are, as they were, having plummeted to earth "sometime while the night obscures the tree." 

They left the other set of twins hanging.

The broken stem.

Recording the harvest date for our first two Shenandoah pawpaws.

Putting the pawpaw harvest tracking chart back behind the woven bamboo fan.

A few quotes from this post are taken from Tennessee Williams's 1961 play The Night of the Iguana, which at one point has a character recite a poem about fruit falling from a tree, beginning with: "How calmly does the orange branch / Observe the sky begin to blanch." Here's the entire poem, with the surrounding dialogue and stage directions:

It's worth your four minutes to watch this poetry reading as it appeared in the 1964 film version of the play.

Shenandoah Pawpaw: Fault Line

When I got home from work today, I went directly to the pawpaws to see if any new fruits had fallen. At the same time, S ran out of the house and said she was coming out to check also. We looked around without success. 

But I went over to the Shenandoah cultivar and looked at a group of four particularly nice pawpaws. They're getting soft hanging on the tree. And today I noticed for the first time that at least one of them, under its own Shenandoahan weight, is developing a fault-line, getting ready to fall.

It won't be long now...

Pawpaw Harvest Tracking Charts

Yesterday morning after my run, I followed my compulsion and went to inspect the pawpaw trees. On the KSU-Atwood, I found a pawpaw whose stem was breaking, reflecting of course that it was ripe and poised to fall. I broke it off and brought it inside, where W saw it before he went to school (and apparently coveted it, though I didn't know). After the kids went to school, NJ and I cut open this second pawpaw of the year and each ate half. It was a good pawpaw.

Then last night at dinner, W asked, "Where's the pawpaw?", and I realized he had seen it and wanted it. I said we had eaten it, and he looked crestfallen, so I told him there were a few other pawpaws on the tree, right next to the one I broke off, that should be ready. He and I went out and picked those, and he ate one.

Having egg on your face means to look foolish or embarrassed, but there's no foolishness or embarrassment in having pawpaw on your face! 

I wanted to get a picture of the two other pawpaws we picked, which we're saving for maybe a day until they're fully ripe. As I took the picture, W reached over and put his hand in the photo, "For perspective," he said, alluding to how we usually photograph the fish we catch (with them running down the length of our arms so people can get perspective on how big, or small, they are).

Then S, who is often not as interested in pawpaws as W, wanted in on offering perspective to the pawpaws and their viewers. She's got dibs on the smaller pawpaw, and NJ and I are planning on splitting the larger pawpaw. Hopefully tonight at dinner.

The pawpaw harvest this year has totaled five so far, which is one more pawpaw than we harvested last year. But this year, there are around 70 on the trees. Last night it seemed notable that all of the pawpaws for this year (so far) have come from the KSU-Atwood, and I started wondering about how the different cultivars would pace themselves in ripening their fruit. How to keep track?

"Johnny Pawpawseed" is a common enough nickname for people to take upon themselves or bestow on others, especially if they've done something to further the fruit's propagation. (Take a look at this google search for "Johnny Pawpawseed" and you'll see I'm not lying.) No offense to Johnny Appleseed, but I decided to go Benjamin-Franklinian in relation to the pawpaws, keeping a chart on their ripening inspired by Ben Franklin's chart aspiring to "moral perfection," as reproduced here:

Ben Franklin's 18th-century chart, from his Autobiography

My chart--or my stapled packet of charts--isn't so grid-like, and it doesn't come close to addressing such topics as venery and sincerity. Rather,...

...it has a first page that's a pawpaw-oriented map of our yard. I needed to make a map, with each tree's cultivar labeled, since I imagine I won't be the only one picking up pawpaws this September. And I need my "co-workers in the kingdom of [horti]culture" to know from which tree they're harvesting. (Check out the origin of the "co-workers" quotation here.) Once NJ and the kids have a map of which tree is which,... 

...they can write the dates on which they harvest pawpaws from any of the three trees that are bearing this year. So, five pawpaw for the Atwood to this point, marking it as the most early-ripening variety of the three trees that are bearing this year. 

And then a blank page of possibilities for the Shenandoah.

And a less optimistic blank page of possibilities for the Wells.

After W finished his pawpaw, he got out the seed storage container and asked how I was planning on keeping track of which seeds came from which tree this year, since there would be so many seeds. I told him that type of keeping track is done for now--there will be too many seeds. For this year, at least, I'll be keeping track of something else.

And here's a pic that's kind of a nonsequiter for this blog post: the two pawpaws that were earlier pictured, with a few prickly pears. Both kinds of fruit happened to be passing across our table last night, and I thought I'd take a picture to show they had at one time met, even if they parted ways shortly thereafter. It turns out the song "The Bare Necessities" in the Jungle Book isn't the only evidence of their association.