Western Scrub Jays in a Pawpaw Tree

In its native land, the pawpaw is accustomed, I'm sure, to visits from the bluejay.

But out expatriate pawpaws in Utah receive visits from the bluejay's cousin, the western scrub jay.

And I saw a pair of western scrub jays out on the Wells pawpaw this morning as I was heading off to work.

The one on the ground was picking through the mulch finding something to eat; it was the first one to fly away, followed by the one in the tree.

The pawpaw gave no indication either way whether it felt strange to be visited by western scrub jays rather than blue jays.

What I Did During Winter Vacation from the Pawpaws

Over the winter...

...there wasn't as much going on with the pawpaws, besides being covered in snow.

To be sure, I knew how they felt at times, but at other times I was thinking about other things, like...

...plant five bonsai citrus trees and keeping them on my office window sill. From ebay, I ordered a Meyer lemon, a Persian lime, a Moro blood orange, another Meyer lemon because the first one died, and a Flame grapefruit.

I also went down to the San Rafael Swell and walked among the red rock cliffs and frozen puddles...

...and petroglyphs and...

...overcast skies.

And we snow-shoed.

And then spring and the wood ducks showed up, and the pawpaws began coming back to life.

Planting Pawpaw Seeds and Hoping to Get Some Plum Cuttings to Root

Spring has really arrived here in Utah, and the pawpaws know it. 

All of the bigger pawpaws in our yard have buds that are getting ready to burst forth in deep purple blossoms.

And the seedlings that grew from the twenty seeds that I planted in March 2016 are also attuned to the warm weather, with a few of them showing some green on their apex leaf buds. (This pic looks so patriotic, the way it has red and white stripes in the background. I think that's red duct tape and whitish plastic in the background--not, as I'm sure most of you are thinking, the "Merah-Putih," the Indonesian flag.)

The other evening I was texting with Dan and he sent me some picks of the work he's doing on getting cuttings from tree branches to root. To most people familiar with plants, I guess this is fairly common knowledge--you can take a cutting, put some rooting hormone on one end, and stick that end into the dirt. Or, you can place the cuttings in a plastic container with some water, and then let them sit in there for a few weeks. Getting cuttings to root is a way to make a tree that will be genetically identical to the tree from which the cutting is taken, so it produces the exact same fruit as the original tree. I hadn't known there was any way to do that except by grafting, which I don't yet know how to do. In any case, once I realized that Dan having success with apples and apricots, I remember the most delicious plum I've ever eaten. I ate it eight years ago, from the tree in the front yard of the parents of a friend of ours. So I contacted the friend to get his parents' phone number and address, and they were willing for me to take some cuttings from their plum tree. I had imagined maybe it was an underappreciated tree and that people didn't realize what good fruit it was. Not so, say his parents. They have people coming from all over the neighborhood to get their plums. And at one point, one of their neighbors (now moved) seems to have set up a ladder beneath the tree and kept it there, so he could get to their plums at his will and pleasure! Based on what I remember of the taste of the plum from eight years ago, I can understand why he would do that. The tree's owners were very generous. And perhaps their generosity was compounded by the profound ecological ethic promulgated by the Ernest Goes to Camp (1987), which only work of expressive culture that surpasses Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949) in terms of impact on American environmental thought. In that august 1987 film ("movie" too degrading a name for such a work of art), a character posits the questions: "Who can own a tree? Who can own a rock?"

 See the bramble of cuttings I took, above. Of course, as Ernest Goes to Camp reminds me: if the cuttings take root, I'll never truly own them.

I stuck the cuttings in a picture of water over night and this morning I planted some using the root hormone and soil method.

And I used the plastic container approach with some other sticks from the plum cuttings. Incidentally, I've read that in terms of pawpaw cultivation, it's the holy grail to be able to propagate pawpaws from cuttings, rather than from grafting. And by holy grail, I mean no one has yet found the method to do so. (The article says people have been successful propagating from cuttings from very young pawpaw seedlings, but of course that's useless, since the seedlings wouldn't fruit before the cutting-propagation window is closed, and the whole reason to propagate a cutting is to duplicate the fruit.) 

After I got things set up for my attempt at growing a delectable plum tree from cuttings, I turned my attention to planting some pawpaw seeds. Like last year, I used Arrowhead water bottles as my containers. And whereas I planted twenty seeds last year, I planted forty-eight seeds this year. But this year I didn't bother with labeling anything and making letter-number coordinates like "B6" and "C2". There were too many seeds in the fall to keep track of any of that, so I just got the seeds and put them in the dirt. You may remember that I stratified the seeds in several layers of paper towels. I only had containers enough to plant the seeds from not even one layer.

So after planting seeds in the containers, I decided to try an experiment--I went into our "backyard" (we hardly have a backyard, that's why all our pawpaw trees are in our front yard) and threw maybe a hundred or two hundred seeds in among the English ivy that forms the riotous border between our property and our neighbors' property. I know the ivy will give the pawpaw seeds some serious competition in terms of the seeds' attempt to root into the soil. But the ivy will also offer some good shade (combined with the red cedar trees) that may protect any seedling that happens to grow. I'd be happy to have some of them sprout and fortify the border between the two properties. I'd say a border pawpaw patch beats a border wall any day.

I also threw some seeds among these bushes here, on another border between our acreage (our .2 acre acreage) and a neighbor's property.

I'm not sure, though, what I'll do with the remaining seeds. We've still got more than half of them left.

Re-homing 2 Pawpaw seedlings and 23 Stratified Pawpaw Seeds

In October I published a blog post entitled Utah Pawpaw Growers: Part 1. It showcased an interview with a Utah pawpaw grower named Dan. Today after work he drove over to our house so we could talk pawpaws, and so I could send him away with two pawpaw seedlings (seeds picked out of some 2015 pawpaws, stratified over the winter, and sprouted in summer 2016) and twenty-three pawpaw seeds (saved from our 2016 pawpaws and stratified during this past winter). 

Here's Dan looking at the seeds. As I told him: they're all mixed up, with seeds from the Wells, the Shenandoah, and the KSU-Atwood. But since each seed has two parents, every seed carries genetic material from two of the best varieties, which are the two final cultivars on the list (no offense to the Wells).

Here's Dan standing with a ziplock bag of twenty-three seeds, with the pawpaw seedlings at his feet. I've talked with him a few times on the phone, and we've talked about youthful pawpaws' shade requirements. As I understand it, pawpaw seedlings need shad for the first year of their lives and then they're fine to be out in direct sunlight. But I don't know when to count "the first year" as finished. If they sprout in June, is that growing season the first year? Of does the sprouting year not count? And so the growing season after they sprout (this spring and summer, for these seedlings) would be the first year?

While he was here, Dan asked our daughter S if she liked pawpaws. S didn't offer a rousing or convincing affirmation, but at least managed to say yes. (She does like pawpaws--I think she was just a little unsure about who Dan was, and I hadn't done much to prepare anyone for his visit, besides telling NJ that "a guy named Dan" was coming over; and I didn't even give S that much of a heads up.)

Dan was especially impressed by the well established Wells. He asked how old it was, and I couldn't exactly remember, but now in the silence of the night (it's about 10.30pm) I remember that this spring in May, it will have been six years since I planted it. The KSU-Atwood and the Shenandoah: five years this spring. We looked at each of the pawpaw trees. At one point, NJ said that liking pawpaws among the fruits is like liking George Harrison among the Beatles.

Here he is, set up now to legitimately vie for first place as the most prolific pawpaw grower in Utah. With these seedlings, he's now got about 8 pawpaw trees I think. And who knows how the twenty-three seeds will turn out. As they always say: You can count the number of seeds in a pawpaw but you can't count the number of pawpaws in twenty-three seeds.