A Few Sept and Oct Pawpaw Events

I've been so busy with work and running and fishing in Sept and Oct 2018 that I didn't have time to post as much as I wanted to, during the window between the first pawpaw harvested and the last. But below are a few events, kind of offering some texture to the times.

This year we were very conscientious about writing the name of the cultivar on each pawpaw fruit. It was kind of fun since sometimes the ballpoint pen seemed to bruise the skin more than write on it, such that the bruises were formed in the shape of the names of the cultivars.

Three fallen pawpaws.

One morning I went out and found a pawpaw half eaten on the ground, maybe by a deer or a raccoon? We haven't had any problems with mammals eating any of the other pawpaws. (Usually the mammals leave it to the rolly pollies and slugs.) After the deer or raccoon got to this one, some big black ants basically took up residence on the flesh for a week. They just sat there and didn't move much and gorged themselves. 

At a certain point before the harvest was over we drove up to Jackson, Wyoming, and fished. We brought five pawpaws with us, and some of us wondered if these were the first pawpaws to ever enter the town of Jackson. Or maybe even the first pawpaws to ever enter the state of Wyoming. Then again, maybe there have been many many pawpaws in Wyoming and I just haven't known about it (and I'm not planning on googling it right now to find out).

Fourth Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival

On Saturday, 22 September 2018, we held the 4th Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival. Last year we only had 12 pawpaws to divide among the crowds that thronged our house for the festival. But this year we had many more. (Whoever can count the number of the pawpaws on the counter, so be it.) We had enough that at the end of the evening, since I was cutting them in half and in fourths to make sure we had enough to go around, we had pawpaws to send guests home with.

This year we roped three friends into making some desserts with some frozen pawpaw pulp we had put in the freezer in 2017. So in addition to our traditional pawpaw cake, some friends brought pawpaw pudding, pawpaw cheesecake (with pawpaw topping), and then a layered and glazed pawpaw cake. I had some of each of the pawpaw desserts, and by the time I finished them I swore I would never eat anymore food in my life--and I kept to that swearing until lunch the next day. And there was a lot of other food at the 4th Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival--including some jackfruit.

About 50 people came to the 4th Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival; you can't see them all in this pic.

Some people talked inside.

Some people talked outside.

In this picture, to the far left, you can see the table where we set out our pawpaw linocuts, hand pulled over the course of a year, in preparation to give away at the 4th Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival. Here are some links to the prints we gave away: here and here and here. And here and here.

Pawpaw Harvest 2018: The Final Tally

Some of you, gentle readers, are real numbers people. You don't care about anything except the final tally each year, the number of fruits we got from each tree. This post is for you, contextualizing the numbers of the 2018 harvest with the numbers of the 2016 and 2017 harvest.

The Shenandoah

• 2016 final tally: 33
• 2017 final tally: 72 
• 2018 final tally: 54

The Atwood

• 2016 final tally: 34
• 2017 final tally: 32 
• 2018 final tally: 49

The Wells

• 2016 final tally: 13
• 2017 final tally: 66 
• 2018 final tally: 58

The Total

• 2016 final tally: 80
• 2017 final tally: 170 
• 2018 final tally: 165

So it was a record year for the Atwood, though the Wells and the Shenandoah underperformed compared to last year. And that threw the narrative of constant progress to pieces, since the total harvest this year was five pawpaws fewer than the total harvest last year. Still, we picked (up from the ground) plenty of pawpaws between August 17th and October 24th. Plenty of pawpaws. And next year I wouldn't be completely surprised if our Susquehanna cultivar bore a few fruits, and then the year after that, onward to the Mango cultivar. (Here I go, in the face of the deflation of harvesting fewer pawpaws this year than last year, still talking the language of "onward" this and "upward" that.)  

BIG Pawpaws

Over the past two days, we've been having some pawpaws fall that are as big as "heck" (to draw on a term that former President Obama used during a recent and welcome speech). The biggest are tumbling from the KSU-Atwood. Yesterday we drove up to the house after going and getting some burgers, and we found these two monsters in the grass. S got a hold of them and started posing. 

Then NJ took them from S and wanted to start posing too.

We've got several POH (pawpaws on hand) right now, all labeled so we know what we're getting when we cut them open (labeled or not, I always know what we're getting after we cut them open, since it's easy to tell the different cultivars apart on the inside). These three pics are of the POH but also snapshots of where we're at in terms of how many fruits from which tree. (A little outdated now, though, since I just went outside at 10:15 pm and found two more big Shenandoah pawpaws on the ground).

This is kind of extra-curricular for me to be mentioning on Expatriate Pawpaw, but last week NJ and I drove about 45 minutes to our "little sister" town up north and saw the Smashing Pumpkins on their reunion tour. You can see Billy Corgan and James Iha up in front and then Jimmy Chamberlin is behind the drums. Still missing (literally, I'm missing) D'Arcy Wretzky on bass. (There's a pawpaw-related tie-in, don't worry.)

One of the fun things about the show was that we had pretty decent seats for seeing the band members on stage, and then behind Billy and the band, they had a lot of big baroque projections on the screens. At one point, it looked like (as you'll see on the left) the steampunk projection of Billy had three big pawpaws growing up from behind his head.

But I zoomed in and it was just five cobras. Heck.

A New Image for Expatriate Pawpaw

This pic is the one I've been using for the cover image of Expatriate Pawpaw since August 2015.  But this year I got an email from a student at a nearby university and he was wondering if I would trade a pawpaw for something, maybe some acorns that had been boiled several times. But then he said that even after boiling, they still weren't very good. I wasn't surprised to hear this, since I myself once tried boiling a bunch of acorns several times, unsuccessfully hoping to drive away their astringency. Based on that experience, I would have given him a pawpaw for not giving me any acorns. But what I admire about his acorn gambit is that we're an elite few in the twenty-first century who have been dedicated enough to eating unconventional plant-matter that we've even tried boiling acorns. So in the end, he had me at "boiled acorns," and we simply agreed to meet and I handed him the pawpaw, which he carried home, by his own report, "like it was the last egg for some endangered species." He ate it this morning, reporting by email: "It definitely had a tropical taste, but I'm thinking it might not have been the best one because I had read some descriptions of it as a mango/banana, which are both pretty sweet, but it was pretty mild (sweeter than an avocado, but in the same realm)." He's right--I bet it wasn't the best. I gave him a Shenandoah pawpaw, and though usually this is my favorite cultivar, this year it's producing a handful of insipid pawpaws along side its normal fruit fireworks. (We ate two small insipid pawpaws and one roman candle pawpaw this evening, for instance.) 

In return for the pawpaw, sub-par though it may have been, he emailed me a design, which he was too politick to suggested I ought to use as the front page image for my blog, but which was so clearly based on the former front page image that I couldn't help but think that I definitely should. So with his permission, I'm now using it, and very happy about it. I'm hoping to give him a better pawpaw later this month.

First Pawpaw of the Year: A Pawpaw Split

We got back from a seventeen-day trip to Indonesia and Singapore about a week and a half ago, curious to see how the pawpaws had fared in our absence. There was a big pawpaw on the Shenandoah that had split open and then developed some scar tissue over its wound. NJ checked to see if it was soft and indeed it was. So we picked it and brought it inside. 

I cut the split portion out and put it in a bowl while working on cutting the rest of the pawpaw.

While I cut, NJ had a different view of the wedge that I had removed from the pawpaw, which inevitably led to...you guessed it--

It seemed like when she suggested it, I had a conjugal obligation to pose this way.

After those shenanigans, I took a slice...

...and she took a slice.

And then we...

...cleaned up.

And I started this year's Pawpaw Harvesting Chart. The first pawpaw of 2018: August 17th, Indonesia's Independence Day.

Beast in the Pawpaw Jungle

The pawpaw seedlings I planted hadn't been out in the woods for 24 hours but that one got bit by a beast.

A deer bit this one--and had second thoughts--on the very first night.

Planting Nine Pawpaw Trees

In September 2015 we had our first pawpaw harvest, from the Wells, which was pollinated either by the KSU-Atwood or the Shenandoah. That year, we harvested four pawpaw fruits and stratified the seeds, keeping them in the fridge over the winter so they would be viable for planting in the spring. There were twenty seeds, and on March 5th, 2016, I planted them all in containers. Most of them germinated. I gave a few away in 2017, for a total of four given away. I also killed one--not maliciously but in a spirit of experimentation. That brings us to July 28, 2018, with nine of them left.

I had been looking at them the past few days thinking they didn't look so healthy, knowing that they probably weren't feeling so healthy either, since they were getting big enough that their small containers and the same soil for the past few years wouldn't be pleasing to them.

So yesterday I decided to plant a few of them, and then once I started planting I just didn't stop. I planted all nine pawpaws of the 2015 harvest (2016 germination year). This brings our pawpaw orchard up to fourteen pawpaw trees, if you can imagine. Though the orchard may shrink if some of them can't hack it Utah's earth, or at least the subsection of Utah's earth that makes up the woodsy margin between our house and our neighbors' house.

The area I planted them is pretty shady, lined with red cedars and covered with ivy. I'm anticipating that if the pawpaws live, they won't grow in the conical-shaped way they do out on our lawn but rather they'll be spindly, like the pawpaws in Virginia that we used to see growing in the woods--spindly because they'll be reaching for sunlight. But don't cry for them. They're an "understory tree" by nature--planting them in the shade is like throwing Brer Rabbit into the brier patch.

I got into the ivy and pulled some of it up to prepare a place for the first couple seedlings.

Clearing the ivy, one of the first things I noticed was a pawpaw seed, one of the many that I have thrown back among the ivy in hopes that pawpaws would sprout spontaneously without further aid from me. But there it lies, thrown there in the fall of 2017 and clearly dried out an unviable. 

It so happened that the pawpaw whose container I had labeled A1 was the biggest at the time of planting yesterday, and I started with the biggest. But what a thing--to have A1 be the biggest of them all. Does it say anything about the way plants are responsive to their names? (I'll get back to you on that question later--I need to consult my crystals for a definitive answer.)

Then I moved on to planting the next one. I was curious, while using scissors to cut open the plastic containers. What would the pawpaw seedlings' infamous taproots look like? What contortions would they make while confined to such small containers? I had a good view of it all while planting the second seedling.

Moving on to planting another one. Mostly I wanted to include this pic because--look!--in the soil to the left of the pawpaw container you can see another dried-out pawpaw seed. Under the ivy, as I dug around, the ground was teeming with seeds that never grew.

(Other than that, excavating in the ivy was something of an archaeology of our son W's childhood. I found a broken arrow, a faded fruit snack wrapper, several dry-rotting sticks he used to play with, some fabric of uncertain origin, and a few other items.)

In went C5--good old C5!

In went C2--who could forget treasured days watering C2!

Since I planted these seeds in clear containers, the soil received a fair bit of light on a regular basis. I've been vaguely aware that some of the columns of soil were looking rather mossy. Now that I was cutting them open, I was curious to get a better look at the moss.

Look at that moss! We don't get that around here very much since the air is so dry. But this pawpaw must've felt right at home in mossy soil, like its ancestors might have experienced in the East. (I'm just kiddn--I don't think the pawpaw liked its soil conditions, wet and soggy and mossy and sunny. I think that's why the seedlings weren't looking so healthy lately. But in the end, I'm just trying to get by with "good enough.")

Another pawpaw seed! (I don't know why I was so excited to find these dead seeds. I put them there--or hurled them there--after all, so I shouldn't have been surprised they were...there.)

Another pawpaw seed.

A mossy taproot. Interesting to think that this taproot was exposed to the sun through the clear plastic.

Now here was a specimen with some fibrous moss!

Specimen C1 won the prize for most extensive moss jungle.

This pic puts the moss in the foreground. And puts the space alien--stop kidding yourself, I know you see the eye and terrifying slit of a nose!--in the background. It would be too much of a distraction, though, to mention the unexpected way in which the planting of these nine pawpaw seedlings ended up being a close encounter of the third kind, so I won't dwell on that here. Rather, I'll save that for my blog dedicated to aliens.

I got them all planted, finally, after sweating it out for a couple hours. Here are the containers of the seeds that din't make it--either never germinated or I killed or died over the winter: D7, D6, D1, C3, D10, A2. (Sadly, it looks like A2 just couldn't take living--or not living--in the shadow of its over-achiever and aptly named sibling A1.)

Here's the plastic-lined box I used to keep the seedlings in, brown with repeated spills during watering.

Here's a map of which pawpaw seedlings I planted, and where. The concentric circles represent the cedars. The cross-hatched area represents some brick hardscaping.

D3, D2, C1

D8, C4

C2, A1

C5

Finally, the last and certainly the least (as in smallest), D5.