Pawpaw Harvest 2017: The Final Tally

In June 2017 I took a census of pawpaw fruits, comparing the 2016 harvest with what I anticipated would be the 2017 harvest.

Here's the information I tabulated and predicted in the census, based on the small pawpaw fruits that were on the trees in June: 

The Shenandoah: 65 (last year's final tally: 33)--a predicted increase of 32

The KSU-Atwood: 23 (last year's final tally: 34)--a predicted decrease of 11

The Wells: 37 (last year's final tally: 13)--a predicted increase of 24

The Total: 125 (last year's final tally: 80)--a predicted increase of 45    

(For more details on 2016's harvest, see this post.)

But below, I've got the actual, verified, final numbers for you, complete with day-by-day notations on the harvest, which, among all trees, lasted from September 5th to October 31st.

The Shenandoah gave us 72 pawpaws, beginning on Sept 5th and concluding on Oct 31st, lasting for the full extent of the harvest.

The KSU-Atwood gave us 32 pawpaws, beginning on Sept 15th and finishing up just a few minutes after the Shenandoah on Oct 31st.

The Wells gave us 66 pawpaws, beginning on Sept 28th and finishing on Oct 26th. On a per-day basis, the Wells's concentrated fury couldn't be matched. And also, like I've said, the Wells was a double-pawpaw making machine (we counted each double pawpaw as two pawpaws, fyi).

So here's the final tally

The Shenandoah

• 2016 final tally: 33
• 2017 prediction: 65
• 2017 final tally: 72 (39 more than 2016 and 7 more than predicted)

The Atwood

• 2016 final tally: 34
• 2017 prediction: 23
• 2017 final tally: 32 (2 fewer than 2016 but 9 more than predicted)

The Wells

• 2016 final tally: 13
• 2017 prediction: 37
• 2017 final tally: 66 (53 more than 2016 and 29 more than predicted)

The Total

• 2016 final tally: 80
• 2017 prediction: 125
• 2017 final tally: 170 (90 more than 2016 and 45 more than predicted)

So much arithmetic in this post. Next time hopefully a little more fractal geometry, which as you'll see from the Mandelbrot set lurking on the other side of the Shenandoah's chart, is the true substrate of all pawpaw harvesting.

Halloween and Final Pawpaws

Halloween was the day we harvested the final three pawpaws of 2017. Here's the stately Shenandoah with its final pawpaw.

See here's the pawpaw.

It so happens that NJ's costume, which remade her as a pawpaw-leaf-adorned dryad, positioned her as Halloween's anointed pawpaw harvester.

She reached out and took hold of the Shenandoah's final fruit.

And then she contemplated the sweet and poignant scent of the closing this phase of the circle of life.

And contemplated.

And still contemplated.


I felt bad, needing to break her reverie, but we had more harvesting to do before we headed off to eat some scones at a neighbor house. So I went ahead and interrupted, reminding her that the KSU-Atwood stood waiting nearby...

She was a good sport about having her meditation interrupted and walked over and did the work of harvesting the final two Atwood pawpaws, which had actually turned kind of purple or brown on the branch.

Then, all over again, it was contemplation of the circle of life and its sweet and poignant scent.

After half an hour I was able to convince her to wipe the tears from her eyes and let's us go and get some scones already.

Over at our neighbors' house, where the scones were, NJ bumped into another autumn dryad, a good friend of ours.

Back home that night, I labeled the final three pawpaws and recorded them on the pawpaw harvest tracking chart.

What Is This? Ha ha ha, a pawpaw!

Over the summer the pawpaws fell by the half-dozen. To keep the slugs from getting them in the night, sometimes we would go out and pick them up so they wouldn't need to sit on the lawn for too long.

We would bring them in and sometimes NJ would spell strange words with them, we had so many. They seemed so familiar to everyone in our house, over-familiar even.

And then one day a visitor reminded us that these are uncommonly uncommon fruit. She walked in and grabbed a pawpaw from the table and said, "What is this?"

"Ha, ha, ha," we answered, "a pawpaw!" Source of the laughter: not that she didn't know what it was, but that her question reminded us that we had forgotten how normal a thing it is to not know what a pawpaw is.

Toward the end of the second month of pawpaw harvest, we drove away and caught a whole bunch of lake trout in three hours. This is my favorite picture from the expedition.

Damaged Pawpaw Sprouts

In spring 2017 we planted forty pawpaw seeds and probably had thirty of them sprout but then had about ten die because they couldn't break out of the seed coat. I wrote about that problem here, finding that in some cases I could pull the seed coat apart and release the leaves and sometimes the leaves would mature okay. But sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes the leaves would die. And we would be left with a green stem. But sometimes the green stem had so much vitality that it would start bristling with nodules.

Here's a look at some of the nodules.

And here's a closer look, each one trying to decide if it has the energy to become a small branch.

And sometimes one of the nodules would find the energy to grow up into the sky and keep the pawpaw sprout alive in spite of the trauma of its birth.

In the end, about twenty sprouts survived to become seedlings.

Mock Commercialization

At a certain point in September or October 2017, as the pawpaws were falling fast and furious, a couple of them were sitting near some store-bought fruit. Just to see how it would look, I took the stickers off the store-bought grocery-store variety fruit and stuck them to the pawpaws. It looked so normal to see the stickers on the pawpaws--strange since you can't buy pawpaws in grocery stores (I'm sure there are one or two exceptions in places like West Virginia).

I left the stickers on the pawpaws until a couple days later when NJ glanced at them and did a double-take, confused to see grocery store stickers on fruit that isn't sold in grocery stores. After that, I stopped this type of mock commercialization of the pawpaw and just resorted to using a ball-point pen to write the cultivar name on the skins.

A Pawpaw Split: The Problem of Dry Pawpaws

On Sept 26 of 2017 I harvested three pawpaws from the Shenandoah. On the pawpaw harvesting chart, I made a note about these three: "picked, soft but not the typical yellow the the Shenandoah." This was the beginning of a new experience for us: late-season pawpaws that seemed dried out. It wasn't just the Shenandoah that was giving us these dried out pawpaws--in 2017 we harvested pawpaws during the entire month of October (in 2016 the harvest only lasted for the month of September), and most of 2017's October pawpaws were fairly dry, not as custardy as pawpaw lovers are accustomed to. More spongy. Many of them still tasted good when eaten fresh, but we also decided to freeze the pulp from a lot of the drier October pawpaws.

A few pawpaws, all from the KSU-Atwood, dried out so much that they cracked wide open while still on the tree.

I didn't like seeing this all that much, but at least it was interesting. It's hard to predict what novelty the pawpaws will throw at us next. Certainly our peach tree provides very limited drama in comparison.

The smallest fruit from this batch was cracked when I harvested it.

You can see another cracked pawpaw at the top of this pic.

This one: we've been letting it dry out completely, and NJ has suggested making a Christmas tree ornament out of it.


I'm not sure why it happened like this--we only lost a few fruit to this on-branch cracking, but the bigger concern was just the dryness of the late-season pawpaws and corresponding lower taste quality. This year I didn't put as much water on the trees as I have in previous years. The leaves stayed green and they produced a lot of fruit, reflecting I'm sure an extensive root system. But maybe without my help they couldn't get enough water to keep the later fruit from drying out? For the 2018 season I'll plan on giving them more water to see if we can get better fruit in October.

Of course, if anyone out there has dealt with the problem of dry late-season pawpaws, I'd love to hear what you've tried and whether it's worked.

The Wells: A Double-Pawpaw Machine

Each pawpaw fruit is born from a flower that has the potential to produce up to about eight fruit at a time, so you'll often see pawpaws growing in clusters. Sometimes the clusters have complications. As they grow in close quarters from the same flower, one fruit might adhere to another fruit, and then the fruit to which it adheres will out pace it in growth, breaking the smaller fruit off of the stem and leaving it like a parasite, hanging onto the larger fruit and then shriveling up eventually. You can see this is what happened with the big pawpaw in the foreground here. The brown nub on top is the smaller fruit in the scenario I've just described.

A closer look at the little failed pawpaw that we had going on during pawpaw season of 2017. In 2016 I described little pawpaws like these as parasitic twins. 

But there's another scenario that can play out when pawpaws from the same flower adhere to each other, as long as the two adhering pawpaws can roughly match each others' growth:
the double-pawpaw.
Above, you see the cluster and the two lower pawpaws have stuck together from infancy and stayed together as they've grown. Before pawpaw season of 2017, I had only seen this type of thing in a pic I saw once online (I've just searched and can't find it now). But during the 2017 season, we were surprised to see the Wells cultivar produce probably five sets of double-pawpaws.
Neither the KSU-Atwood nor the Shenandoah produced any doubles.

A closer look: you can see they really are stuck together.

Here's another set of doubles. Based on the shape, I thought of this one as Asimina triloba's straining toward Taoist philosophy.

Another double-pawpaw that hadn't yet attained a consciousness of how seemingly contradictory forces may actually be complementary.

Here I am, having harvested a big cluster of three Wells pawpaws. The two that are directly in my hand are doubles.

See?

Here's what the connective tissue looks like on a double-pawpaw.

One day I harvested both the yin-yang pawpaw and a double-pawpaw that was quite off balance, to the point that if the smaller one were just a little smaller I bet it would have become a parasitic twin.

Here's the yin-yang double-pawpaw getting its portrait on the counter.

Here's the same double-pawpaw cut open.

The Wells produced so many double-pawpaws in 2017. I wonder if it was a fluke or if this is something we can expect from it every year?