Planting Pawpaw Seeds--March 29, 2018

Last year only about half of the pawpaw seeds I planted resulted in sprouts that leafed out. It's spring now, and these are the containers that did indeed sprout. I got them out of the shed.

These are the containers that didn't sprout. This year, to save time (I usually go out and buy some water bottles and cut them off at the top), I decided to plant seeds in the failed containers from last year.

I began by dumping out the dirt from the last year's failed containers, interested to see what I would find. I knew I hadn't seen sprouts, but what about roots? The first container I dumped out I saw a long tap root, so the pawpaw was trying--it just didn't succeed.

A closer look at the root.

A look at the root with the stem that protruded up into the air, at the top.

The end on the upper left side shows the part of the plant that got stuck in the seed and couldn't get out--it wanted to become leaves but the shell on the seed was too strong. Here's a short discussion of the problem I was dealing with.

I kept dumping the soil from the failed containers, putting the soil at the base of the Elberta peach tree, and collecting any subterranean signs of pawpaw life (and death) that I found.

Here's a line-up of what I found.

Interestingly, this one seems to have tried putting out three taproots.

A pic that shows some perspective on size.

I deposited all the roots next to our prickly pear start, which rests on a piece of petrified seabed we picked up a few hours south of here. Honestly, the seabed is more interesting than the pawpaw roots--look at the waves produced by the ancient currents.

Finally, I had dumped out all of the containers...or so I thought.

I found one other failed container and emptied it out and found one more root.

Then I got all the necessities for pawpaw-seed-planting: some flower and vegetable garden soil and...

...a Spiderman cup for scooping soil.

While I was at it, I topped off the containers of the seeds I planted last year--good to give them some new soil and nutrients.

And then I topped off the containers of the seeds I planted in 2016.

Here they are, all topped-off, containers for 2018, 2017, and 2016. But the 2018 containers still lacked seeds.

I got the stratified seeds out of the fridge and found the top layer covered with mold.

The next layer down didn't have any mold to speak of.

And the bottom-most layer had just a little mold.

Because last year I was dealing with the problem of the plants not being able to break out of the seed shell, I decided I would try weakening the shells with the saw on my pocketknife. I had 24 containers and gathered 12 KSU-Atwood seeds (left) and 12 Shenandoah seeds (right). And I was about to start scoring them with the saw.

But then I realized I could just use the cement as a file, so I ran each of the seeds along the cement, about 3 times on each side.

Here are the seeds, after having left their mild discolorations on the driveway.

You can see the weakened sides of the seeds--hoping this works.

I planted the 12 Atwood seeds left side.

And the 12 Shenandoah seeds on the right side.