The Gathering In--For the Pawpaw Fest

The Fifth Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival is coming up soon--tomorrow, in fact. The branches of the pawpaw trees are heavy laden, as you can see.

And once in awhile we've had a pawpaw fall. I found this one in the grass several days ago, ripe and emitting a strong, delightful pawpaw smell. The roly-polies thought the same thing, and they ate holes in it--and one hole through it!--before I found it. (The roly-polies got one half, while we ate the other half.)

But in general, the pawpaws have been very slow to fall this year, we can only speculate because of the late spring we had here in Utah Valley.

So we've been picking some pawpaws from the trees--only the soft ones--in prep for the Pawpaw Fest. 

The number of ripe POH (pawpaws on hand) swelled from zero to eight by the end of Sept 24th. I think today we might be at thirteen. I'm hoping by the end of the day we'll be at fifteen. Heck, I'm hoping that by the end of the day we'll be at thirty or forty. But fifteen is more realistic. We're doing all we can--which isn't much--to hurry things along.

Losing Weight through Self-Metabolization

You'll recall that this year we bought a food scale so we could carry the obsessive compulsion of cataloging pawpaws further out toward the nth degree. Now we're recording not only dates of each fruit's harvest but also weights. This is the first pawpaw on the scale back on Sept 6th.

Then, out of curiosity, I weighed the same pawpaw on Sept 7th. It had lost weight.

And what of the same pawpaw on Sept 8th? It had lost more weight.

It presents a problem for the conscientious pawpaw weigher: When to weigh the pawpaw--when it's first disconnected from the tree or right before you're going to eat it?

For right now we're going with disconnection from the tree. 

Pawpaw-Cuttin Ceremony, 2019

On September 10th we had a pawpaw-cuttin ceremony in the kitchen.

I feel so bad that the knife doesn't show up well in the pic,
since it was the knife that was doing all the cuttin.

Cut!

Also happening in the house at the same time:
Here's an in-progress linocut of the nearby Great Salt Lake and its brine shrimp.

The Weight of First Harvest

Yesterday I went up to Ogden (which hosts one of the most substantial pawpaw patches in Utah), so I missed a few things in my hometown, including the plummeting to earth of the first pawpaw of our 2019 pawpaw harvest. It plummeted from the Shenandoah, and NJ found it and marked it by cultivar and date. It's not ready to eat yet, but it's soft enough that it's sure to ripen,
unlike the many windfalls and early-cast fruit we had during the spring and summer.

You'll recognize that in this pic (above) I've placed the first fruit upon the as-yet blank pages of the 2019 pawpaw harvesting charts. In reporting harvest results of the past, we've listed the numbers and the dates for each individual fruit. That has started to not seem compulsively obsessive enough, so this year we bought a food scale specifically for the 2019 pawpaw harvest. Now we can also report on the weight of each pawpaw that falls. 

Behold.

The placing of the pawpaw.

The weighing.

The recording.

Pawpaw Volunteers and Windfalls

As you know, we've got about twenty pawpaw seedlings growing in our meager backyard. I was out watering them about a week ago and realized that I was seeing a new pawpaw tree, one I hadn't planted. In this pic you can see the pawpaw plant on the right with its characteristic big leaves. And then on the left you can see the new pawpaw plant, much smaller. 

Here it is. Since I didn't plant it, it must be a volunteer that the roots of the bigger pawpaw sent out. I put the bigger pawpaw in the ground in 2018, as a seedling germinated from our first pawpaw harvest in 2015. I of course knew that pawpaw roots sent out volunteers (the origin of the proverbial pawpaw patch), but I didn't know they would send out volunteers so soon and when the originary tree was still so small. But, well, the pawpaw surprised me.

We've had a lot of fruit set and grow over the spring and summer. At first I didn't know how the trees would bring all of the fruits to fruition, but as I mentioned earlier, the tree will decide how much fruit it can bare. And the trees have decided to cast plenty of their fruit early. These are the last four early-cast fruits, cast sometime during the past weekend. How do I know they're the last four? Because yesterday, September 5th, NJ found the first ripe pawpaw on the ground. Let the 2019 harvest begin!