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!