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.