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.

Pawpaw Flower Buds in Late March 2018

About a week ago I took a look at the pawpaw trees and saw that the flower buds on the KSU-Atwood are growing and showing a little green.

For Christmas I got NJ a couple Monkey Jar plants, which we had seen over the summer at the Hortus Botanicus Leiden in the Netherlands. I bought them from Pearl River Exotics.

We've been glad that the plants have grown a bit and have made the "monkey jar" features that we admired in Leiden. They're passively carnivorous or insectivorous I guess, since the "jar" opens and there's water at the bottom and insects get trapped in the water. 

And then the plant digests the insects and uses whatever small nutrients they offer. Good to see it already working.

Linocut: Grosbeak with September Pawpaws

A few years ago I saw a Black-headed Grosbeak flying away out of the corner of the yard where we have our pawpaw trees. This was before the pawpaws were giving fruit, so I know it was after our peaches, and I know it got to some of our peaches, since that year I found several peaches with grosbeak-sized bite marks. Since then I haven't seen the grosbeaks hanging around (not even around the peach tree), but I've wondered: if they hung around, would they try eating a pawpaw?

I wanted to make a speculative print about this question, but the Black-headed Grosbeak doesn't overlap in range all that much with the pawpaw's native range. So I decided to make a print with the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, which is more in keeping with the pawpaw's native range. (I know--to be truly "expatriate pawpaw" I would showcase the pawpaw with the Black-headed Grosbeak, but in this instance I just decided to be unfaithful to the blog's overarching conceit.) 

Because I wanted the red on the chest and the yellow on the broken-open pawpaw to be as intense as possible, I printed these colors first, over the white paper, so no other underlying color could dull their intensity. But because I didn't want the red and the yellow to become underlying colors that would dull the intensity of the blue sky, I used my finger to apply the red and yellow to the linoleum only to the places I wanted them to appear. Then I printed the first yellow/red layer.

On top of the yellow/red layer, I printed blue, so the blue could benefit in intensity from the white paper also.

The blue doesn't quite hide the red and yellow substrate--you can see places where the two overlap.

Then I printed the green, which has an opacity that does a good job covering everything printed to this point: yellow, red, and blue.

The final layer was brown. A rose-breasted grosbeak has black feathers not brown feathers. But we don't have any black ink, so brown was to become the new black.

I did the printing and it turned out that when brown ink is layered on top of blue and green, it becomes functionally black. This is a finished print (albeit with the brown layer still wet and shiny and without signature etc) that has the blue layer at low saturation.

This is a finished print (still shiny brown with no signature) that has the blue layer at high saturation.

Here are the two prints--low saturation and high saturation--side by side, now titled "Rose-breasted Grosbeak with September Pawpaws."

Linocut: Opossum with July Pawpaws, a First Try

We're continuing to experiment with linocut and pawpaws. Lately I've been sketching a design to convert to linocut: a possum hanging in the air while using its teeth to hang onto a cluster of unripe pawpaws. The design is inspired by some pawpaw pickin I did back during the 2007 season in Virginia. I got permission from the landowner (actually the land-renter) to harvest from a patch that was about a half acre. As I walked through and picked in mid-September, I would find ripe pawpaws that had tooth marks in them. But the tooth marks weren't fresh. They had obviously been made before the pawpaws were ripe, since the pawpaws hadn't come off the tree when they were bitten, and since the small puncture wounds had healed and left scars rather than holes in the skin.

I could imagine the scenario well: It's the middle of the night and the impatient possum climbs the tree in July or August and then slides down one of the spindly pawpaw-supporting branches, biting the pawpaws in hopes of getting one to come off. Then, failing that, the possum falls a few feet to the ground.

So I carved out the white and printed the yellow. Then on top of the yellow I printed the green.
(The print above--of the ram skull and the yucca bloom--is one I did last month, in keeping with some other, desert-themed prints we're doing, a theme that grows more organically out of the Utah soil.)

See, here it is with the green. You can see the outline of the possum's tail, before it's printed, since that's the ball-point pen coming off the linoleum.
(I'm still thinking about ways to not have that happen.)

And then I printed the brown. I took this pick while the paint was still wet so you can see the sheen.

Here are a couple prints side by side with the original drawing.

Tonight I numbered and signed the set of ten prints, titling them
"Opossum with July Pawpaws, a First Try."

For this one, I didn't get the green layer properly lined up with the yellow layer, and then when I laid down the brown layer I had to choose: should I line it up with the green or yellow? I lined it up with the green, and now the possum has a very yellow mouth.

I'm not very concerned about this since I'm folks, so I'm making folk art.

Here's the print that turned out the least eccentric (so I guess the most centric). Like I say, these are titled "Opossum with July Pawpaws, a First Try." A first try: because it's July rather than September when pawpaws are ripe and the possum is giving it a first try, and because this was my own first try in making this print. I think I'm going to make a similar print in a little while called "Opossum with August Pawpaws, Just Checking."