Various States of Pawpaw Blossom

Last year I received an email from a guy who lives here in Utah saying he has a solitary pawpaw tree and wondering if he could get some pollen from me in the spring. I said yes, and that he should remind me when spring came and we would work things out for him to get some pawpaw pollen. He needs the pollen since he's only got one tree and pawpaws aren't self-fertile (which I mention in case anyone reading is new to pawpaws). It's spring now, and we've arranged for him to come by on Wednesday next week, with the time still to be determined. He's bringing a little paint brush to harvest the pollen. By the way, he contacted me at the following email address: brr29@yahoo.com

I'm anticipating the blossoms will be ready next week, since they aren't in full swing yet. Right now, they're in various states of bloom and unbloom. See below, all from the Wells cultivar since it's got the most blossoms and the most variety: 

See these ones? They opened and then seem to have died when we had some cold weather that came through and punctuated our spring.

A closer look at a cold-weather casualty, poignantly crowned with a fibrous and wind-carried seed that (unlike this particular flower) may yet live.

Here's one that's still green, not yet the purple color that pawpaw lovers look for in the spring.

Here's one that's attained that classic purple look.

Twins.

Growing into the sky.

An early blossom that's in full bloom; note the white pollen grains on the petals. 

Not all blossoms are so lucky--here's one of the dead hangers-on, frozen and thawed and now brown.

And just as a reminder that these pawpaws aren't growing in the home range, here's a prickly pear from our weekend trip to the desert of southern Utah. I liked the shadow hanging under the cactus. If you click on the image you'll be able to see the shadows of individual cactus needles.

Western Scrub Jays in a Pawpaw Tree

In its native land, the pawpaw is accustomed, I'm sure, to visits from the bluejay.

But out expatriate pawpaws in Utah receive visits from the bluejay's cousin, the western scrub jay.

And I saw a pair of western scrub jays out on the Wells pawpaw this morning as I was heading off to work.

The one on the ground was picking through the mulch finding something to eat; it was the first one to fly away, followed by the one in the tree.

The pawpaw gave no indication either way whether it felt strange to be visited by western scrub jays rather than blue jays.

What I Did During Winter Vacation from the Pawpaws

Over the winter...

...there wasn't as much going on with the pawpaws, besides being covered in snow.

To be sure, I knew how they felt at times, but at other times I was thinking about other things, like...

...plant five bonsai citrus trees and keeping them on my office window sill. From ebay, I ordered a Meyer lemon, a Persian lime, a Moro blood orange, another Meyer lemon because the first one died, and a Flame grapefruit.

I also went down to the San Rafael Swell and walked among the red rock cliffs and frozen puddles...

...and petroglyphs and...

...overcast skies.

And we snow-shoed.

And then spring and the wood ducks showed up, and the pawpaws began coming back to life.

Planting Pawpaw Seeds and Hoping to Get Some Plum Cuttings to Root

Spring has really arrived here in Utah, and the pawpaws know it. 

All of the bigger pawpaws in our yard have buds that are getting ready to burst forth in deep purple blossoms.

And the seedlings that grew from the twenty seeds that I planted in March 2016 are also attuned to the warm weather, with a few of them showing some green on their apex leaf buds. (This pic looks so patriotic, the way it has red and white stripes in the background. I think that's red duct tape and whitish plastic in the background--not, as I'm sure most of you are thinking, the "Merah-Putih," the Indonesian flag.)

The other evening I was texting with Dan and he sent me some picks of the work he's doing on getting cuttings from tree branches to root. To most people familiar with plants, I guess this is fairly common knowledge--you can take a cutting, put some rooting hormone on one end, and stick that end into the dirt. Or, you can place the cuttings in a plastic container with some water, and then let them sit in there for a few weeks. Getting cuttings to root is a way to make a tree that will be genetically identical to the tree from which the cutting is taken, so it produces the exact same fruit as the original tree. I hadn't known there was any way to do that except by grafting, which I don't yet know how to do. In any case, once I realized that Dan having success with apples and apricots, I remember the most delicious plum I've ever eaten. I ate it eight years ago, from the tree in the front yard of the parents of a friend of ours. So I contacted the friend to get his parents' phone number and address, and they were willing for me to take some cuttings from their plum tree. I had imagined maybe it was an underappreciated tree and that people didn't realize what good fruit it was. Not so, say his parents. They have people coming from all over the neighborhood to get their plums. And at one point, one of their neighbors (now moved) seems to have set up a ladder beneath the tree and kept it there, so he could get to their plums at his will and pleasure! Based on what I remember of the taste of the plum from eight years ago, I can understand why he would do that. The tree's owners were very generous. And perhaps their generosity was compounded by the profound ecological ethic promulgated by the Ernest Goes to Camp (1987), which only work of expressive culture that surpasses Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949) in terms of impact on American environmental thought. In that august 1987 film ("movie" too degrading a name for such a work of art), a character posits the questions: "Who can own a tree? Who can own a rock?"

 See the bramble of cuttings I took, above. Of course, as Ernest Goes to Camp reminds me: if the cuttings take root, I'll never truly own them.

I stuck the cuttings in a picture of water over night and this morning I planted some using the root hormone and soil method.

And I used the plastic container approach with some other sticks from the plum cuttings. Incidentally, I've read that in terms of pawpaw cultivation, it's the holy grail to be able to propagate pawpaws from cuttings, rather than from grafting. And by holy grail, I mean no one has yet found the method to do so. (The article says people have been successful propagating from cuttings from very young pawpaw seedlings, but of course that's useless, since the seedlings wouldn't fruit before the cutting-propagation window is closed, and the whole reason to propagate a cutting is to duplicate the fruit.) 

After I got things set up for my attempt at growing a delectable plum tree from cuttings, I turned my attention to planting some pawpaw seeds. Like last year, I used Arrowhead water bottles as my containers. And whereas I planted twenty seeds last year, I planted forty-eight seeds this year. But this year I didn't bother with labeling anything and making letter-number coordinates like "B6" and "C2". There were too many seeds in the fall to keep track of any of that, so I just got the seeds and put them in the dirt. You may remember that I stratified the seeds in several layers of paper towels. I only had containers enough to plant the seeds from not even one layer.

So after planting seeds in the containers, I decided to try an experiment--I went into our "backyard" (we hardly have a backyard, that's why all our pawpaw trees are in our front yard) and threw maybe a hundred or two hundred seeds in among the English ivy that forms the riotous border between our property and our neighbors' property. I know the ivy will give the pawpaw seeds some serious competition in terms of the seeds' attempt to root into the soil. But the ivy will also offer some good shade (combined with the red cedar trees) that may protect any seedling that happens to grow. I'd be happy to have some of them sprout and fortify the border between the two properties. I'd say a border pawpaw patch beats a border wall any day.

I also threw some seeds among these bushes here, on another border between our acreage (our .2 acre acreage) and a neighbor's property.

I'm not sure, though, what I'll do with the remaining seeds. We've still got more than half of them left.

Re-homing 2 Pawpaw seedlings and 23 Stratified Pawpaw Seeds

In October I published a blog post entitled Utah Pawpaw Growers: Part 1. It showcased an interview with a Utah pawpaw grower named Dan. Today after work he drove over to our house so we could talk pawpaws, and so I could send him away with two pawpaw seedlings (seeds picked out of some 2015 pawpaws, stratified over the winter, and sprouted in summer 2016) and twenty-three pawpaw seeds (saved from our 2016 pawpaws and stratified during this past winter). 

Here's Dan looking at the seeds. As I told him: they're all mixed up, with seeds from the Wells, the Shenandoah, and the KSU-Atwood. But since each seed has two parents, every seed carries genetic material from two of the best varieties, which are the two final cultivars on the list (no offense to the Wells).

Here's Dan standing with a ziplock bag of twenty-three seeds, with the pawpaw seedlings at his feet. I've talked with him a few times on the phone, and we've talked about youthful pawpaws' shade requirements. As I understand it, pawpaw seedlings need shad for the first year of their lives and then they're fine to be out in direct sunlight. But I don't know when to count "the first year" as finished. If they sprout in June, is that growing season the first year? Of does the sprouting year not count? And so the growing season after they sprout (this spring and summer, for these seedlings) would be the first year?

While he was here, Dan asked our daughter S if she liked pawpaws. S didn't offer a rousing or convincing affirmation, but at least managed to say yes. (She does like pawpaws--I think she was just a little unsure about who Dan was, and I hadn't done much to prepare anyone for his visit, besides telling NJ that "a guy named Dan" was coming over; and I didn't even give S that much of a heads up.)

Dan was especially impressed by the well established Wells. He asked how old it was, and I couldn't exactly remember, but now in the silence of the night (it's about 10.30pm) I remember that this spring in May, it will have been six years since I planted it. The KSU-Atwood and the Shenandoah: five years this spring. We looked at each of the pawpaw trees. At one point, NJ said that liking pawpaws among the fruits is like liking George Harrison among the Beatles.

Here he is, set up now to legitimately vie for first place as the most prolific pawpaw grower in Utah. With these seedlings, he's now got about 8 pawpaw trees I think. And who knows how the twenty-three seeds will turn out. As they always say: You can count the number of seeds in a pawpaw but you can't count the number of pawpaws in twenty-three seeds.

Pawpaws in the Deep Heart's Core of Winter

In the deep heart's core of winter, things can be pretty dazzling in the canyon next to our house.

The other day it was a little warmer than usual so I got the pawpaw seedlings out of the shed and put them on the front porch. Then it snowed but still was just hovering around freezing so I wasn't worried about the roots getting too cold. Hence, the seedlings got to stay out in the light for a few days. Eventually the weather got cold again--into the teens--and I put the pawpaws back into the shed. It seemed so unjust, since we don't treat our other plants that way.

For instance, here are some little prickly pear cactuses that I collected in southern Utah with my dad a few months ago. They're sitting on the window sill in eye shot (as if plants had specialized photo-receptive nerves) of where the pawpaws were, out on the porch.

Here's one of the cactuses, growing another pad, soaking in the morning sun filtering through the window.

And then here's a bowl full of air plants. It so happened that, after our three earlier air plants died, I had the idea to get NJ some air plants for Christmas, and she had the same idea for me. So we have an overabundance of air plants now. I get the impression that air plants are to Christmas 2016 what ironic t-shirts were to Christmas 2006. O how fads shift so unpredictably over the course of a decade!

Over next to another window: an anthurium with a dead flower arching on its stem. I received this a year ago when a colleague left for England for a year. It was for keeps, so even though she's back, it's still mine.

And even this petrified wood, which I assume is indifferent to temperature fluctuations, gets better treatment than the pawpaw seedlings out in the shed. NJ found these pieces and they wound up on the table, where I began stacking them and now find that I need to have them sitting next to my place mat, in case I need something to distract me while I eat. The light brown pieces are sandstone and the dark one is chert. The sandstone pieces smell like spent gunpowder.

I know, I know--you're saying, "This is a blog about pawpaws--stop showing us a bunch of pics of your other plants and plant-like rocks." In response to my anticipation of your protestations, I've spared you needing to see my recently acquired grafted bonsai meyer lemon tree, moro blood orange tree, and persian lime tree. Instead, here is a pic of the uppermost layer of pawpaw seeds, which I recently took out of the fridge to check on. I was surprised but not overly concerned to find ice on some of the seeds.

And some icicles forming on the lid of the container.

And a final pic (sorry I guess I'm spiraling off topic again): a coral cactus, an Indonesian dragon head, a thrown and glazed pot, a Tonala parrot, an oil painting of Dead Horse Point commissioned in the 1980s by a uniquely soulful dentist, and my recent watercolor of a t-shaped Ancestral Puebloan doorway.

Pawpaws in the Christmas Snow

Not much snow had fallen in our part of Utah until Christmas day, when we woke up to a good six to eight inches. We've been staying inside with colds (not hiking in southern Utah and not tending to the pawpaws), and a few days ago NJ and I spent some time water-coloring. Here's a painting I started (but haven't yet completed), of an arroyo we've gone to sometimes. This is from a photo we took a few autumns ago.

But onward to the pawpaws in the Christmas snow. If I had taken the pictures on Christmas day, there would be picturesque snow hanging from the boughs. But since I waited until today, the pawpaws aren't so picturesque, and the main aesthetic experience offered by some of these pics may involve admiring the sublime and snowy mountains in the background. (And unfortunately, for some viewers, that aesthetic experience may be mixed with envy.)

The Wells cultivar

The Susquehanna cultivar in its snow-laden cage

Left to right: The KSU-Atwood, the Shenandoah, and the Mango in its screened-in cage

Close-up of the Mango, which (true to One Green World's claims) grew quite quickly over the summer, much faster than the Susquehanna.

After looking at the pawpaws out in the snow, I started wondering about the pawpaws that had come in from the cold. So I walked around to the shed and took a look. The soil seemed a little hard, hopefully not too freeze dried, as if they needed some water. (You can see some mineralization on the top of the soil of a couple of the pawpaws--I thought it was frost until I touched it.)

So I took the seedlings outside and gave them each a clump of snow, for now, making a mental note to give them water occasionally in the future.

Then I put them back in the shed where the snow will slowly melt.