Excavations of a Future Unknown Pawpaw Patch

In terms of archaeology, excavations happen to learn about the past, as was the case when some Colorado ranchers in 1888 excavated portions of what would later become Mesa Verde National Park. (By the way, I'm not endorsing the methods of these 19th-century excavators. C'mon, a sledge hammer? I'm not even endorsing the project of archaeological excavation. As the ranger mentioned when we visited Mesa Verde a couple years ago, the best way to preserve a structure is to not excavate it and let the desert soil do the work of preserving.)

That's archaeological excavation into past and sometimes unknown patches of human culture.
But what I'm talking today about is botanical excavation into future and unknown patches of horticulture.   

As the faithfulest of this blog's readers will know, there's been some suspense out on the front porch in recent weeks. Compared to last year, our forty planted pawpaw seeds are two weeks delayed in showing any kind of above-ground sprouts. So yesterday evening I did some investigations, some excavations into the future.

I used my finger--a more delicate instrument than the Colorado ranchers' sledge hammer--to remove thin layers of soil from the surface of one container, until I arrived at the black shiny seed.  

Once I got to the seed, I gave it a light tug but it wouldn't move. So I gave it a harder tug and it still didn't budge much. So, there was a root holding it in place even if there was no sprout that had yet sought the sun. With that discovery of the botanical future, I swept up the small pile of dirt and put it back on top of the seed, content that I had excavated and seen a small portion of the initial stirrings of a future unknown pawpaw patch. 

Pawpaw Seedlings Out into the World

Last week I got an email from Jake, who had seen my blog, wondering if I had any pawpaw seeds that had been stratified over the winter. I told him I did and that it seemed late to plant them, given that last year I had the seeds sprouting by this time. But he wanted to give them a try and see if he could get them to grow. So we arranged for him to pick up some seeds yesterday evening. While he was over, I also sent him away with two pawpaw seedlings from last year. 

Pawpaw Trees and Deer Damage

This morning after we went for a run we came back and looked around the yard a little. 

Some of what we saw: 

The first of the raspberries are ripening, 

The Elberta peach tree has been tossing some of its fruit onto the lawn,

As usual there's a complement of large turds in our yard from an unkind neighbor's dog,

The rootstock of the dead grafted American persimmon tree is sending up three or four shoots,

The lawn needs cutting this Saturday,

The Wells pawpaw tree is growing a surprising number (and size) of fruit,

The bonsai citrus trees (outside for the summer) are dropping some leaves, allergic to the sun,

The claret cup cacti (planted from cuttings) are still green and sitting quietly inert,

and

The Mango pawpaw has been bitten, repeatedly, by the mule deer that have been lounging and loitering in our neighborhood's yards this spring.

You can shoot bullets off the pawpaw's resume: not bothered by pests, not bothered by deer, delicious fruit full of divine custard, large leaves that turn bright yellow in the fall, just the right quotient of quirkiness, etc.

It looks great on paper (or a computer screen, since that's where you're more likely to read its resume), but sometimes it doesn't live up to what you read on its resume.

I'm hoping the mule deer (I'll bet it's one of those two young bucks we've been seeing in spots and places) has a stomach ache that's bad enough to disrupt a week of lounging and loitering.  

The News: No News

Last year, in 2016, I planted all twenty of the pawpaw seeds we got from the four pawpaws we harvested from the Wells in 2015. In 2016, June 7th was the first day I found any sprouts from that batch. You can take a look at that glorious day here.

But this year, it's a week later than last year and still no signs of sprouts. Fingers crossed...

Pawpaw Seedlings and Sun Damage

Like I say, we got back from Spain a week ago today. While we were in Spain, my dad took care of the pawpaw seedlings (which first sprouted on 7 June 2016). He also took care of this year's batch of planted pawpaw seeds (which I hope will sprout sometime next month).

When I took the seeds and seedlings over to my parents' house, I set them out on their back patio, which is covered. I set them at the edge of the patio, so that they could get some shade but also get more sun than they had been getting. 

When I got back from Spain, I found that this year's batch of planted seeds have remained inert, although as you see below they attracted a large flying insect.

After I took a pic of the flying insect, I looked around for the seedlings and found them moved from where I had placed them. They were moved far from the edge of the patio, pushed up against the house, far into the shade. They had developed more and bigger leaves but something was wrong...

The leaves on each seedling were curled and almost shriveled.

See: 

When Dan Carpenter came over and took a couple of the seedlings back in March, he asked if they could be out in full sun. Like me, he had heard that pawpaw seedlings need shade. I told him that I had read that they need shade for the first year but after that they should be okay for full sun. But, also told him, I didn't know if "first year" referred to the year they sprouted or the year after they sprouted. Too bad these 2016 pawpaw seedlings got sun damage, but I'm glad to have found out that "after the first year" means keep your pawpaw seedlings in the shade during the year they sprout and also the year after they sprout. I'm hoping these ones can recover from having their first few leaves burned and can still grow up to be good strong pawpaws.

FYI--Here's what KSU has to say about shade and sunlight for pawpaw seedlings:

Site, soils, and habitat

Although the pawpaw is capable of fruiting in the shade, optimum yields are obtained in open exposure, with some protection from wind (on account of the large leaves). Germinating seedlings, however, will not survive under those conditions because they are extremely sensitive to full sunlight, which can kill them. (Containerized seedlings may be grown without shade in a greenhouse.) Shading for the first year, and sometimes the second, is normally required outside, and it is for this reason that pawpaws are almost always found in nature as an understory tree. The soil should be slightly acid (pH 5.5-7), deep, fertile, and well-drained. Good drainage is essential to success. Pawpaws will not thrive in heavy soil or waterlogged soil. In habit it is a small tree, seldom taller than 25 feet. Grown in full sun, the pawpaw tree develops a narrowly pyramidal shape with dense, drooping foliage down to the ground level. In the shade it has a more open branching habit with few lower limbs and horizontally held leaves. 

KSU info available here.

Spain, New Pawpaws, Scale Insects

We just got back from a two week trip to Spain. NJ was traveling there for work and I tagged along. Her conference was in Madrid, and we also went to Granada where we saw the Alhambra, to Malaga where we swam in the Mediterranean, and to Toledo where we enjoyed the most picturesque streets and buildings while feeling some degree of desperation regarding the general lack of restrooms available to visitors to the town.

Here are a couple of fruit-oriented pictures from Spain and a few pictures of the pawpaws now that we've made it back and can see how they've been developing this year.

Especially in Granada we saw a lot of orange trees, which we learned the Arabs brought to Spain centuries ago because of the smell of the blossoms. They do have great smelling blossoms. We were disappointed that all of the oranges, which looked ripe, were out of our reach. But after church on Sunday we were walking away from the chapel and found some trees outside of the tourist section. These trees had oranges we could reach. This was great, since I had told NJ that my fondest desire while in the town where the Alhambra is located, would be to eat a true Spanish orange. We split one, and tasted the vast difference between an improved culinary orange and an orange that is planted just for the smell of its flowers. The orange tasted like a bitter grapefruit (not a standard grocery store grapefruit but a bitter grapefruit). As I said to NJ after we achieved my fondest desire by eating the orange: the unimproved pawpaw is in very little need of improvement compared to the unimproved orange!

In Malaga we went to a fish and fruit market, and although we like both fish and fruit, we gravitated to the fruit. We saw dragon fruit and mangosteens and big grapes and peaches and a kind of fruit that was locally in season called the niparo (later we learned the common name in English is the loquat--but not that common, since we hadn't heard the name before, nor had we seen the fruit). While cruising around the market, we stopped at one stall and I touched a peach to see how ripe it was (it wasn't). And then I picked up the peach, and soon the proprietor of the stall was yelling, saying, "Oiga. Oiga! Oiga!! OIGA!!!" Finally on the last loud  "OIGA!!! (LISTEN!!!)," I realized he was yelling at me. And I remembered something that a friend had warned me about a couple months earlier: when in Spain, you can't go around just touching the fruit that's on sale because people get mad. I found this to be true, and I said, "Lo siento" and put the peach down. It's kind of ironic to say "Lo siento" when you're being yelled at for feeling fruit, since "lo siento" means "sorry," but literally it means "I feel it," which is exactly what the good man was yelling at me not to do.

After I was yelled at, we moved on to another stall and bought some niparos, since we wanted to try them. They were 1.50 euros/kilo. And we didn't know if one kilo would be enough (we're such optimists--we might have worried, instead, that one kilo would be too much). So we bought two. And as the man filled a heaping bag, I was reminded that a kilo is quite a big larger than a pound. So we found a bench and sat down and ate probably a kilo of niparos, which reminded me of kiwis, before leaving the remaining kilo of niparos on the bench in the hopes that someone else would find them and enjoy them.

While we were in Spain, we heard from my parents that the talavera plate we had bought in Puebla, Mexico, had fallen (spontaneously!) from the wall and broken on our tile floor. Oh how sad we felt! But they saved the pieces and, if the plate had to die, we're glad it's now reincarnated as a set of potsherds adorning NJ's mother's day present.

Okay, so I know several of you have been looking forward to seeing whether the fruit has set on the pawpaw trees this year. It has! It's fun to check the trees day by day (as I do when I'm here), but it's also fun to be away and see the development that takes place over the course of two weeks. And so, without further adieu (I'm just kidding--I know it's ado), I present to you some exquisite pawpaw pictures:

Click on them and they look even more exquisite.

So fun for me to see so many pawpaws growing on the trees!

But the fly in the ointment was that I found some scale insects in the pawpaw orchard. Not many--maybe five on the Shenandoah, three on the KSU-Atwood, and none on the Wells (though I admit I was tired of looking by then, and the low numbers hardly made it feel like an infestation).

I'm rethinking this sentence, which I used just a few lines above: "But the fly in the ointment was that I found some scale insects in the pawpaw orchard." My goals in life aren't exceptionally lofty--my fondest desire in Granada, after all, was to eat a true Spanish orange. But here's one of my loftiest goals, and if it's achieved at some point, the purposes of this blog will largely be accomplished: for the phrase "scale insects in the pawpaw orchard" to replace or at least compete with the phrase "fly in the ointment" as a metaphor for an otherwise good situation that is spoiled by some minor problem. For instance, I would like to be widely understood if I were to say something like this: "When it came to that wonderful fruit market in Malaga, the true scale insect in the pawpaw orchard was when the proprietor yelled at me for touching the peach."

Utah Pawpaw Growers: Part 2

I know that those of you who have read my 23 October 2016 blog post, titled "Utah Pawpaw Growers: Part 1," have been anxiously awaiting a follow-up, reasoning that if there is a Part 1, there ought to be a Part 2. And here it is.

On Wednesday this week Greg and Lora and their daughter came over to collect some pawpaw pollen, as I mentioned earlier.

I sent them off with some pawpaw pollen

And I sent them off with some stratified pawpaw seeds

And I asked if they would be up for being the second in the "Utah Pawpaw Growers" blog post series. They thought that sounded okay. So here's my subsequent email Q&A with Greg.

BR: How did you first hear of pawpaws? Is there a story? 

GO: I don't really know. I remember reading about them in a Gurney's magazine and I was always curious abut them. I imagined that they tasted like a bland mushy banana from their descriptions, but maybe worth a try.

BR: Why pawpaws and not peaches?

GO: Actually I grow and love both, it is hard to beat either one of them when they are dead ripe. I do like the fact that you don't need to spray pawpaws.

BR: Which pawpaw cultivars did you choose and why?

GO: I have tried growing Wabash, NC-1 and Patomac as well as several seedlings. I did a lot of research on what ones taste better by looking at KSU's tasting reports and what people had written online. In the end the ones that survived are my seedlings and the Patomac. 

BR: How many pawpaw trees have you planted? How long have you had them? How many trees do you have right now?

GO: In total I have planted 8 trees. A few at my Mom's and 5 at my house.  My oldest tree is 6 years old and about 4.5 ft tall is all. All my other trees are only a year or two old and are less than 3 ft tall.

BR: Any challenges you've experienced growing pawpaws in Utah? How have you dealt with those challenges?

GO: Of the three grafted varieties I have tried 2 have failed at the graft after a year or two. Paws paws like a lot of water compared to what Utah receives and some times it seems hard to give them enough (at least in my soil).

BR: If you've already eaten a pawpaw, what would you compare the taste to? Also, if the pawpaws you've eaten aren't from your own trees, how did you get a hold of the actual fruits? 

GO: We have ordered them online from Integration Acres and Rocky Point Farms. I can't say exactly what a pawpaw tastes like, they taste like a pawpaw and have a flavor of their own. Everybody says they taste like banana but I don't think they taste like one at all, they do have some slight banana flavor but it is not dominant. I think that to say one tastes like a banana is a put down to a pawpaw. When I eat a pawpaw it tastes like a mixture of pineapple, honeydew, cherimoya, mango, a hint of banana and the fragrant pawpaw flavor.

BR: Is there a question about pawpaws that you wish I had asked but didn't? What's the question and how would you answer it?

GO: Not really however if you asked me what unusual fruit would you recommend to grow in Utah?  I would say a pawpaw above all other for both the fact that they taste so good, they are so unusual and the trees are really pretty in their own right.

Greg says he'll probably be able to send some pictures of his trees this weekend, so I'll plan on updating the post once he's got those sent. Thanks Greg! (And now I'm wondering about a hypothetical future post titled "Utah Pawpaw Growers: Part 3.)

Update 2 May 2017

As promised, Greg sent along some pics of his pawpaw growing, which I'm posting below, with his explanations as captions.

GO says: "The first picture is all 5 of my trees. The root stock from the Wabash is in the front with the 2 Peterson seedlings in the burlap covered tomato cages.  The oldest one is a seedling on the other end and the one in the corner is a Potomac."

GO says: "The second picture is of my seedling it is 5 going on 6." 

Greg O says: "The third picture is of some of the flowers."

GO says: "The last picture is of the Potomac it is 2 years old."

Thanks for sending along these pics, Greg!