The Fruits of a Windstorm

This morning, Sept 8th, as I left the house for work I saw that the final raspberry of the season was ripe on the cane. I texted NJ and let her know she should come out and pick it when she got the chance.

The raspberry was gone by the time I got home. Also, while I was at work there was a big rain and windstorm, so I was expecting some pawpaws on the lawn as I walked up. The only tree that dropped any was the Shenandoah. So the Wells and Atwood are stubborn this year!

The two pawpaws that fell from the Shenandoah. The lower one is ripe (and I ate it first thing for dinner) and the upper one is not even half-ripe and I hope it ripens.

First Pawpaws of the Year!

Last year the first pawpaw fell on September 1st. But this year we kept waiting and waiting. Then on Tuesday, Sept 5th, we were backing out of the driveway to go pick some neighbors' grapes and NJ gasped in kind of a loud way. I worried she had hit someone's pet...

...but she jumped out of the car and pointed to three (count the fingers, THREE) pawpaws that had fallen from the Shenandoah cultivar.

Here I am being melodramatic--okay, deadly serious--as I smelled the aroma of the first three pawpaws of the year. (I'm very humbled to brag that if you notice some extra flush in my cheeks, it's because I had run 15 miles that morning in prep for a marathon that's coming up in October.)

As far as S was concerned, there was too much melodrama in all this. She said, "Ugh, go ahead and put on your black hat and fake mustachio and tie me to the train tracks already!" I took her point, and we took this more festive pic.

The Shenandoah has so many pawpaws this year that the branches are spreading every which way.

We went and picked the grapes (green concord I think) and made a still life composition titled Pawpaws with Green Grapes and Daily Pill Box (Containing Calcium Supplements and Multivitamins).

Then I got down to business.

At one point in my life someone showed me a video about manners that said you should never lick a knife--never, never ever. Never. But..I'm finding it harder to be a gentleman every day.

Twist!

And there it was--the first pawpaw of the year!

Helping Pawpaw Seedlings Out of Their Coats

This year, the pawpaw seedlings have been rising from the soil with their seed coats still on them. See the second-to-last pic in my previous post for an image of this. 

At first I thought I would just let them throw off the seed coats naturally, but then I started noticing that the germinating roots were dying with their leaves stuck inside the seed coat. So then I tried breaking one of the seed coats open to free the leaves. After doing so, I thought I had killed the seedling, but then it turned out that it spread its leaves and has lived. So I began trying it with all of the germinating seeds that rose from the soil with their heads still stuck in the seed coats. It's generally working, with most of the seedlings surviving after I've done this. And as for the seedlings I didn't do this to--they died.

It wasn't like this last year. Last year all the seedlings were able to get out of their coats on their own. Not sure if I didn't water enough? If I didn't plant the seeds deep enough? (This year I wasn't so detail oriented in planting them exactly one inch deep.) If the seed coats are just thicker this year? Has anyone else out there run into this problem?

I planted 40 seeds this year. I've had 17 leave out. And there have been maybe 5 that have dies of seed coat complications. We'll see what happens in the next few weeks.

On Saturday I took a trip to Eureka, Utah, with NJ and RoRo. We walked amid the prickly pears and claret cup cactuses, and among...

...the squirrels.

Eros and Thanatos among the Pawpaws in July

This July, out on the front porch and in the yard, we've got eros (the drive to life) going up against thanatos (the drive to death). It's all condensed into this image: the first flower stalk ever to show up among our hens-and-chicks, trying to out-scream a coyote skull (which W picked up in the San Rafael Swell) that bears its teeth among the adjacent pot full of hens-and-chicks.

Like I say, it's all condensed in the image of the flower and the coyote skull, so if you've found that condensations are sufficient for you, you can stop reading now.

Last July we had some leaf problems on our pawpaw trees, and this July the leaf problem have returned, though not in such force (yet) as last year. Last year the leaf problems didn't seem to do much damage: the Wells (which had the worst case of this mode of thanatos) is following eros in producing a lot more fruit this year, so no real ill effects that I can see from one year to the next. And no ill effects in terms of fruit production, which is the thing (sorry to be so mercenary) that I care most about with the pawpaws.

Look at this big cluster of Shenandoah pawpaws in the foreground (eros): but wait, the one that is at the top of the cluster isn't attached--it's a windfall (thanatos) higher up on the tree. It didn't quite make it to the ground but instead found a temporary home among the still-living. It's a "pawpaw ghost," cousin of the more famous "cherry ghost."  

In the winter I bought some citrus plants (Meyer lemon, Persian lime, Flame grapefruit, and Moro blood orange) and kept them on the window sill in my office. But I wanted them to get some sun over the summer so I brought them home and have kept them on the porch. Rather than them getting sun, the sun got to them: it caused almost all of them to lose up to half or most of their leaves (thanatos). But the Persian lime, in spite of losing half of its leaves, has gone ahead and blossomed (eros). The blossoms don't smell as good on the front porch as they did in my office. There's no mysticism here: it's just a question of dispersion and concentration of the scent, which is divine (wait, I guess there is some mysticism here).

Among the seedlings (seeds harvested in 2015 and germinated in 2016), several are thriving (eros) while the one in the foreground spontaneously dropped all its leaves (thanatos). Who knows why? And who knows how close its peers (or any of us) are to spontaneously following it?

The most advanced of the germinating seeds of this year has risen from the ground with its head stuck in the seed casing. This morning I was concerned that it might need help so I tried taking the casing off the plant to reveal it's waiting leaves. But instead, once I removed the casing, all that was left was some white flaky gunk. I might win some (eros) but I really lost one (thanatos). 

The Shenandoah had a phenomenal setting of fruit this spring (plug in the life-oriented word here), but it's been losing a lot of those fruits (plug in the death-oriented word here): there are 21 windfalls on the porch and 6 others that I threw away before I became dedicated to saving the windfalls. This year I've only been giving extra water (beyond the sprinklers) to the 2nd-years (the Mango and the Susquehanna), and now I wonder what would have happened if the Shenandoah (in its fifth year) had had some extra water...could it have held on to these lost ones? 

Updates from a Utah Pawpaw Orchard

There are several people who grow pawpaws in Utah and who have pawpaw orchards that are about the size of ours. (Scroll down to the comments section of this 2015 blog post to hear from some of the pawpaw growers of Utah.)

This is a report on our particular orchard (consisting of three fruit-bearing trees, two pre-fruiting trees, thirteen seedlings, and forty planted seeds, some of which have already germinated).

On the fruiting trees: A little while ago I told you that the Shenandoah (five years old) is carrying about 65 pawpaw fruits this year. I thought I was reporting this figure after it had already dropped the fruit it wasn't going to carry. But I was wrong. We've had some high winds and a week or so ago it dropped six pawpaws, taking the total down to 59 fruits.

Here are the pawpaws, thrown before their time, cradled in W's hand. I'm not posting the pic with his face because he's smiling while holding them, which doesn't show the proper decorum.

And then yesterday we also had some high winds and we lost twelve more fruits from the same tree, taking us down to about 47 fruits on the Shenandoah.

These windfall pawpaws are next to the forty seeds we planted in March 2017, seven of which have germinated and many more of which will germinate in the coming month. 

As for the pre-fruiting trees: you'll recall that last month I reported that a deer had munched the top off of the Mango cultivar. The pawpaw tree knew what happened and knew what to do once its terminal leaf bud was removed. It chose another leaf bud to be terminal and has kept on growing up. And then you'll see right about in the middle of the pic there's a leaf that was half eaten and so the pawpaw activated a previously dormant leaf bud and turned it into two small leaves. They say "broccoli has an IQ of 10"--I think the pawpaw is even smarter, with an IQ of maybe 15. (Oops--sorry about that misplace link on the "IQ of 10" bit; here's the actual link on broccoli.) 

On Saturday we didn't just sit around the yard pining for the pawpaws to ripen in September. We drove over to the High Uintas and hiked to some high mountain lakes and fished. Here's a boulder field, immediately above one of the lakes, still with snow covering a lot of it.

Once we got off the road and started hiking, we didn't see anyone all day long (we went to lakes that don't have trails to them). But as I walked through the boulder field, I found a little egg abandoned amid the granite and lichen.

A Census of Pawpaw Fruits

This morning I went outside and found that the second pawpaw seed of the year has sprouted, but this post isn't about any old seeds--what pawpaw people care most about is the fruit. 

And last night, to the best of my ability, I picked through the leafy foliage of the Shenandoah, the KSU-Atwood, and the Wells to find each and every piece of fruit. 

I may have missed some among the big leaves, and I may have accidentally recounted a few pawpaws here and there, but here's my best count for how many pieces of fruit each tree is on course to produce this year:

The Shenandoah: 65 (last year's final tally: 33)--a predicted increase of 32

The KSU-Atwood: 23 (last year's final tally: 34)--a predicted decrease of 11

The Wells: 37 (last year's final tally: 13)--a predicted increase of 24

The Total: 125 (last year's final tally: 80)--a predicted increase of 45    

(For more details on last year's harvest, see this 2016 post.)

After I finished counting the Shenandoah and the Atwood, I was tired of counting pawpaws. Nevertheless, I persisted.

A particularly heavy-laden branch of the Wells

After I finished counting all the pawpaws, I went over to our dead Prairie Sun American persimmon tree, which, even though the graft has failed, has unimproved roots that are sending up shoots. Last night it was time to select the shoot that was going to survive and hopefully turn into a tree.

There wasn't a lot of pomp and circumstance, like some people do when they're announcing who's "fired" on fifth-rate reality TV; I just selected the tallest shoot as the winner and cut down the rest.

The mountain is a monument to the persimmon shoot's elegy

First Pawpaw Sprout of 2017: June 22

Last year on 7 June I found the first pawpaw sprouts of the year (they were also the first pawpaw seeds I had ever germinated and as far as I remember the first seeds of any kind I had ever generated since my kindergarten bean seed was a terrible failure).

This year I planted forty seeds and have been waiting--patiently until 7 June and impatiently since 7 June. But finally after a fortnight's delay, the suspense is over. This morning after our run, I watered the seeds and found this:

It's just one sprout among the forty seeds...

...but I'm sure more will be showing up over the next week or so. And last year I had sprouts coming up into late July.

I guess the difference between last year and this year is that last year I planted at the beginning of March and kept the seeds inside until around the beginning of May or maybe mid-May. This year I planted in mid-March and kept the seeds outside in the cold right after I planted them. I don't know if the couple weeks' difference in sprout time stems for the couple weeks' difference in planting time or from the temperature difference between the two years. Or both. But I guess in the future I'll plant at the beginning of March and keep inside until about mid-May.