Planting Pawpaw Seeds

The weather's been nice over the past week or two, which got me wondering when the pawpaw trees would start leafing out, which got me remembering that I had some seeds in the fridge. Which got me thinking I needed to get them out and get them growing if possible.

So on Saturday, 5 March, I went out and bought some potting soil. That was easy enough. But then I was confronted with what to start the seeds in. When planting pawpaw seeds, you want to have a tall container for the seeds' long taproots. 

Kentucky State University has a good discussion of planting pawpaw seeds here, suggesting a container that's 10 inches tall. But I had twenty seeds in the fridge, and the nursery I was shopping at didn't have anything that was tall and inexpensive enough that I wanted to buy twenty of them. So I went to the grocery store and was thinking I might buy some one-quart milk cartons, like I had seen online, since you could cut the tops off those and they were tall. But the cheapest product was buttermilk (only about $1/carton), and I could hardly imagine bringing home twenty quarts of buttermilk. Then there was half-and-half, which was about $4/carton, and I could hardly imagine spending $80 on pawpaw seed containers. So I cruised around the grocery store until I found some bottles of water, twelve bottles for $6. That's a bad deal for water (I get mine free from the tap), but a good deal for pawpaw seed containers. So I bought two packages of twelve and brought them home.  

Before I prepared the seedlings' containers, I got them out of the fridge and itemized them based on which pawpaw they came from. Pawpaw A had 2 seeds. B had 3 seeds. C had 4 seeds. D had 10 seeds. I did this mostly for curiosity, so I could keep track of how likely a seed is to sprout, based on what size of pawpaw it comes from. (In the background you'll see some grinding stones. The molcajete I got from some friends in California. The cobek we got from a woman in Surakarta. And the pestle that's unmatched with a mortar, we found at a thrift store in Maui.)

Out under the carport, I had my supplies.

Our son W came outside and started showing off his moves so I had to ask N to aim the camera back at the pawpaw business instead. And she obliged.

If you look behind the yucca, you'll see some driftwood from the river. If you look behind the driftwood, you'll see our lawn. If you look on our lawn, you'll see a Wells pawpaw cultivar. If you look behind the Wells, you'll see me beginning to prepare the containers.

First I took the label off the bottle.

Then I stuck my Swiss Army knife into the top of the bottle, just below the point where it starts narrowing.

Then the water would start streaming out.

And I would try to dodge...

But sometimes dodging didn't work, and N did me the favor of making sure my failure to dodge was captured.

Then I removed the top of the bottle.

And the remaining water, I dumped on the Wells cultivar. The label on the water bottles said they contained "spring water," so I imagine the Wells really enjoyed receiving so much high quality water--$12 worth of water in just fifteen minutes! No doubt the Wells will grow phenomenally strong this year, as a result of the superior water, since it's natural and from a spring and all.

Here was the rubbish left over--off to the recycle bin with it!

And here were the pawpaw seed containers, twenty of them. I hope they work, since KSU says they should be 10 inches, but I measured them and they're only 7 inches. 

After all the cutting was done, there were four bottles left standing, still full of 100% spring water.

Next was putting the soil into each container.

And then I needed to figure out how to keep them from falling over, standing so tall as they were, so I started duct-taping.

I duct-taped them in groups that corresponded to the chart I made detailing which seed came from which pawpaw.

Left to right: A had 2; B had 3; C had 5; D had 10.

And then, zen-like, I sat labeling each container according to which seed I planned on putting in it.

Like so...

...and so.

Then I took them inside and set the containers next to the chart where the pawpaw seeds were waiting.

And I began sowing the seeds, 1 inch deep as KSU suggests.

Photo-bombing some of these scenes of kitchen-based agriculture: a mid-twentieth-century California ceramics Twin Winton cookie jar that N found at a thrift store a few years ago.

This is seed D-10, from the biggest pawpaw, but it's nonetheless the smallest seed of the twenty we harvested and kept in the fridge. In some ways, it's the runt and might seem like the least likely to grow up into a pawpaw tree. But in other ways, it's the most promising. Pawpaw growers want trees with big fruit and small seeds. So this seed might seem to carry the ideal genetic profile, set to make progeny that bear big fruits that have small seeds. (Sure it's from the Wells cultivar, but it was likely fertilized by the KSU-Atwood or Peterson's Shenandoah, so that's a retro cultivar for one parent and probably one of the cutting-edge cultivars for the other parent. Oh what hopes are hung on your successful awakening from dormancy, little D-10 !)

In you go, D-10, one inch deep into the potting soil. (In the foreground: N's jean jacket sleeve and her bracelet.)

And now the chart was empty.

I got a big shoe box which formerly held some knee-high boots and lined it with plastic. And put the twenty pawpaw-trees-in-embryo in it. There's S in the background.

I needed to give them their first watering, and I realized the spout on one of the remaining bottles of spring water was ideal for practicing precision agriculture with pawpaws. (By precision agriculture, I don't mean anything quite so technical as RKR and Burt English et al. I just mean I would be less likely to spill the water as I irrigated.)

You see how precise this is.

After they were precisely irrigated, I set them on a table next to the widow. I would have put them outside, but KSU says that between 70 and 85 degrees F is ideal for germination. And it's still mostly in the 60s during the days. And the nights, closer to freezing. So I'm thinking I'll keep them inside at night and set them out during the days once it starts getting into the 70s.

KSU says the seeds germinate in about two weeks and then the sprouts actually appear in about two months. So who knows, it could be at the beginning of May that we start seeing some shoots. Then again, maybe the seeds will sense that they're in 7-inch containers rather than 10-inch containers, or that they're in Utah rather than Georgia, and they'll just decide it's not worth the trouble of germinating. We'll see...