Pawpaw Pollination, of the Artificial Kind

Pawpaws aren't self-fertile. That means that a lone pawpaw in a garden won't bear fruit, since it can't be pollinated with its own pollen. It needs pollen from another pawpaw. But even when there are two pawpaw trees--or four pawpaw trees--together, the pollination might be slow to take place. The blossoms don't attract bees, which help pollinate a lot of flowers. Pawpaw blossoms' scent is sometimes described as "putrid" I think, which is telling, because to me, when I've smelled a pawpaw blossom, I've been reminded of Nacho Cheese Doritos. The smell is supposed to attract flies and beetles I understand, which is also telling, in relation the question of the US population's affection for Doritos. But in any case, I'm not even sure the right kind of flies and beetles live here in Utah.

So if I wanted to be sure our pawpaws got good and pollinated, I decided I should take things into my own hands. I've read online that using a paint brush on the blossoms can work well to bring about artificial pollination for pawpaws. So this evening, after work and the kids' track meet, I undertook the project, mixing it up among our three trees that currently have blossoms.

NJ did me the favor of taking some pics as I retrieved the pollen from one tree and took it to another. And then retrieved the pollen from that tree and took it to another. And then retrieved the pollen from that tree and took it to the first.

Is this how it works, I wondered?

Well, here goes.

I wanted to smell the Nacho Cheese Doritos smell that I remembered, but for some reason I couldn't smell it, even when I put my nose up against the paint brush. (Maybe it was too cold this evening for the nacho-cheesy pollen to sublimate into my nostrils?)

Back to work.

After awhile, the brush got pretty pollinated, so hopefully the blossoms were following suit.

Finally, I put my shoulder to the wheel and got the brush  as covered in pollen as I could, since I've got a plan.

I'm going to save this brush as it is, covered in thousands of pollen grains. And in three weeks, when the fourth pawpaw's flowers bloom, I'll bring the brush back outside. And I'll help the final tree get pollinated.

So I placed the brush in an old Coke bottle, with a clamp paperclip attached to the handle so it doesn't fall into the bottle.

While I was working on the artificial pollination process, two neighbors stopped by and it seemed clear that I needed to explain what I was doing. So I told the first guy that stopped by that I was artificially pollinating the fruit trees. He replied, "Oh they need a little help huh?" And the second neighbor who stopped by, when he heard about the artificial pollination, asked if the pawpaws would be able to take care of that themselves when they got older. And he told me his cousin had a job like that, except on a ranch. Attracting this type of quality talk with the neighbors was enough to make me glad we planted the pawpaws for all to see in the front yard!