On the Cusp of September

We were out in the front yard on Sunday evening and some of our neighbors, from Mexico, stopped and talked and asked, admiringly, how we got our avocado trees to grow here in the cold. Although it meant giving up their admiration, we had to confess they weren't avocados, they were pawpaws. What are pawpaws, they asked. We answered that they're a fruit that's kind of similar to the mamey sapote (since our neighbors are from Mexico, we were lucky to be able to draw our fruit metaphors from another pantheon of fruit, a pantheon that knows something beyond tropical fruits that are mangoes, pineapples, and bananas). 

So here we are on the cusp of September, the branches burdened under the weight of large pawpaws growing as twins and quintuplets and sextuplets. Next month we'll be harvesting these avocados! (NJ's are the hands that are pictured here.)

Seeing double on the Shenandoah

More Shenandoah
 

Shenandoah singleton

Shenandoah

I guess I didn't take any pics of the Atwood, since this is the Shenandoah also

Here's the Wells, which has a lot fewer pawpaws than the Shenandoah or the Atwood. But most of its pawpaws are bigger than the ones it produced last year. And this cluster is interesting because it's been turning yellow.