Wells Pawpaw Cultivar: Ripe Sept 18

The Shenandoah and the KSU-Atwood have shed quite a few ripe pawpaws over the last week. I'm including pictures of their ripening charts below. There was a bit of a wind storm on Sept 12, so you'll see a lot of pawpaws fell that day--nineteen, as I mentioned in a previous post. Since then, not many have fallen, though quite a few are still on both trees. I think the wind knocked down some pawpaws that would have been happy to wait to fall until later in the week. So now we're waiting on the Shenandoah and Atwood fruits that prefer to wait awhile longer.

But you can see from the third chart, below, that we haven't yet harvested any from the Wells cultivar.

While there haven't been any ripe ones, the Wells has been nourishing some genuinely big fruits. The big ones on the Wells don't seem to be the rule, but rather the exception. And these ones seem doubly exceptional to me because they're about as big as the biggest of the Shenandoah pawpaws this year, and they're bigger than any of the KSU-Atwoods. (That said, this is the Wells' second year bearing and it's carrying 13 pawpaws, while the Atwood and Shenandoah are a year younger than the Wells and are bearing around 25 and 40 respectively.) One of the cool things about this cluster of three Wells pawpaws is that the fruits seem to have continued growing over the past few weeks (over the past few weeks, the Shenandoah and Atwood seem to have been done growing and just concentrating on ripening).

So those exceptionally large Wells pawpaws aren't ready to come off the tree, but at least two (and maybe all) of this cluster of four are ready to come off the tree. These are still pawpaws of a fine size, even if they're not the biggest. NJ is getting home from Brazil today, and I think one aspect of the celebration will be picking the first Wells off the tree and sharing it.