Damaged Pawpaw Sprouts

In spring 2017 we planted forty pawpaw seeds and probably had thirty of them sprout but then had about ten die because they couldn't break out of the seed coat. I wrote about that problem here, finding that in some cases I could pull the seed coat apart and release the leaves and sometimes the leaves would mature okay. But sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes the leaves would die. And we would be left with a green stem. But sometimes the green stem had so much vitality that it would start bristling with nodules.

Here's a look at some of the nodules.

And here's a closer look, each one trying to decide if it has the energy to become a small branch.

And sometimes one of the nodules would find the energy to grow up into the sky and keep the pawpaw sprout alive in spite of the trauma of its birth.

In the end, about twenty sprouts survived to become seedlings.

Mock Commercialization

At a certain point in September or October 2017, as the pawpaws were falling fast and furious, a couple of them were sitting near some store-bought fruit. Just to see how it would look, I took the stickers off the store-bought grocery-store variety fruit and stuck them to the pawpaws. It looked so normal to see the stickers on the pawpaws--strange since you can't buy pawpaws in grocery stores (I'm sure there are one or two exceptions in places like West Virginia).

I left the stickers on the pawpaws until a couple days later when NJ glanced at them and did a double-take, confused to see grocery store stickers on fruit that isn't sold in grocery stores. After that, I stopped this type of mock commercialization of the pawpaw and just resorted to using a ball-point pen to write the cultivar name on the skins.

A Pawpaw Split: The Problem of Dry Pawpaws

On Sept 26 of 2017 I harvested three pawpaws from the Shenandoah. On the pawpaw harvesting chart, I made a note about these three: "picked, soft but not the typical yellow the the Shenandoah." This was the beginning of a new experience for us: late-season pawpaws that seemed dried out. It wasn't just the Shenandoah that was giving us these dried out pawpaws--in 2017 we harvested pawpaws during the entire month of October (in 2016 the harvest only lasted for the month of September), and most of 2017's October pawpaws were fairly dry, not as custardy as pawpaw lovers are accustomed to. More spongy. Many of them still tasted good when eaten fresh, but we also decided to freeze the pulp from a lot of the drier October pawpaws.

A few pawpaws, all from the KSU-Atwood, dried out so much that they cracked wide open while still on the tree.

I didn't like seeing this all that much, but at least it was interesting. It's hard to predict what novelty the pawpaws will throw at us next. Certainly our peach tree provides very limited drama in comparison.

The smallest fruit from this batch was cracked when I harvested it.

You can see another cracked pawpaw at the top of this pic.

This one: we've been letting it dry out completely, and NJ has suggested making a Christmas tree ornament out of it.


I'm not sure why it happened like this--we only lost a few fruit to this on-branch cracking, but the bigger concern was just the dryness of the late-season pawpaws and corresponding lower taste quality. This year I didn't put as much water on the trees as I have in previous years. The leaves stayed green and they produced a lot of fruit, reflecting I'm sure an extensive root system. But maybe without my help they couldn't get enough water to keep the later fruit from drying out? For the 2018 season I'll plan on giving them more water to see if we can get better fruit in October.

Of course, if anyone out there has dealt with the problem of dry late-season pawpaws, I'd love to hear what you've tried and whether it's worked.

The Wells: A Double-Pawpaw Machine

Each pawpaw fruit is born from a flower that has the potential to produce up to about eight fruit at a time, so you'll often see pawpaws growing in clusters. Sometimes the clusters have complications. As they grow in close quarters from the same flower, one fruit might adhere to another fruit, and then the fruit to which it adheres will out pace it in growth, breaking the smaller fruit off of the stem and leaving it like a parasite, hanging onto the larger fruit and then shriveling up eventually. You can see this is what happened with the big pawpaw in the foreground here. The brown nub on top is the smaller fruit in the scenario I've just described.

A closer look at the little failed pawpaw that we had going on during pawpaw season of 2017. In 2016 I described little pawpaws like these as parasitic twins. 

But there's another scenario that can play out when pawpaws from the same flower adhere to each other, as long as the two adhering pawpaws can roughly match each others' growth:
the double-pawpaw.
Above, you see the cluster and the two lower pawpaws have stuck together from infancy and stayed together as they've grown. Before pawpaw season of 2017, I had only seen this type of thing in a pic I saw once online (I've just searched and can't find it now). But during the 2017 season, we were surprised to see the Wells cultivar produce probably five sets of double-pawpaws.
Neither the KSU-Atwood nor the Shenandoah produced any doubles.

A closer look: you can see they really are stuck together.

Here's another set of doubles. Based on the shape, I thought of this one as Asimina triloba's straining toward Taoist philosophy.

Another double-pawpaw that hadn't yet attained a consciousness of how seemingly contradictory forces may actually be complementary.

Here I am, having harvested a big cluster of three Wells pawpaws. The two that are directly in my hand are doubles.

See?

Here's what the connective tissue looks like on a double-pawpaw.

One day I harvested both the yin-yang pawpaw and a double-pawpaw that was quite off balance, to the point that if the smaller one were just a little smaller I bet it would have become a parasitic twin.

Here's the yin-yang double-pawpaw getting its portrait on the counter.

Here's the same double-pawpaw cut open.

The Wells produced so many double-pawpaws in 2017. I wonder if it was a fluke or if this is something we can expect from it every year?

The 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival

On Friday night, September 22, we held the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival. (If you're looking for accounts of the 2nd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival or the 1st Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival, click here and here.)

We decided the harvest has been big enough this year that we could introduce the pawpaw revelers to a pawpaw cake. So on Thursday night, I took a knife and spoon to a few pawpaws and filled this bowl with pawpaw pulp. 

Here are the pawpaw skins from the fruits I used for the pulp. It looks like it took about four or five pawpaws to make that bowl of pulp. The skins on the left are the ones I've spooned the pulp out of. The skins on the right--those are the ones that NJ got to after I spooned the pulp out of them. NJ eats closer to the rind (watermelon, pawpaws, etc) than I do. 

These are the pawpaws that we had left over after I made the pulp. Just 12 of them, which worried us a bit, since according to the Evite that NJ sent out, there would be 67 people attending the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival.

We comforted ourselves by thinking that we also had these four pawpaws (in the foreground) in reserve--they were about to be ripe and might be right by Friday night. As for the pawpaw in the background--that one fell from the tree a little early and we were sure it wouldn't be ripe in time for the festival, so I committed to give it to a guy who goes to a nearby university and had contacted me about trying a pawpaw. (I met him on campus on the day of the festival and made the hand-off, instructing him not to eat it until it turned fragrant and pretty soft.) We also consoled ourselves by saying that everyone didn't need to have a whole pawpaw or even a half of a pawpaw but could have a quarter of a pawpaw or even an eighth of some of the big pawpaws.

After thus consoling ourselves, I started to work on making the pawpaw cakes. (And NJ started to work on being my life coach while I made the cakes.) Here's the recipe. And sorry the pic isn't oriented well. I've spent too much time trying to get it right-side-up but some type of little ghost in the machine is foiling my efforts and I need to move on. If you want to see a pic of it right-side-up, take a look at when I made a pawpaw cake in October 2016.

Here's NJ cleaning up after me--I told you she eats closer to the rind than I do and she likes to get more of the batter off the spoon than I do. So she's getting the last of the batter, which I missed, off of the spoon and into the pan. And she's doing it with such good cheer.

With the last two drops of batter in the pan, I was ready to put the cakes into the oven to bake.

While we waited for the cakes to finish baking, I snooped around in the fridge wondering if we had happened to have lost any stray pawpaws in there that we could find and use for the festival the next evening. Turns out we had indeed lost one, huddled between the pickles and the margarine. (I know some of you are sneering right now that we've got margarine rather than "real butter" in our fridge, and that's fine. Just know that I'm too generous to sneer at you when I consider the fact that most of you eat many more apples and oranges than you do pawpaws.)

Once the cakes were finished baking it was time to put on the cream cheese frosting (recipe also visible in the photo above).

These are the baked goods we had ready by 6:30 pm on Friday night, a half-hour before the revelers started arriving for the festival: I had made the two pawpaw cakes on the right, and NJ had made the apple-cardamom cakes in the middle as well as the brownies on the left..

And the festival began! There were some repeat offenders at the festival that you may recognize from previous pawpaw festivals. And then there were some new people on the guest list, including friends from the neighborhood and work, and also people who we've met via this blog solely because we share a common interest in the pawpaw.

Fortunately the revelers brought other items to fill up the plates besides just pawpaws. (More fortunate still would be if we had enough pawpaws to fill up the plates!)

In the left corner: a reveler who drove all the way from Ogden to Provo to join in the festivities. Also in this pic is a reveler who garnered an invitation by virtue of the fact that a few months ago he saw the pawpaw trees as he walked by our house and later when he bumped into me said, "Hey you've got pawpaw trees don't you?" We were so impressed that he could identify them that we immediately placed his name on the list of invitees. 

And then it turned out that the guy who goes to the local university also made it to the pawpaw festival.

In the end, we did have enough pawpaws to give some people a pawpaw half. (I took people out to look at the trees before it got dark and was able to harvest a few extras.) It also helped that not a lot of the kids that showed up were very interested in trying the pawpaw--more for the adults!

CSI: Hipster Banana Edition

Yesterday some friends (who are coming to the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival later this week) mentioned that they had seen an article claiming that the new nickname for the pawpaw is "the hipster banana." As soon as I heard that, I looked up what hipsters wear and put on my distressed Chuck Taylors, which I slept in last night just to always be looking the part (and you'll see they make a cameo later in this post).

This morning as I went off to my hipster job while wearing my hipster shoes I realized that, somehow, there had come to be some splattered hipster banana on our driveway. (I know it's very bourgeois to have a driveway and to have purchased a house, but I assure you that we're saving up to be able to afford to rent a place that doesn't have a driveway so that we can just park our tandem Vespa on the street.) 

The splattered viscera of a pawpaw on our driveway. I could barely believe my eyes. Then I realized that the slug-covered pawpaw, which I had simply left under the tree, had disappeared a few days ago. Hence, even before heading off to work I had identified the victim. Sadly, I had a sense it would meet a fate like this, given the invertebrate-types that this particular hipster banana had been hanging out with.

Once I got home from work (see there's my hipster shoe) I needed to turn the driveway into a proper crime scene. So I grabbed a piece of S's sidewalk chalk and got down to the morbid business of chalking things up. With the chalk lines, the method of extinguishing the pawpaw becomes apparent: it fell, or better was pushed, or more precisely was thrown onto the cement. The area without the pawpaw guts in the center (inside the chalk circle) is where the fruit made impact with the ground, and then the chalk marks the extent of the splattering. Grisly, I know.

I further surveyed the driveway and found other evidence. An archipelago of evidence.

Whoever did it, it wasn't a clean job. It was a crime of passion, with the pawpaw (based on cold hard evidence) being thrown repeatedly onto the cement. Bludgeoned even.

For the most part, the criminals disposed of the body, leaving only splatters, but I did find this genetic material.

As I applied the final chalk lines, the neighborhood kids were walking home from school. Several of them watched me as they walked by, and I saw a few with guilty looks in their eyes, as if they had been surprised that when they returned to the scene of the crime, I had made it into a genuine crime scene with chalk. This photo is another splattering with an absent center, where the absent center shows the place of impact.

Not for the weak of stomach, this type of work.

FYI: Not only was I wearing my beat up Chucks while I conducted the investigation but I also had my hair dyed pastel for the occasion.