Losing Weight through Self-Metabolization

You'll recall that this year we bought a food scale so we could carry the obsessive compulsion of cataloging pawpaws further out toward the nth degree. Now we're recording not only dates of each fruit's harvest but also weights. This is the first pawpaw on the scale back on Sept 6th.

Then, out of curiosity, I weighed the same pawpaw on Sept 7th. It had lost weight.

And what of the same pawpaw on Sept 8th? It had lost more weight.

It presents a problem for the conscientious pawpaw weigher: When to weigh the pawpaw--when it's first disconnected from the tree or right before you're going to eat it?

For right now we're going with disconnection from the tree. 

Pawpaw-Cuttin Ceremony, 2019

On September 10th we had a pawpaw-cuttin ceremony in the kitchen.

I feel so bad that the knife doesn't show up well in the pic,
since it was the knife that was doing all the cuttin.

Cut!

Also happening in the house at the same time:
Here's an in-progress linocut of the nearby Great Salt Lake and its brine shrimp.

The Weight of First Harvest

Yesterday I went up to Ogden (which hosts one of the most substantial pawpaw patches in Utah), so I missed a few things in my hometown, including the plummeting to earth of the first pawpaw of our 2019 pawpaw harvest. It plummeted from the Shenandoah, and NJ found it and marked it by cultivar and date. It's not ready to eat yet, but it's soft enough that it's sure to ripen,
unlike the many windfalls and early-cast fruit we had during the spring and summer.

You'll recognize that in this pic (above) I've placed the first fruit upon the as-yet blank pages of the 2019 pawpaw harvesting charts. In reporting harvest results of the past, we've listed the numbers and the dates for each individual fruit. That has started to not seem compulsively obsessive enough, so this year we bought a food scale specifically for the 2019 pawpaw harvest. Now we can also report on the weight of each pawpaw that falls. 

Behold.

The placing of the pawpaw.

The weighing.

The recording.

Pawpaw Volunteers and Windfalls

As you know, we've got about twenty pawpaw seedlings growing in our meager backyard. I was out watering them about a week ago and realized that I was seeing a new pawpaw tree, one I hadn't planted. In this pic you can see the pawpaw plant on the right with its characteristic big leaves. And then on the left you can see the new pawpaw plant, much smaller. 

Here it is. Since I didn't plant it, it must be a volunteer that the roots of the bigger pawpaw sent out. I put the bigger pawpaw in the ground in 2018, as a seedling germinated from our first pawpaw harvest in 2015. I of course knew that pawpaw roots sent out volunteers (the origin of the proverbial pawpaw patch), but I didn't know they would send out volunteers so soon and when the originary tree was still so small. But, well, the pawpaw surprised me.

We've had a lot of fruit set and grow over the spring and summer. At first I didn't know how the trees would bring all of the fruits to fruition, but as I mentioned earlier, the tree will decide how much fruit it can bare. And the trees have decided to cast plenty of their fruit early. These are the last four early-cast fruits, cast sometime during the past weekend. How do I know they're the last four? Because yesterday, September 5th, NJ found the first ripe pawpaw on the ground. Let the 2019 harvest begin! 

Planting Nine Pawpaws, 4th of July 2019

 In 2018, you may remember, I planted nine pawpaw seedlings that were grown from seeds saved from the 2015 harvest (and germinated in the spring of 2016).

Over the winter, one of them died but the rest came back to life and most have seemed fairly healthy.

On the 4th of July 2019, I decided to plant nine more, the healthiest of the batch of seeds saved from the 2016 harvest (and germinated in the spring of 2017).

In the diagram below, you'll see the placement of the original nine in 2018 (these are named D2 and C4 etc) together with the placement of the 2019 planting, with the seedlings simply represented as circles with sunbursts around them.

As always, click on the pic for a better view.

The seedlings I put in the ground in 2018 are surviving but I'm not sure they're thriving, since they look just about like the seedlings I put in the ground in 2019.

In any case, my goal is for the trees to grow and become a natural fence between our back walkway and our neighbors' side walkway.

Well, and I guess I have another goal in planting these: to gain extreme fame and fortune by discovering and naming a new pawpaw cultivar. But that's much much less likely than it is that I'll achieve the humbler goal of having the seventeen pawpaws grow into a fence.

It so happens that while I was planting the seedlings, our neighbor walked by and I asked him if I could plant three pawpaws on his side of the railroad tie, so we could have more of a barrier. He was fine with that, so here they are, planted.

And just for opulenence's sake, I thought I'd through in a pic of our cactus, which is blooming today.

The Tree Will Decide

We've got three pawpaw trees online (that is, three pawpaw trees that have been giving fruit): the Shenandoah, the KSU-Atwood, and the Wells. And then one more is coming online this year, probably, since our three-year-old (three years since planting the grafted cultivar) Susquehanna currently has four pawpaw fruits on it.

This year, as far as I can tell, we've had a record fruit set, and I think the harvest will be the biggest ever in September. But on our way to September, the trees are deciding how much fruit they can sustain, and the Shenandoah has dropped a lot of the fruit that set in the spring. In early July, fruit was dropping quick. And on July 8th I gathered a bunch of the prematurely dropped fruit from off the lawn.

I put the premature fruit on the pavement to take a pic. I wonder how many of each types of pawpaw we'll get this year. I still think it will be a record year. But. The trees will decide.

Stereotypical Pawpaw Blossom Post

Just checking in, wanted to show you the pawpaw blossoms, which are already finish and on to fruiting time. If you've there's an ant in the final pic.