Pawpaws!

plantyhamchuk:

It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about these, but it’s pawpaw season!

This is the fruit of a pawpaw tree – Asimina triloba – a wonderful fruit tree native to the eastern US / Appalachia. Many people have never heard of it, let alone tried it, because the fruits don’t last and they don’t ship worth a damn. They get bruised SUPER easily. It’s kind of like an illicit substance, people get the fruits, because they know someone, who knows of a place to get harvest them.

These came from an old employee of the plant nursery, who gave them to a still-current coworker, who shared them with everyone. In the second picture, I chomped into the fruit so you could see what it looks like inside before I devoured it.

Pawpaws taste like a cross between a mango and a banana. There’s a smoky aftertaste. It’s a complex flavor.

The trees can be tricky to grow, and there’s a huge difference from seedling to seedling, tree to tree. They are full of seeds, which I saved for V. I took the second one home to V, who shared it with some family friends who’d never tried it either. 

We figured out pretty quickly how to germinate these from seed, at around a 90% success rate (one year we had a 100% success rate) – which is kind of unheard of. However, our plants struggled horribly as we experimented with where they’d be happiest. I told V they were naturally found near rivers and sure enough, our most successful plants are down by the river. They want a shallow water table. Now that we’ve figured out the germinating and what they actually want once they’re germinated, I expect we’ll have quite a few more trees in the future.

Word is that some of the farmers in neighboring counties are catching onto the pawpaw demand, and are starting to plant it too. 

Technically, the fruit produces a neurotoxin, though not really in quantities thought to hurt anyone. There are breeding programs to try to breed that out though.