18 thoughts on “Paw Paws”

  1. The infallible Wikipedia and the linked article say that pawpaws are native to the eastern US and southern Ontario. So, not a tropical fruit, but one with a tropical-ish flavor.

    2. Whatever flavor it has, I ate one once and it was the best fruit I ever tasted.

      The story I heard is that fruit of wild paw paw can taste like . . . stuff. There are cultivated varieties propagated by grafting as with apples, but I am told that unlike apples, the seed from a cultivated variety stands a chance of giving decent flavored fruit. I have two paw paw trees grown from grafting root stock. I thought to skip grafting a cultivated variety on them and take my chance on what I get. They have set their first fruit, and I am eager to taste them if they are any good or if I need to buy a grafted paw paw and keep the other trees as pollinators.

      Unlike its cousin tropical fruits, you need some amount of winter weather for them, but not too much. In south-central Wisconsin, I am at the extreme northern end of where you can consider growing them–judging by their nickname “Hoosier banana” a city named Paw Paw in Michigan and other states, and it being the state fruit of Ohio, I am thinking it grows best in mid-latitude North America.

      The other story I heard is that is simply cannot be picked green and expected to ripen in storage as is done with apple, peach, pear and even plum. You have to pick them soft-ripe off the tree or even pick the windfalls off the ground, otherwise they will taste like . . . stuff. That puts a crimp in having them for sale anywhere outside farmer’s markets local to where they are grown. Don’t think of storing ripe paw paws any other way than by freezing them.

      The natural pollinator insect for these trees is not known. You can hand-pollinate with a Q-tip, but when I tried that one year, I didn’t know there was a difference between a male flower and a female flower. Sort of like Laura Bush’s speech describing her husband at the National Press Club banquet or whatever venue and joking about the President of the United States being an inexperienced rancher who attempted to milk a male horse.

      I guess something pollinated this year’s flowers that look like small bells hanging down, but I only have four fruit clusters on one tree, a single cluster on the second. The clusters look somewhat but not completely unlike bunches of bananas.

      So for the most part, eating paw paw pretty much means growing it in your back yard, but a guy in a Chicago fruit-growing club warned about getting complaints from neighbors. A paw paw tree sends of “root runners” from which sprout more paw paw trees. I have that going on, which I guess is a sign the plants are healthy, but so far my runners are not popping up in the neighbors carefully maintained lawn.

      But don’t even think of transplanting the runners to offer trees to friends and neighbors. The roots are very delicate, and the main plant has a deep taproot that you have to not damage. I had a cultivated paw paw that I bought and planted 30 years ago under shade and it never grew taller than about a foot. I read that paw paw trees do that, growing as tiny trees in the forest understory until the big trees around them die, and then the paw paw takes over. Even knowing how difficult paw paw are to transplant, I attempted to move mine into more sun where I had the from-seed paw paws thriving, and sure-shootin, I broke the tap root and wrecked this tiny tree.

      1. What’s to prevent me from sneaking over late at night and stealing your Paw Paws? The police will tell you you need to erect a “No Trespassing” sign.

        I’d suggest: “Keep your Paws of my Paw Paws.”

        But for maximal deterrence and technical correctness perhaps: “Keep your Paws off my Hoosier Banana.”

        Your choice…

          1. When my Dad was growing sweet corn for the local cannery, in order to deter poachers grabbing roasting ears from our rural fields, he’d plant about 8 rows of early season seed corn (we called if field corn, some know it as cattle corn) around the periphery of the fields next to the roads. Most people would just pick what they could fetch close to the car. Tough and stuff tasting…

            Maybe Paul could surround his Paw Paws with hedge-apple trees around the periphery of his backyard.

          2. Eight rows of field corn next to the road?

            So now I know why back-in-the-day the odd can of Green Giant Niblets had tough corn kernels.

          3. On of the guys hunting deer on my land stopped by to tend his hunting blind. He remarked, “Do you know about the wild asparagus growing on your property?” and I responded, “where?”

            “You mean those asparagus “ferns” along the orchard fence? I busted my (ahem) “backside” planting all of that!”

            “Oh, Tom (one of the hunters in the group) has been picking it.”

            Gee, all this time from the broken stalks was wondering if the deer were browsing my asparagus, and it was a deer hunter doing this all along.

          4. Joan of Arc / Del Monte brand
            Cannery closed decades ago IIRC.

            No, the specialized pickers used were somewhat ancient FMC machines that were tractor mounted and didn’t corner well. All contracted out by the cannery we weren’t involved in the harvest, however…

            We’d get notification a few days before they showed and we would disk down all those rows so that they wouldn’t get harvested by mistake. Typically end rows and the long rows next to the road.

            By the time of harvest the sweet corn was typically over ripe in order to survive the canning / freezing process and not really made for good roasting ears.

            Probably more detail than you’d want to know in a thread about Paw Paws…

          5. About poaching, Tom Wolfe wrote how Robert Noyce of Intel fame almost didn’t graduate from college. I am sure many other people contributed, but Noyce is essentially the inventor of the integrated circuit as we know it today, even though people “in the business” who should know better credit Jack Kilby, who got priority for inventing the integrated circuit based on overly broad patent claims.

            Grinnell College is in Iowa, to many people an unlikely place where the Digital Revolution came from, but Noyce had an inspiring Physics professor at Grinnell who knew William Shockley at Bell Labs and was able to have his students experiment with transistors before anyone else ever hear of them.

            The story is that Noyce thought it would be cool to roast a small pig for a “Hawaiian Lua” for his friends, so he stole one from a local farmer, thinking this to be a harmless college prank. Wolfe commented that Noyce was athletically endowed, and anyone knowing anything about the ability of small pigs to escape and evade, catching this pig was no mean task.

            Given that farming has since forever been done on “thin margins”, stealing a pig in that community was a serious crime. When Noyce was found out, or he may have confessed to it thinking it to be a harmless college prank, the farmer pressed charges and Noyce was almost expelled before graduating were it not for the intervention of the Physics professor.

          6. Gee, all this time from the broken stalks was wondering if the deer were browsing my asparagus, and it was a deer hunter doing this all along.
            If you’d left a six-pack of Leinenkugel along the fence, if that went missing, you’d have known it was beer hunters…

          7. Stolen Pig doesn’t quite have the same ring as Intel Inside although I have many friends at AMD that would claim otherwise…

  3. We planted a paw paw tree last year. Will take a while for it to fruit, so I read.

    “When you pick a paw paw, or a prickly pear, and you pick the wrong claw – well next time beware…”

    1. I guess I am the resident paw paw nerd.

      My understanding is that you need two paw paw trees to cross pollinate. But I told a colleague from India about how tasty the paw paw fruit is, and he was intrigued of growing a kind of tropical fruit here in Madison. He planted a single cultivated paw paw in a pot and as of a couple years ago had fruit. So there may be some cultivars that are self-fertile of which you need just one.

Comments are closed.