After a couple of lean years due to late frosts, this year is a pawpaw bonanza year. The kitchen window sill and counter are piled up with these delicious fruits.
Although pawpaws can be used in most of the ways bananas are, we choose to eat them fresh. I do little dessert baking now, so freezing them for this is pointless.
That is one of the annoyances of growing old. I look at desserts and spend a couple of months taking the extra pounds off.
Can Pawpaws be Commercial?
There is again talk of making pawpaws a commercial fruit. The idea is doomed as a pawpaw bonanza year is not reliable and growing them is not easy.
First, pawpaws are a true understory tree. Others like redbuds and flowering dogwoods are called understory trees, but they grow is many directions seeking light. Pawpaws grow straight and tall in deep shade with their large leaves spread out.
Redbuds and flowering dogwoods grow happily out in full sun. Pawpaws, if they survive the first couple of years as UV light kills them, grow with their leaves hanging down as if to show their misery.
Second is pollination. Many of our fruits are pollinated by bees with their hives moved around on trailers. Pawpaws are pollinated by flies and beetles farmers like to assault with sprays.
Third is their fruit. Pawpaws look like green potatoes. They have two rows of large seeds. Not everyone can eat them without reacting to the flesh.
Our Pawpaws
We don’t mind. Our pawpaw bonanza is disappearing rapidly. We’ve been planting them for years and have many patches in addition to the original one now. The trees tend to have large fruit on them.
Smaller fruits are left for wildlife. They are popular with raccoons, opossums, foxes, coyotes and deer among others. They appreciate the pawpaw bonanza too.
A plus for us is having a native fruit tree growing in our ravines needing little care. The apples, Asian pears, pears and plums we planted have mostly perished from insects and disease in spite of our attempts to care for them.
This makes the year’s native persimmon and pawpaw bonanza even better.
