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Welcome to a little about growing your own pawpaws. This is
not too too tricky, as the trees grow wild on their own, don’t need spraying, and grow fairly quickly. Even from seed
you could hope to be harvesting a few in about 5 years.
Let’s start from the way to get the best tasting fruit
the quickest. That would be to order some grafted plants from Peterson (link on top left). His “Shenandoah” cultivar
bears fruit very quickly, and they are huge and delicious. (In my very best planting spots I have Peterson trees.)
Next we will veer toward cheaper, slower, and slightly less
perfect fruit. But fine.
Here are a couple of seedlings planted in the woods. They don’t
come up until late July, so don’t give up. (A good trick is to plant in the fall, and to plant both pawpaws and daffodils
in the same place – the daffs will help mark the spot, and will be faded by the time the pawpaws come up. If you plan
to plant in the spring, keep the seeds in the fridge over the winter.)
The cheapest way to go would be to toodle off to a pawpaw festival,
sample as much fruit as you can, and save the seeds of your favorites. Stick them in the ground where you hope to be able
to pick the fruit, which could include along your favorite trails and such. If you have woodsy property, that is a perfect
place to plant and forget (or come back in a few years and chainsaw to let in a little sun). The wee tricky thing about seedlings
is they don’t like full sun that first year. (At these festivals people also sell small plants, etc.)
The biggest festival I know of is in Ohio.
Another is in Missouri.
A couple of caveats. You can’t bring a bunch of pawpaws
home for the winter like you can apples. A disappointing reality of pawpaws is that they do not keep or ship well. They are
sorta like fresh figs – you pretty much need to know someone who grows them to enjoy them when the time is just right.
Another minor problem if you are trying to choose your favorite varieties at a festival is that not all pawpaws ripen at the
same time, and being perfectly ripe does make a difference. So at the weekend of the festival the earliest ones may be over
ripe, and the late ones either not there or picked a little too soon. For your own little orchard it would be ideal to have
some early, mid-season, and late varieties to spread out the good times.
Here is another seedling (I think, it could be a root sucker)
that shows the leaves very well. The dark “dirt” here is deep compost with a layer of coffee grounds on top.
A much faster way to get your pawpaws growing (and not too much
more) is to buy “unnamed seedlings from parents of improved cultivars” from Burntridge, about $6 each. These are
about a foot high at least (one year they were ~2'). These could be planted in any good spot for a tree, like out
in the full sun or the edge of a forest. The trees are quite attractive, fine for landscaping. Ideally plant at least 2 for
better pollination. There are lots of other nurseries that sell pawpaws of one sort or another, and they are all fine as far
as I know.
Grafting your own is not really that hard. You’d need
a rootstock, which could be wild ones growing right where they are. (Pawpaw trees do not transplant well, especially out of
the rocky soil they grow wild in. If there are millions of seedlings these will do OK, maybe 50% will make it, and in a year
be big enough to graft onto.) Another source of rootstock is the improved seedlings above. (Probably need to let them grow
a year or two before grafting.)
The
other thing you need is scion from a good tree. You can get a good variety from Burntridge, and take a few cuttings off the
top of it and let the rest grow. If you are grafting on to a wild tree, even the improved seedlings would be a good improvement
to most wild trees, and worth the experience.
How to graft. Start with Joe Real’s excellent tutorial.
Then, if you can’t resist being cheap and easy (he gets 100% take, my cheap easy way gets about a third that), you can
adapt his to mine. (Each year I lean more toward his methods and get better results.)
I carry everything I need in an apron with pouches. A little
zip lock of the scion sticks (kept in a cooler until last minute), a good knife, clippers, pocket saw, and a potato peeler
(good for separating the bark, and scion prep). Plus the things mentioned below.
For sterilizing and keeping the scion moist I just put the little
sticks in my mouth.
For taping / sealing the union I just use strapping tape and
a little latex caulk.
To
slow down growth from root suckers and buds below the graft I wrap the trunk in about a foot of aluminum foil.
I
am usually gone for a few months after a graft, and when I return the competing buds usually need cutting back. And the strapping
tape has to be cut, sometimes out of the growing bark if it has been too long or the tree is a real grower.
This
picture is a graft to a wild pawpaw out in the forest. There was a drought and far more than usual eating of the pawpaw leaves.
Mostly you see the aluminum foil. The scion piece started out a few inches long in late April (this is late August). It is
kinda fried from the drought, but it must have grown well early in the summer.
This one looks more exuberant, but it is a failure. The little
scion stick on top is not growing, and the shoot with leaves is coming up from the roots. (I’ll just try again next
year.)
I don’t always cover the scion (like with masking tape,
or white vinyl elec tape, covering all except the buds), but I think I get more takes when I do. Joe has a sense of which
scion tend to dry out (like avocado) and what to do about it.
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Once the graft takes
sometimes (not usually with pawpaws) I tie the union with nylon string that buries itself in the joint. Professional grafting
people think I am insane to do this, but it works for me. I have buried string (always 100% nylon) in lots of branches that
would normally break (like kwai mi lychee) and never had a problem from the string or a break. I tend to let kids climb in
my fruit trees, and I don’t want to worry about weak unions.
If you ever have to
prune these branches off, the saw will cut through the nylon just like wood. The only disadvantage is if you wrap 2 or more
branches together (like a figure 8 for 2 branches) to make a strong crotch, then later forget and cut one of the branches
off, the loss of the string will cause you to lose the other branch. The string gets tighter than an E-string and holds a
mighty amount of weight. If you ever cut it the branch it was supporting will drop like a stone.
These first grafting
strings are on a pear tree in Iowa that now has big heavy fruit.
Below is the lychee
tree.
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Here are a few pictures of a lychee crotch I tied a nylon string around
about 20 years ago. Many years later I was pruning the branch off anyway, and out of curiosity cut it open.
The first picture shows the branch (or a similar one) before I cut it
out of tree. You can see little pig tails of the string ends sticking out of the tree.
Then the branch on the saw ready to split open. (Note the crotch above also has been
tied. I did this to almost every branch down low on the tree that might bear a lot of weight later.)
The branch cut open - the auger is pointing to the string.
A close up. Note that the wood is totally sealed around the string.
Back to the pawpaw page on the Pondermostly site: http://pondermostly.tripod.com/id7.html
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