I took my remaining seeds and broadcast them in a 24X36″ spot in my garden. I knew Jim Walton also had an interest in growing pawpaws and I gave him most of the still dormant seeds that had not yet opened up. When they started ‘hatching’ I had so many baby pawpaws I couldn’t take care of all of them. Last year I collected more than 200 pawpaw seeds. At the end of the summer, the potted plants were 8” tall.Seeds that I broadcast in my garden eventually grew twice as large as ones I had potted.I include several seedlings because the recipient will need several trees for cross-pollination when they get big. I transplant several seedlings as a group into a larger planter.When the seedling starts to come up, the roots are probably down 5” to 8.” The roots are twice the growth, or more, of the plant you see.Don’t try to remove, or ‘help’ the leaf growth come out of the brown pod. The seedling will start to grow a stem and leaves with the original growth still locked inside the seed pod.It may take a month or more for that growth to push the seed up along with the plant. The roots are growing, you just don’t see them. I water them with a very diluted liquid fertilizer.For those with a ‘root or tail’, I replant 1” deep in a separate container with appropriate soil.My curiosity gets the better of me and I start checking after 30 days for signs of growth. It will take another 30 to 100 + days to show germination. After the stratifying process, place the seeds in a growing medium.I just refrigerate them for the cool down. Stratify: Place them in a cool down (40 degrees?) for a minimum of 60 days some sources say 100 days.Scarify: Sand or scrape the coating to allow moisture to penetrate. Through trial and error, and checking the internet, this is what I have learned. It is not an easy process however, the young seedlings are tough little seedlings. When I discovered my lone pawpaw growing from the seeds, I had thrown out ten years earlier, I realized that the best method would be to grow them from seed. It did not survive the transplanting process. The ‘root’ consisted of an underground runner about the thickness of a pencil which had sent up a shoot to become a tree. One year, Darrel Boles, another Sugar Creek chapter member, picked out a 5’ foot sapling from his grove and dug it up for me with his backhoe tractor. Pawpaw leaves have about a ¾” offset.Īs Fred mentioned in his article, they do grow by sending out runners (clones). The difference is hickory leaves join the stem at the same point. For those who want a quick identification, hickory and pawpaw leaves look almost identical. Yes, it can take them that long to germinate! Since then I have learned a lot about pawpaws and learned to speed up the process. Ten years later I found one growing, and today it is a producing tree. I did keep a few and scattered the seeds into the woods around our house. I decided to ‘plant them’ and went to the rim of the canyon and threw most of them over the ledge. In about 1995 on the way to the Fall Ozark Society meeting at Petit Jean State Park, I stopped off at the Cherry Bend Trailhead and picked up bags of pawpaws to share with Ozark members at Petit Jean. Over the years I tried a number of times to dig up young pawpaws and transplant them. Compton had a grove of pawpaws growing on his property and he suggested I take a few and plant them at my house. What did I just taste? Mango? Banana? Peach? From that point on I was hooked on pawpaws. What a pleasant surprise on a September day, especially when you are thirsty. Being new to the Ozarks and never having seen a Pawpaw before, I picked one up for a taste. Compton pointed out lots of pawpaws on the forest floor. We turned to go up Wellcave Hollow when Dr. Compton, and others, searching for virgin timber on a warm September day. I had my first taste of a pawpaw on a hike down in the bowels of the West Prong of the Mountain Fork of the Mulberry River about 1988. It’s time to grow your own and share the bounty. My estimate is that 95% of the population would not be able to identify this tree, and perhaps 99.99% have never had the pleasure of tasting the fruit. The article Fred Paillet presented about pawpaws should be required reading for every Ozark Society member.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |