Requirements for establishment
Another nickname of the pawpaw is “the captive tree,” because its seedlings need shade to establish, but prefer full sunlight to fruit. The best way to satisfy these needs is to plant seedlings in full sun but shaded by shrubs, or to put a barrel that’s open on both ends over them to shade them for the first year or two. Their taproots reach down to China, and it’s said that the only way to kill a pawpaw is to transplant it. (It’s rumored that when the roots come out in China, the residents use them for fence posts. For that reason, they’d appreciate it if you grew your pawpaws in rows.)

The trees are happiest in rich, humus soil with good drainage and an organic mulch. They need about 30 inches of water per year and a long, warm summer to ripen (150 frost-free days.) For this reason they bear better in areas with this length of growing season, although they’re rated hardy in USDA Zones 5 to 8.

Seedlings grow slowly into attractive pyramid-shaped trees about 20 feet tall, with large, tropical looking foliage which turns tawny yellow in fall. Robert Kurle in northern Illinois told me, “My trees grew about 15 ft. tall in 10 years from seed. They started bearing when they were about four years old.”

Pollination – doing what comes un-naturally
In spring the trees bloom with two-inch wide dark maroon flowers. Native pawpaws are shy bearing because bees don’t pollinate them. Corwin Davis in Michigan watched his flowering trees day and night to find out how they were pollinated, and found that green bottle flies were the main pollinators. These flies are called “carrion flies” and he had to hang spoiled meat in the trees to attract them. (Of course this could attract buzzards, too.) Fortunately a man in Kansas used a different approach. He collected pawpaw pollen from several trees, mixed honey with it, and put a little dab of the mixture on pawpaw blossoms. Bees in the area discovered them and pollinated the trees like crazy, which gave him a fantastic crop. He’d bribed the bees to work trees they wouldn’t touch ordinarily.

You can also hand-pollinate the trees. Take an artist’s brush or a Q-tip and wiggle it around in one flower after another on at least two varieties of pawpaws.

New strains developed by Davis and other growers improved pollination. They may not have achieved self-fruitful strains combined with delicious flavor yet, however.

After the blossoms appear in mid-spring, clusters of three- to six inch long fruit develop and ripen in September-October. (Their two rows of large bean-like seeds are a minor disadvantage.) Pawpaws are credited with saving Lewis and Clark from starvation in their explorations. Some old timers say that the riper the fruit, the better the flavor, and they won’t eat it until the skin is black. The clusters led to the nicknames, “Indiana banana” and “Poor man’s banana.” (This fruit sure has a lot of nicknames!).

Pawpaws grow wild from Florida north to southern Ontario, according to Horticulture Magazine. Their natural habitat is in the understory of hardwood forests, especially in rich, moist bottomlands, where they send up stolons to create a dense thicket. They are the only larval host of the fabulous Zebra Swallowtail butterfly.

The fruit is rich in nutrients. According to the owner of Oikos Tree Crops Nursery, “Pawpaws have 20 to 70 times as much iron, 10 times as much calcium, and four- to 20 times as much magnesium as do the banana, apple, or orange.” Other sources say pawpaws are higher in protein than other fruits, with elevated levels of amino acids, Vitamins A and C, and many minerals. (And they taste better than vitamin supplements, too.)

Sources
You can’t find pawpaw trees for sale everywhere. One source is Oikos Tree Crops, (269) 624-6233, www.oikostreecrops.com/ or e-mail: oak24@aol.com/

Another source is Larry Sibley, the son-in-law of Corwin Davis, who did many years of research in developing superior pawpaw strains. Sibley took over the Davis nursery and sells several varieties of grafted pawpaw trees: Tollgate Gardens & Nursery, (296) 781-5887, www.tollgategardens.com/ or e-mail tool3gate2@juno.com/ Other sources of information

The Pawpaw Foundation is dedicated to the development of pawpaws as a new fruit crop. For information contact Snake Jones, 147 Atwood Research Facility, Kentucky State Univ., Frankfort, KY 40601. Also at KSU is Dr.
Kirk Pomper, kpomper@gwmail.kysu.edu/ or www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/ who will answer your questions about pawpaws.

Waynesville, MO has a pawpaw festival, held in September. Contact denton@zigs.net for information. The annual pawpaw festival in Albany, Ohio is also held in September. Last year it had a “Best pawpaw contest,” a cookoff competition, and even a pawpaw beer garden. (Honest, I didn’t make it up.) For information contact pawpaw@frognet.net/ You’ll also find reams of information if you research pawpaws in a search engine on the Internet.

You probably won’t find any pawpaws in the wild, but it might intrigue you to grow this unique fruit-bearing tree and be able to serve homegrown “tropical” fruit far from the tropics.

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Dorothy Nichols has been nationally published in such magazines as Flower and Garden, Woman's Day, Organic Gardening, Woman's World, and .Successful Farming. She covers a wide variety of topics, taken from extensive research as well as experimentation in her own garden, giving sources of the plants, seeds, and products she mentions. She has been the Garden Columnist for the Lewiston Morning Tribune for 10 years. For more on Dorothy and her writing, please see her website: http://fun.to/plant