Pawpaw PROBLEMS

Slide 2 – Pawpaw problems and success This is about pawpaw problems, and successes. Mostly about problems, because there are a lot more ways to do things wrong than right.

Slide 3 - pawpaws are different I have the biggest pawpaw orchard in Michigan (show picture of orchard). I have about 300 seedlings, which I planted 17 years ago, and 22 grafted trees. I killed a lot more trees than this, learning how to grow pawpaws. One of my biggest problems was accepting that pawpaws aren’t like apples. I should explain, even though most of you already know it, that most of our fruits in the North, come from just one family, the rose family. Peaches, apples, plums, apricots, strawberries, raspberries, quinces, loquats, blackberries, cherries, June berries and pears are all close relatives of the roses. Pawpaws aren’t. Most of the afore mention fruits share quite a few diseases in common with each other. Pawpaws don’t. The rose family, also share a number of well known insect pests, like the Japanese beetle. Pawpaws don’t. Most of the rose family won't grow near black walnut trees. Pawpaws do. So pawpaws really are different. This has its pluses and its cons. First the cons:

Slide 4 – Germination can be difficult The seeds are fussy about where you plant them. I get about 98% germination in standard seed starter mix, and about 1% or 2% in my heavy clay soil, if I’m lucky. I tried planting seeds in the woods, Johnny Apple seed style (pawpaws are supposed to grow in the woods). Out of thousands of seeds, on hillsides, hilltops, floodplains, beside streams, beside swamps, forest margins, I got zero results. I kept maps and put down markers, and as far as I can tell, not a single plant came up. Other people have lots of volunteers come up, but that’s in different soil. I throw a lot of rotten pawpaws away and I never get any volunteers. So the seeds are very particular about their soil. However once they have grown in a pot for a year, you can plant them in almost any type of soil. My orchard is heavy clay. Most pawpaws grow in sandy loam.

Slide 5 - shade The first season they sprout, they need shade. Not much. A tree over head or just a green house glass provides enough shade. I used mosquito netting over my starter box, and that was enough. Grow tubes provide enough shade also. I planted some 3 month old seedlings in grow tubes in August, and they did just fine. Two things you have to watch out for with grow tubes are wasps and mice. The wasps will build nests and block the tube in the summer and smother the tree, and the mice will build nests in the tube in the winter and gird the tree. They must do it out of boredom, because normally mice leave pawpaws alone. If you don’t provide some shade the first season, the seedling will die, but after the leaves have fallen off in the fall, you can plant the new seedling out in full sun without harm. And the next year the tree doesn’t need shade at all: Just the first year it sprouts.

Slide 6 - Weeds Pawpaws are very uncompetitive with weeds. This was hard for me to learn, because I never have enough time to weed and mulch. This is normally a deep woods, under story tree. If you don’t keep the weeds at least 2 or 3 feet from the trunk, the trees won’t grow. I planted a row of about 100 trees twenty years ago, and then abandoned them. I used to check once in a while to see how they did. Some died at once. Some grew for a while and would die back and re-sprout. All of them are dead now. I try to keep 6 feet of mulch all around my trees. Once the trunks get an inch or so in diameter I mound it up 2 or 3 feet high, right against the tree. Don’t try this with apples or peaches

Slide 9 – Transplanting problems They can be hard to transplant, if you let them. Pawpaws, if they’re allowed to, tend to grow long brittle taproots (and I mean three feet or more) with out a lot of moisture- absorbing hair rootlets. They will do this in a deep pot, or in the ground. If you have one of these trees, you’ll find it hard to dig up or plant without breaking the taproot, which will set them back. You’ll also need to water a lot, probably once a day for the first week, and once or twice a week for the rest of the summer. You can avoid a lot of work by buying trees with shallow, dense, hairy root balls. They’re a lot easer to plant and keep watered. If you’re starting plants yourself, then use short, bottomless pots, kept at least a few inches off the floor. The taproot will go straight down, hit the air at the bottom of the pot, stop and branch out to make a dense root ball. I have also heard of a product called spin out. It’s a cooper-based paint that you coat the inside of your pot with. When the roots hit it, they stop and branch out. I haven’t used it myself, but I’ve understand it works. You wouldn’t have to water as often as I do with my bottomless pots. Once I put the trees in the ground, I only water the first year, but I have heavy soil, and a foot or two of mulch. You’ll have to adjust watering to your situation.

Root suckers that have been taken off the mother tree have even fewer hairs roots. This means they are a lot harder to keep alive until they have put down new roots and become established. If you’re transplanting root suckers, I would cut the root back to the mother tree the year before you transplant. I suppose you might call that the umbilical root. This will cause the sucker to develop its own root system.

Once you’ve planted your trees, mulched and watered them. They sit there and sulk like a wet cat for a long time, and don’t do anything. This is really irritating. A lot people pull their trees out after a couple of years of no progress. Be patient! The roots are growing. If the trees are taken care of correctly they should take off the second or third year. I’ve noticed this apparent lack of growth is more pronounced in seedling than grafted trees. My orchard looked like a weed bed for years. Actually, it was a weed bed. I had these giant burdock and big nasty thistles towering over my trees. I had trouble mowing between the rows, because I couldn’t see the trees. Finally, I spent a week in the spring pulling out all the weeds (I couldn’t spray them, they were too big and thick) and laying cardboard covered with about a million wheelbarrows of sheep manure. That year my trees averaged three feet of growth.

Slide 10 – Plant good quality grafted trees If you plant ungrafted pawpaw seedlings, as I did, expect to wait 10 years for fruit. But that’s also the case for apple seedlings. Most people know better than to plant an apple seed and wait for fruit. Folks who plant seedlings have tried root pruning, girding, smoking trees, the same way you smoke out a bee hive, chemical treatments, iv drips with solutions of ground up female flowers and ESP to get fruit and nut trees out of their juvenile phase and to start bearing. There was a very funny article in Tropical Fruit News. I think it was written by a nursery owner. He had a ten-year-old mango that kept growing, but it wouldn’t fruit. He took his chain saw out to the tree and had a little talk with it. Pointed out the fireplace and told it, this is your last chance. His said some of the branches broke that year from the fruit load. But if plant psychology is not your strong point, then plant grafted trees. Or graft them yourself in the field. I started my seedling orchard and 5 years latter I planted 22 grafted trees I bought from Larry Sibley. I got fruit from Larry’s trees first. In fact I had to take some fruit off Larry’s trees the next year, so they wouldn’t be stressed. I still get almost as much fruit from those 22 trees as I do from the three hundred seedlings. The other reason to plant grafted trees is because most seedlings are inferior tasting. Out of all my seedling trees, I expect to keep 30 at the most. I’ll graft the rest with better varieties.

Slide 11 – Pawpaws can sucker Pawpaws sucker. Some of them sucker a lot (picture here). You can’t spray them with roundup because they are tied to the mother tree. In fact you can’t even spray herbicide on the pawpaw down the row because the trees tend to root graft themselves together. One whole row of trees will all share a common root system. Spray one and kill them all. I cut the suckers off every spring. So far no one is selling non-suckering rootstock that I know of. I have noticed however, that vigorously growing trees, which include most of the named varieties don’t seem to sucker very much.

Slide 13 – Wind Damage Here is a pawpaw gone bad (picture of twisted limbs). Pawpaws are susceptible to wind damage. Limbs have to be pruned out or straightened.

Slide 16 - Pruning Pawpaws are very susceptible to weak crotches. The wood is brittle and where other trees would grow their limbs together into a strong fork, pawpaw limbs fail to self-graft. When you have a vertical growing limb that appears to be growing into the truck beside it, it isn’t. When the two limbs get big enough, one breaks and usually takes a strip of bark and sometimes half of the truck, all the way to the ground (Picture). So, don’t let narrow angles develop on branches. Bend them down or cut them off(draw a picture).

Slide 20 - Spacing Spacing your trees. Here are trees spaced at eight feet, one foot, and twelve feet.(show pictures). I recommend twelve feet in the rows and sixteen feet between the rows. I have to prune the twelve foot spaced trees to keep them from growing into each other. Keep them pruned low. You can grow pawpaws in a hedge (picture). The fruit size doesn’t seem to be affected, just the production. You need to keep cutting back the hedge, or else you’ll get thirty foot tall pawpaws, so grafted trees might not work so well in this situation. When trees are cut back, you get a lot of suckers, which in a hedge might be an advantage.

Slide 23 -- Grafting When you graft pawpaws, be sure to remove the flower buds (the big fat round ones). Flower buds are easy to tell from leaf buds, which look like feathers (pictures of buds).

Slide 24 – Fruits: picking and handling Pawpaw fruits are tender (picture of fruit). Some are more so than others. Some varieties will flatten out on a kitchen counter just from their own weight. You can’t stack them up on each other. If they fall on bare ground, they smash. In general you have to handle them like eggs. They have about a two day shelf life at room temperature. I can usually tell about a week before they ripen, but this varies from tree to tree. Some cultivars have subtle changes in color and texture of their skin as they ripen. Most of them will fall when they’re ripe. At that point, they’re usually dead ripe, and need to be eaten or processed in a day or two. Some pawpaws will hang on the tree all winter. If you have just a few trees you could pick the fruit before it falls, as it gets close to ripe (when it softens and smells ripe). That would avoid bruising the fruit. I have too many trees to go feeling every fruit, so what I do is to pick up all the ones that fell that day. That’s one more reason that I like to keep two feet of mulch on the ground. I try to keep the trees less than seven feet tall, so that I don’t get a lot of bruised fruit.

So, now you’re thinking, why would anyone want to grow this tree?

Slide 25 – pawpaws are delicious First of all; pawpaws are delicious. As good as a fresh ripe peach just picked off the tree, still warm from the sun. A lot of wild fruits are typical Euel Gibbons food, if you put enough butter and sugar on them, you can eat them. Pawpaws aren’t like that. A good pawpaw is as right up there with the best plum, or a perfect pear Slide 26 – you don’t have to spray You don’t have to spray pawpaws. In fact there’s nothing on them to spray. Unless you want to spray the opossums. They don’t get brown rot, fire blight, black knot, codling moth or plum curculio. The Japanese beetles don’t even bother them.

Black walnuts don’t bother pawpaws. I have about 20 pawpaws growing under walnut canopy and they produce just fine. In fact I think they do better under walnuts, because the walnuts suppress some of the weeds.

Slide 27 – deer don’t both pawpaws Deer don’t bother pawpaws. At least they don’t bother mine. (Picture of deer) I have two Labrador retrievers inside an electric fence to protect my other trees, but the dogs aren’t let into the pawpaw orchard. I’ve never had a tree rubbed or chewed on by deer. Rabbits will sometime nip off a very small tree out of curiosity, but they don’t come back for a second tast.

Pawpaws are usually not bothered by late frost. All the other trees will be leafed out and flowering while the pawpaws are still dormant. Since they’re native trees, they’re not fooled by early spring warm spells.

Pawpaws aren’t pollinated by bees. So if there’s a problem with the local bees, your pawpaws won’t be affected. Slide 29 White Owl Winery There are pawpaw products you can make with your surplus fruit. Like peaches, the processed goods aren’t as delectable as the fresh fruit, but most people who try them enjoy pawpaw pie, fruit leather, ice cream, milk shakes and jam. White owl winery in Illinois has won awards for their pawpaw wine (White owl winery picture). The way I preserve pawpaws is to wash them as soon as I pick them and squeeze the pulp through a deep fry basket to remove the seeds. Then I put it in a zip lock and freeze it. You can use it for anything you would use peaches or bananas. My personal favorite is walnut pawpaw smoothies.

There’re tough. I know I complained about how many pawpaws I’ve killed, but really, once they’re established, all they need is a little mulch, and weeding. I use round bails of straw or hay. I have used cardboard covered with sheep manure. I try to go through the orchard 2 or 3 times a summer and spray roundup on the encroaching quack grass and thistles. As I said you have to watch out for the suckers, although I don’t find pawpaw to be overly sensitive to roundup. If you don’t want to spray, or do a lot of hand weeding, I would put in some kind of weed barrier.

There’re exotic, and they’re local. Pawpaws aren’t in competition with fuji apples or naval oranges. They have their own niche, and nothing else can fill it. You’ll never see them in Wal-Mart, but if you have two or three pawpaw trees behind your house, then you’ll have something special to treat yourself and friends to in the fall. If you have a fruit stand, or if you sell at a farmers market, then you have a real attention getter. Try putting up a sign saying “yes we have pawpaws!”

Slide 30 – They’re pretty There’re pretty. Even if the fruit wasn’t edible, the tree would be worth having. If you only have room for one tree, you can graft several varieties on it. And if you don’t know how to graft, you’ve come to the right place. We have some top grafters here.

Thank you. Questions?