Any new thing I try these days is usually with a few seeds or plenty of cuttings, as I experiment to get a sense of an initial success rate. This can be deceptive, getting for instance one time a good handful of beans from a few random plants in 2022, yet only a similar handful from the larger number of more purposefully and, I thought, better-placed bean plants this year. (They all died fairly early in the season.) Of course every year there are so many variables - how early it really warms up, how hot, how dry, the spare attention I have to water and weed Darwin’s garden, and so forth - beyond the simple inputs of a seed going in a flat or the ground on a certain day. One of these days, I keep saying to myself, I should start keeping better records. This isn’t yet that day but below I document a few baby pawpaw trees.
Above, a commercially-acquired pawpaw. Yes, on Saturday I spent money on plants, which I try hard not to do. It’s an endless black hole, like a boat or a sports addiction, we have many things growing already, and beyond all that, believe me when I say that no matter how I try to keep things under control, more than enough flora of all shapes and sizes turn up, one way or another, to keep me overrun. Whatever it reveals about my psychology, the fact is I get more satisfaction out of reviving a near-dead plant or the success of new life from a twig or saved seed than ups and downs of a storebought specialty (that doubly risks paining my flinty Scots-Presbyterian heart if the pennies or pounds turn out to have been ill-spent).
Still. For reasons I cannot articulate, I need to try to grow pawpaws. There used to be a guy on freecycle who gave away pawpaw volunteers from his yard every now and then, but they always go fast and none I managed to get ever survived. They can be a bit tricky to transplant (according to the intertubes). More recently I dug a few myself from those sprouting in a friend of a friend’s yard, which so far are not all dead yet.
Above, the scrawniest of those pawpaws, as the popsicle stick says ‘pawpaw 1’ of two different trees, based on my extensive research (a few pages on the aforementioned innerwebs) that instructed me that we need genetically-different trees for bountiful fruiting. There’s another pawpaw 1 and pawpaw 2 nearby, which have survived two years or so in these grow bags. With new tree, pawpaw 3, I’m stoked for Big Things in five to seven years. Investing in trees teaches a little patience, eventually, or so I hope.
I’ve probably mentioned my inability to make decisions about where to plant things, but I’ll force myself to put all the pawpaws in the ground this spring, somewhere in the sun but sheltered, not dry but well-drained, not in a place that creates additional obstacles to the Holy Rite of Weekly Mowing. Naturally it has to be way down yonder where it can spread into our very own pawpaw patch. These four things are hard to (ahem) square. I’ve almost decided… I think. Stay tuned.