It is incredibly exciting the first time you plant something new and it delivers a fruit, flower, or vegetable you have never experienced. It’s been a while since I have felt this but this weekend my harvest (and consumption) of pawpaws exceeded my expectations. It has been a long wait.
I planted three pawpaw trees in a front garden bed over five years ago. They are one of the few native fruit trees in North America. After the second year, they started to flower but never bore fruits. After a few fruitless years I figured out that the flowers were not being pollinated (unless I was unlucky enough to have three genetically equivalent trees).
So this spring I become a Q-tip bearing fly that would pollinate the trees. Going back and forth between the three, I did my best to cross-pollinate all of them.
In about a month, I noticed that all the trees had tiny little fruit buds. Now I just needed to wait.
And a few days ago they were ready. The best way to tell if pawpaws are ripe is to see if they are soft with a gentle squeeze and have a bit of a scent to them. But also I noticed that a few had already been half eaten by local mammals. Time to get what is left.
Juana and I gathered the remaining intact fruits and quickly split one open. The scent of a strange tropical fruit tickles our noses as we peer at a custard-like substance filled with fat black seeds (that are poisonous (as is the skin)). We both dig in and are not disappointed. The creamy consistency of a pawpaw just melts in your mouth filling it with something that tastes like a cross of a mango with a banana.
We are ready for the next one.
