Well they are in socal… Socal is a big place, but its going to be a lot drier and hotter than it is on the east or midwest. The humidity can be a double edge sword with the tree tubes because of moisture build up inside the tube. Tubes tend to be used to prevent deer damage, but I find they do help pawpaws when they are young or just freshly transplanted. Anywhere you buy a grafted pawpaw online is going to give you a non feathered whip, even starks.
Vigor is kind of hit or miss sometimes, since technically every rootstock is genetically unique in the case of pawpaws (minus getting suckers going). I visited an orchard with pawpaws all lined in rows with the same pawpaw each row, each row planted at the same time. The heights were all so every slightly off and main truck were all slightly diff.
Chappell is more like Wabash or Potomac. It’s a medium flavored pawpaw. KSU pawpaws are ripening order inversely related to strength of flavor. It should be (if I remember correctly lightest to strongest) Atwood, Chappell and then Benson, reverse order for ripening schedule. If you think Chappelle is strong, you’ll be surprised by a lot of other ones though.
KSU is no longer breeding evaluating their own pawpaw seedlings last time I checked in. There are two maybe releases but they both have negative traits which maybe why they may never get released.
Wow thank you @treefrogtim and @JustPeachy - this is really helpful. Really appreciate the super detailed response.
Good point about the vigor being basically unique to each tree. Let me do a bit more research into the varieties you’ve mentioned and also what’s actually available and then I can post back on what I order.
I think I will try to put one into the ground and then also keep one or two in a large pot to see what happens and/or maybe I can put them in the ground somewhere else. The sooner I get them the sooner I start the clock (in some ways).
like you say, I do think you have to be a little careful to not let younger trees overcrop. I mean, they’ll be ok, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve allowed too much fruit set in early years despite significant (or so i thought) thinning.
I also think it may be best in many cases to delay any fruit set on a new tree until adequately strong scaffolding can be achieved.
Hard to say but my point is my observations over the last couple of years have led me to want to be more conservative about fruit set.
And the only reason apples have that name recognition is from literally millions spent on product development and marketing. Pawpaw growers aren’t there yet.
Ok but more people like apples. Hence more money. They market pears too, but people like apples.
We can take money out of this and it still wouldn’t matter. Apples still win. The easiest comparison would then be niche heirloom apples like Black Oxford. This has had no marketing. It’s not a club apple. It’s not a newly developed apple. Compared to newish pawpaws, newish fadish apple still spread way way faster. Everyone has it within 5 years. Dwarfing precious rootstock seriously is undervalued.
I think the money is an important part of equation though. You even said above that the only university I’m aware of with a significant interest in a breeding program for pawpaws is no longer active in developing new varieties. I imagine that is at least in part a funding issue.
With millions of dollars it would be much easier to commercialize pawpaws as a fruit, not even marketing a specific variety. If I remember correctly, 3 million dollars was put into breeding Cosmic Crisp. Can you imagine if that kind of money was invested effectively just to put pawpaws on more people’s plates? Until then we have a core group of humble backyard growers quietly collecting high quality repositories, and very few nurseries selling either very expensive or very small trees. Still less people are actually selling fruit, and it’s extremely expensive to make up for the boutique shoestring marketing budget.
I’m not intentionally and purposefully knocking apples to raise up pawpaws, but you get where I’m going. The majority of people don’t know if they like pawpaws because they never ate one. Basically everyone knows what an apple ‘is’ as a baseline.
I try to remember there is a certain level of motivation required for someone to want to walk into the woods and seek out a fruit, or to commit 5+ years to growing a tree to taste it’s fruit when you can just go to the store and buy an apple.
I bet the majority of people aren’t willing to change their own oil. I don’t expect there are many willing to grow their own pawpaw. Maybe on this forum, but in the general public, absolutely not.
I would say Chappell is candy-like…sweet, “fruity,” not as much classically “pawpawy” (which many folks find offensive)…so i would say yes.
By the way, the Juicy Fruit flavor is essentially Jackfruit. The first time i ever tasted pawpaw (via pawpaw ice cream) the first association i made in my mind was jackfruit. However, over time I have not found that association to hold particularly true.
Are you ok with paying overnight shipping? If so PM me in August/September as a reminder. I have overnighted the first and second taste of pawpaw to multiple people on the forum. They can jump in and tell you their experience or you can flip over to the Pawpaw varieties thread.
Even if you could solve the transportation issue of it being a very easy to bruise fruit. Millions of dollars can’t solve the issue of it not being very shelf stable unless you want to go down the road of GMO. Thing literally turns to mush within a week or two of being tree ripe. Pick it not completely ripe and counter ripe it, half the people that like pawpaws get sick! Let it ripen too much, half the people that like pawpaws still get sick!
If you talk to the old timers on the pawpaw growers association, it’s not the absence of millions of dollars that’s preventing the problems from being solved. It’s that the existing millions of dollars that have been poured in have not shown any progress of solving these problems. If there was more definitive progress, there would be more money. At this point there is a growing realization that pawpaws are more than likely going to remain very niche.
Believe it or not, I actually find that there are more people that dislike pawpaws than like them…
There was a italian university I believe that poured over a million dollars into a single study just trying to figure out if there was a way to clonally propagate pawpaw rootstocks. There has been money spent. Quite a bit of it actually. There’s just not much to show for it at the moment in terms of tangible results.
Yeah but to make this analogy fair, we would have to have club pawpaws. Cosmic Crisp is basically a club/restricted use apple (I believe WA state has exclusivity till '27 and patent expires in '35). This would be crazy with pawpaws because even in an ideal world where you could solve storage, transportation problems inherent to pawpaws, there’s not enough of a market for them. KSU releasing a cultivar that can only be grown in KY for 15 years would be crazy. There is no orchard, farm, processing company, or growing association that is going to be willing to front the money for that exclusivity agreement. WA state can do that because they actually make the money back in sales.
I think we could at least agree that there are more people that find cherries, plums, peaches whatever stonefruit, grapes, and even tropical fruits like lychee, bananas, papaya, pineapple, mangos, passionfruit, etc all more palatable than pawpaws. If you can’t get club fruit going for those (because they are all still less popular than apples), then you definitely aren’t getting that type of funding for pawpaws.
I don’t really want to get in on the debate but I do think this is correct.
All the points about perishability and fragility are definitely key but like Peachy says, I think even if you solved those, the hard fact is pawpaw is a funky fruit that is far outside the normal palate of most Americans. I don’t think the demand would be there at a nationwide-grocery-store kind of level.
And saying that doesn’t diminish the amazingness of pawpaws (for those who realize it), nor should it discourage people from growing them at scale and marketing them. The latter is actually what we need in order to supply the niche demand that does exist.
You’re not wrong. I will say there are plenty of fruits and veggies out there processed into a form unlike what they start from fresh and are still popular.
Additionally, I have a feeling that pawpaws will become far more popular in other parts of the world than it’s native range.
But lots of people love durian and other funky fruits and pawpaws fall into that niche very well! I’m hopeful more people begin to include things like persimmon and pawpaw in their diet in America and it becomes more ‘normal’ for things with new textures to be consumed. Even if it is in beverage form, I see pawpaw popularity increasing a lot.
Iron City makes a Mango flavored beer. If pawpaw was a seasonal release by a major microbrewery like Sam Adam’s, I could see it catching on.
