Wow, I have never seen such a concentration of paw paw blooms on my 3 trees- do people ever thin this fruit? Clearly the trees will be overloaded this year- there were flies tending to the blossoms yesterday. The funny thing is that they also bore a good crop last year, so it has nothing to do with taking a year off. Maybe the 20 year old trees (I’m guessing) have simply only just reached full maturity. I should take a picture so someone with experience with older trees can tell me if this is unusual. Seriously, does anyone thin paw-paws?
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I’ve never thinned them before, but you are right… My pawpaws have about double the flowers as the last few years.
One of mine has over 100 blooms on it (and the tree is probably only about 12-15 feet tall, stem diameter 3 inches.
Scott
My pawpaws have thinned themselves pretty well, I get big bloom but maybe 10% set on it. I still end up with more than I can eat. Fortunately I found out my neighbors really like them, I brought some to a neighborhood picnic and they were a big hit.
Yup, more like forage food for me, eat 3 or 4 each season but have a couple of friends that are ga-ga for them.
Not going to do it on my 4 yr old PA Golden. It’s got one flower.
Sometimes I got many multiple clusters of 5 or 6 fruits, I thinned them down to 2 to 3 fruits to size them up.
Tony
I wish I could. Looked tonight and my 10 year old only has a hand full growing. I had loads of blooms, but as of today very few actual fruit.
They are sneaky, last year I didn’t think there was much fruit set, but bearing in clusters and difficult to see, there turned out to be a pretty full crop- lots more than I could eat.
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Alan, you got that right! I must of stood under those trees for 20 minutes just trying to find those little banana like pods. This year I grafted several varieties to hope for future pollination/Fertiization, I’m not sure what it is called with pawpaws.
I know they are at least partially self-fertile- I’ve seen isolated trees produce fruit. I have 3 varieties growing together.
Jerry Lehman recommends planting 2 pawpaws right in the same hole for maximum pollination. He says he gets much more fruit set that way, which is kind of surprising when you consider that he already has rows of them 5 feet apart. Grafting should have the same effect, though.
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Thats interesting. It could be that ants are doing a lot of the pollination and they travel shorter distances. Now that I think of it my tree with the most set is the one which has two different varieties on it.
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It may be the case with all fruit species that crop unreliably, bees or no. I think Euro plums may bear more reliably when a compatible variety is almost touching.
Just when out to check on the pawpaws and lot of clusters. Here is one with 8 fruits from the Susquehanna tree.
Tony
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I was quite surprised to see 2 flowers on my 2nd leaf NC-1 as its only ~2’ tall. I picked them off. Hopefully I’ll get some decent growth on it this year.
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I wish I had a mature tree. I just planted 28 seedlings that were from seed last year. It looks like two are struggling, but the rest are growing good. I have two more in the garage begging to be outside. I’ll use them as replacements. It’s a chore planting that many when you have to clear the area for them to grow. Some have been in full sun so far and doing well. I’ve only protected half so far. I used tomato cages with south west cover. I got lucky at work building condos. On trash day someone threw 25 tomato cages out.
I never paid too much attention to my paw paws and didn’t do anything for them- that they do good in partial shade just inspired me to give them space not so good for other species. My first ones were seedlings from Gurney’s- lots of seed not much pulp, but interesting. Then about 20 years ago I planted Overlease and Sunflower. They took a long time- probably 7 years to be big enough to really crop- but I didn’t do much to make them more vigorous
They are so much better than my seedlings were, but still not important fruit to me. I am planning on trying to get them going in my nursery though- stick them in in-ground bags for a few years and do little for them. Once they are bearing age they will be worth quite a bit of money around here. I will start with seedlings and graft them over.
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I was thinking about grafting mine over. Maybe next year when they are bigger. Is paw paw scion wood hard to get?
Cliff England sells it and there are lots of people to swap with here… it shoudn’t be a problem 
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I wouldn’t say it is hard to get. Just not as abundant as other woods. I am a member of a pawpaw organization and that helps me get wood as well as members on this forum. I have at least 25 pawpaw trees that are not part of my orchard as I keep them next to the woods in a shaded wet area. I’ve started grafting to them this year to increase my varieties in hopes of increasing production.
So far many of my grafts have taken this year. I hope to be able to share different varieties of wood with others in the future.
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