Because the flowers are pollinated by beetles that have somewhat limited mobility and by flies (not sure what species) that are attracted to the light carrion scent of the flowers, having trees 30’ apart with mowed lawns and asphalt between and around them does not provide much habitat for the natural pollinators. They aren’t like honeybees that will fly 5 miles to a patch of flowers. Some folks recommend putting fresh manure, roadkill, meat scraps, chicken remains, etc., near the trees. Household members or the neighbors might object.
I would suggest having trees ~ about 12ft. Apart to give them room to develop to a full mature size.
And up to / within 30ft. Apart for pollination.
More or less
Other spacings will work.
I just listened to a podcast where @RNeal discussed his orchard spacing for selecting cultivars at 3 foot spacing. However, he did qualify that spacing by saying it was suitable for getting the fruit to production size, not to continue harvesting from mature trees. When you have around a thousand trees and only an acre or two to work with, you go with the spacing you are able to!
1 Like
I think this makes total sense though. The objective is breeding in this scenario; you’re trying to maximize the number of seedlings in a given area, observe the largest possible number of potential candidates. Improving fruit size can be tweak with soil, thinning, fertilizer, etc… You can’t improve the genetics of an existing cultivar. It’s almost like nursery planting 1-2 feet distance. The are expected to be dug up for sale. They aren’t permanent plantings. If you’re going for production, you’re obviously not in the same boat.
I absolutely agree. Different strategies for different purposes. I feel like the ideal planting distance varies greatly based on how a tree is used, especially for training pawpaws. Unlike other fruits like apples, no dwarf rootstock exists so it comes down to how the tree is pruned more so than apples etc.
I think a dwarf rootstock could exist. They have to first figure out a way to reliably clonally propagate pawpaws. Until that happens, any rootstock program is basically a no go.
This kind of mirrors the peach industry with one major exception (besides the fact that stone fruits get plenty of research funding). UCDavis only recently released dwarfing 100% prunus persica rootstock, but tissue culturing peaches was never as hard as it has been for pawpaws.
Similarly to a discussion recently about cloning apples, it’s entirely possible a pawpaw is out there that can be propagated easily via root suckers like M111 which might be a dwarfing rootstock. Hard to say, and I imagine we are a long way away from that. The one way I can think of to reliably do this with current availability would be grafting onto a smaller Florida based Asimina sp. but you risk cold hardiness.
Maybe. You’d still have to find the right one of the Florida/Texas/souther Asimina sp. … and even if you did, since the species aren’t self-pollinating like you can with P. persica, you still might end up losing that trait in the seedlings.
They need to figure out how to either tissue culture or stool bed pawpaws for this to be a viable option. Since stool bed is a no go (unless I’m missing something recently), tissue culturing still seems to be the most viable to address this, but again, no one has figured out how to do this with high degree of success. I remember reading a research paper that some Italy university was experimenting with tissue culturing A. triloba , but the process had to be rigidly followed and had a very large margin of error/failure. Still they had the best success ever recorded thus far according to KSU. (I don’t remember the title of that paper, but KSU folks could point you there if you are looking for it.) I do remember that it was not a commercially viable process, simply more labor, resource (chemicals), and time intensive than just the regular tissue culture process.
If it was easy, someone would have surely figured it out by now… 