Mango and Shenandoah fruits are large this year due to all the rain We got this year.
Tony
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I picked some green paw paws once with a friend of mine. He said to just set them in the window until they got ripe . They didn’t taste very good to me. I’m guessing tree ripe paw paws are better.
Your pawpaws look great. I only have about 7 from one young tree, but I am really excited. Last year I had 2 and I guess I picked them too early. The taste was sorta like banana but not very sweet. Good luck with yours!
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The best way to tell if your pawpaws are ready to harvest is to squeeze them lightly and they give a little and easy to pull them off from the branch.
Tony
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The ones I picked were off of really tall wild trees. We would take sticks and throw them high up into the tree and try to knock down fruit. I was really surprised to see photos here of people’s pawpaw trees and how different they looked from the wild ones I had seen. Some of those wild ones didn’t even have a limb you could reach.
Derby
The wild pawpaw tends to be tall and lenghthy. Home grown in full sun tends to be shorter but wider. My 8 years old Mango paw paw is about 11 feet tall and 8 feet wide.
Tony
Can’t wait until mine produce fruit but I’ve got a long wait ahead of me. Mine had a lot of early growth indoors but have slowed down outside. The good news is that most seem healthy and it doesn’t look like I’ll loose any this first summer. If I can overwinter them well, it will be one more summer on my deck before they get field planted. Then more waiting…
I have never tasted a pawpaw, but these make me drool just by looking at it 
Very good looking pawpaw, Tony!
Tom,
I think you are going to like them. Hopefully your trees will do well for you.
Tony
Thank Tony.
They’re a bit taller, about 16" from 6" at planting time this spring! It’s going to be a long wait for me but I hope that the wait worth as much as you have enjoyed them.
Tom
Some of the ones I planted under lights this winter have started to grow again. Here is the best one:
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I have a question for you experienced paw paw growers. I have a wild, transplanted pawpaw (from a patch that produced INCREDIBLE fruit!) that is about 3 years old now and looks almost exactly like the one in the photo above posted by @forestandfarm. But the big difference is mine is a lot taller…its actually almost 4 foot tall. But it is (just like the one shown above) just a single, long, somewhat thin stick. It has plenty of leaves and seems pretty healthy, but I’ve had to steak it because it was starting to bend a lot.
ANYWAY…here is my question. I am very tempted to pinch the top of it off in an attempt to make it branch out some so it will have some scaffolds, more fruiting sites, and be more bushy. But I would like to get input from some of you. 1) would pinching the top off probably cause it to send up 2 new tops the way many trees do when the are topped young? And/or would it probably cause the tree to send out some branches/scaffolds? 2) Is this even a good idea? ie, is there any reason to WANT my paw paw to just be one long, tall stick with no branches or am I right to want it to fork and/or send out new limbs? 3) Is there any danger to the tree or any other major disadvantages to clipping my tree about 1/8th of an inch from the top to encourage 2 new tops and/or other new branches?
Thanks
I’m not an experienced pawpaw grower. The tree in the picture was started from seed under lights and is young. I started over 50 of them this way and all seem to have that same characteristic. I presume this will change as the tree gets older and is planted in the field but I haven’t gotten that far yet so I don’t know for sure.
I plan to keep mine in containers for another season next year in the shade before planting them in the field.
Hopefully someone more experienced can help you with the pruning questions.
Some of them have that growth habit when they are young.A number of mine grew to about four feet before starting to branch. Brady
Here is my 20 plus suckers ftom a stooling bed. 2 yrs old and about 3 feet tall but have not branching out yet.
Tony
Tony,
Tell us more about stooling pawpaw. I’ve seen apple rootstock stooled in a container but not in open ground. Did you do anything to amend the soil to make removal and separation easy?
Jack
Our housing development was use to be a soybeans and corns field before it was turn into a Golf course so the soill was fertile and soft
3 years ago I just want to know if I can stool pawpaw. I had a 3 yrs old seedling and I cut the in late March one inch below the ground level and covered it with soft soil and watered to keep the soil moist. Around July. the pawpaw root system sent up 20 plus suckers. I digged up about 8 to use as rootstock. Gave a few to Antmary this Spring before they leafed out.
Tony
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Interesting. Do you think that is more efficient than starting them from seed?