For every one pawpaw tree I get to live two years, I lose two to three that die during winters and fail to leaf out the next year. Any ideas why they die during the winter in zone 7 despite wide, deep pine straw mulch? Are they cold sensitive before getting established?
Have tried both grafted and seedlings, really no survival difference for me. Also tried bare root vs potted, think I lost every bare root pawpaw I bought. Now am trying planting my own seed. I have five survivors ages three to eight out of at least 20 purchased. And yes I build nice burlap overhead shade structures for first two years.
Hope springs eternal! Thanks in advance for any ideas.
I had great luck planting seeds in the woods/fencerow around my place. I simply planted the seeds from my wild ones a couple inches in the ground after eating the fruit in the fall. Now, they are probably 10 ft tall and look very healthy. I now need to remove some of the plants that shaded them and get them some more sun. I thought my potted domestic paw paws died last year after a bad drought, but it now appears that 2 of them have made it. I’m in 6b and our last two winters have been pretty severe, so I can’t explain why yours have died out.
I wonder if it could be moisture related? Here in zone six sw Missouri we have pawpaws growing wild in the creek bottoms as understory trees. I have seen many bloomed out as I walked the banks fishing in early spring. You just don’t see any up on the hills, even just up from the creek bottom. Their seeds would be dispersed by coons and possums like persimmons so they would have opportunity to grow away from creek. We get a lot of rain here but It drys out in late summer. where I see wild pawpaws grow there is constant year around ground moisture. Just a thought.
You are scaring me…I started a bunch of pawpaws from seed this past winter under lights. They are now on my lower deck. They get a couple hours of direct sun early in the morning followed by sun filtered by the upper deck for a couple hours followed by afternoon shade. They are doing well so far in Rootbuilder II one gallon containers with Promix Bx and pine bark nuggets mixed as a media. I know they are photo sensitive when young. I put two of them in a spot that gets full morning sun followed by afternoon shade and the leaves turned brown in just a few days. I’ve returned them to the lower deck and hope those two recover. I wanted to test to see how much they could handle.
Mine have not been through a winter yet. I’m in zone 7A, so I hope I don’t have issues over wintering them.
Water them weekly the first year. Keep em out of direct sun until they’re 3 years old. Some of them should survive in 7a if you let them drop that 2-foot deep taproot (don’t let it hook into a “J”). I cannot emphasize enough how fragile the roots are.
That is why I’m using those rootmakers. The tap roots are air pruned on mine. They will spend this summer in the 1 gal containers and next in 3 gal containers. I’ll be planting them in the field from there.
I dig 2 feet deep and amend the backfill with perlite, peat & vermiculite. I know some other folks advise against this, but I have had 30% success rate using this method, which is adequate for my purposes.
For whatever it’s worth, a friend of mine found and showed me a huge grove of pawpaws growing in a park near hear (Piedmont, NC) near the top of a long small hill. I’d say there were probably 3 acres covered with little immature pawpaw trees and interspersed with 100+ bearing age trees. Being a park there hadn’t been any active forestry, so the canopy was mature oaks and red maples, some of which were dying out and falling over, opening up some big holes in the canopy.
I’m still trying to figure out the best way to plant my containerized trees in general. I’ve tried a few methods. I have heavy clay soil. I haven’t planted any pawpaw yet, but here is where I am with other trees so far. There seem to be two problems with planting containerized trees in my clay, too much water in the first spring and not enough in the first summer. My trees are in the field where I can’t provide supplemental water.
What happens is that water infiltrates amended soil much faster than clay. So, when you amend the soil, it is like creating a pond. When we get heavy spring rain, the pond fills up and sits long enough to drown the roots. Then in the summer, when we don’t get rain for longer periods the amended soil dries out much faster than the clay and the tree is starved of water.
Here is what I’ve worked out so far with my trees grown in rootmakers. First, I select a site that is not in a dip and preferably on a slight rise. I use a tractor auger close to the diameter of the container but drill the hole about twice as deep as the container. I amend the soil below the root ball and fill so the top of the container mix would be a bit above the soil line to allow for settling. I unwrap the Rootmaker container so the rootball and mix are completely intact and undisturbed. I plant the root ball and fill around the sides with native clay soil.
This seems to be working fairly well. Here is my theory why. When we get the spring rains, the excess water ponds below the root ball in the amended soil but does not affect the tree. Planting on a slight rise rather than a dip reduces the amount of water that makes it into the hole in the first place. Because the hole is only slightly larger than the container, all of the lateral roots don’t have to grow much to make it into the native clay soil. When summer rolls around, there is enough roots in the clay to extract the needed water…
I don’t know if this will work well with pawpaw, but is has worked with chestnut pretty well.
I don’t disagree that in many places they can grow on hills. Here the hills are very rocky, which allows them to dry quickly. The bottoms are deep rich soil so it could also be the fertility of the soil. The trees here on the hills are mostly oaks and in the bottoms they are sycamore, ash, and hackberry.
I have a friend that plants trees including paw paws in these. tree tubes
on the down side of these, he has apples in tubes that are 6’ to protect from deer, but the trunks are weak from not dealing with wind. But if you did a 3’ or 4’ that shouldn’t be an issue
A number of years ago, there was a property in the outer suburbs of DC that had a facility that owned about 1,000 acres. The head of the facility was an anti-hunter, so they rejected continual insistence from the state game commission that the needed to do something about the over population of deer. Eventually they sold the property to a developer. The developer was worried about the cost of deer damage to landscaping so he brought in our bowhunting group to get a handle on the deer population.
The browse line was about 6’+. You could see for hundreds of yards through the hardwoods with essentially no understory because deer had eaten everything green…except for pawpaw. Anytime you saw anything green under 6’ and walked over to it, you could be sure it was a pawpaw. The minute one had fruit, the deer would eat the fruit, but there was zero browsing on the foliage.
Given that experience, I don’t think that pawpaws are a good candidate for tree tubes. If you have an issue with deer eating fruit, fencing may be a better option.
Your info on deer not eating the foliage is interesting. However, the point of the tubes on Paw Paws is to filter some of the sunlight while the trees are young and sensitive.
Based on my experience so far, a normal tree tube would not filter enough light unless they were planted in shade as well. I was amazed at how sensitive they are. I’ll try to get some pictures posted later.
Are the tubes specialized in some way? That is what I was trying to get at. The tubes I’ve used would not filter enough light if they were placed in direct sun when young. Is he tubing older trees or is he tubing and planting in shade? I’m not disputing what he is doing, just trying to understand it better and reconcile it with my limited experience.
I don’t know anything technical about the tubes. He was using them when I met him. His are light blue in color and no vents other then the tie and closure holes. His paw paws get no other shade. The tubes would block UV, but I don’t know if UV is the killer.