@TrilobaTracker — I looked at digging one of those 4 up but there is a mass of hickory and muscadine roots and lots of rocks in there… I decided to just let them be… and they can fight it out with my muscadines… with some moderation from me… to make sure the pawpaws make it.
The location they are growing in is shaded most of the day by the edge of my woods (Oak, Hickory trees mostly) Once leaves are out on the trees… they are only getting 2-3 hours of evening sun.
The rest of the day indirect light only shade by large trees.
Will a paw paw grow and produce fruit in a location like that ?
If so… I might look into grafting some named varieties on them next spring.
I expect they might like morning sun better… but hey this is what luck gave them.
This is what is left of it after three root branches fractured off when I levered up the root ball that I trenched around. I have been soaking it in water since late Saturday’s mishap.
I grafted a Marshmallow pawpaw 2 summers ago. It returned last year and while it is growing, it is also quite stunted in the shade of a few (ancient) lilac bushes.
The tree is probably 20 inches tall with the graft comprising about 12 inches of that.
I planned to move it this spring (and I will wait until it pushes growth).
Given its age and size would you think that shading is still necessary?
Assuming the dark colored portion is the root or is it just dark because it’s wet?
If the dark section is all that remains of the roots it could be in for a mighty struggle.
That looks to me like a root sucker. They spring up along lateral roots, sometimes at some depth, but have no fine roots so they’re not really viable on their own. One trick that CAN work, given some time, is to partially sever the lateral root the suckers are arising from, which tends to cause the sucker to form its own fine roots.
Oooof. Sorry to see that. But I would plant it in a pot, keep it very moist and in the shade and hope. I don’t think having it in water will help. I’m not sure how much hope there is with that little root, but worth trying anyway.
I don’t think this is a sucker. I have some of those on my 8-foot-tall grown-from-seedling paw paws in the back yard, but this plant was on the other side of the house with a cement foundation in the front yard.
This is a grafted paw paw that I bought from a catalog and planted 20 years ago, not much bigger than what I planted. Or at least I think it is because I planted four and this appears to be the only one left. I believe that crook is the graft – I had purchased grafted paw paws.
The reason I think this is one of the paw paws is that it grew those big leaves characteristic of my other paw paws.
The dark portion is wet – I pulled it out of the soak to get a good picture of the whole plant.
As I said, I failed to dig this plant up properly. I am reporting my failure to share what can go wrong attempting to transplant a paw paw and why these are more difficult to work with than say, apple. The scientific literature has the problem that only successful experiments get accepted for publication, and knowing about how things go wrong is important, too.
Probably still too early to tell, but I dug up two suckers from an existing paw paw that was either a transplant itself for grown from seedling. I got a disappointingly small amount of root, but they are both leafing out and look healthy.
