I wonder what constitutes great genetics.
Is it worth growing out seedlings from fruit such as Shenandoah, Susquehanna, Allegheny, Halvin, Danaes Creekside etc? The male parent is also one of the above. Are these great genetics?
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I’m not sure what others consider to be great, but that sounds pretty good to me. I believe the parents for the varieties offered from Red Fern Farm (Betria, Canopus, Rigel, etc.) were from Shenandoah/Susquehanna crosses. I may be wrong, but I think he grew a bunch out and has selected some of the best to offer for scion wood.
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I would classify those as great genetics. Red Fern Farm used only Shenandoah and Susquehanna for almost all of Tom’s introductions.
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It’s a matter of opinion. If I found two people, one who liked golden delicious and another who liked honeycrisp apples, the selections either made for breeding parents are going to be different. This obviously results in different progeny. Does that make one set superior to the other? No, definitely not.
I often get seeds collected from Lehman’s farm. Are those average? Are Cliff’s? What about Marc’s? Ron’s? Or a orchard of Halvin’s selection of pawpaw (which are all wild btw)? People get too tied up in the genetics. It’s a grab bag. There’s a grove of 30 seedlings grown out from Peterson pawpaws near me at a friends, of these 30, I find interesting traits in over 50% of them, flesh color, color break, tree form, etc… I find over 50% of them to be of good taste. I find 10% of these to be equal or better than the parents.
People often forget that genetics is still a grab bag. In most cases, you will not get something better than an existing cultivar. In fact, odds are you won’t. Peterson had thousands of plantings and yet only selected less than 10 to release.
Pawpaws aren’t anything special other than the fact that the community is small, it’s a highly polarized fruit (you either like it or you don’t). This along with the challenges to make it commercially available means that cultivar development has been relatively slow relative to other fruits. The first person to release a cultivar of said flavor kind of wins. With apples for example, it’s exceedingly hard to release new cultivars, because there’s too much been there done that, even though everyone’s favorite apple preferences differ.
Imagine the situation with apples, though. If one were to grow out 1000 Honeycrisp seedlings, how many would be considered at minimum equal to the parent or even better than? Not that many. That’s kind of the game with genetics. Pawpaw’s aren’t different in that way. Superior genetics is still genetics. It’s a grab bag.
Pawpaw breeding is also exceeding slow because the maturation time to go from fruit to seed (assuming you want to see tree form), is like 8 years minimum. This is as slow as the cycle for most nut breeding programs.
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Thanks for the commentary Peachy. I stand by my post that the honorable Blake Cothron’s Ultra select seeds are Superior, selected from the finest genetics. Likewise, I hold that seeds from Peterson’s 7 releases are Superior, selected from the finest genetics.
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I don’t want to start this into the battle of the nurseries, but if you were to ask people at the pawpaw growers association or other experts like Kirk, Sherri, Ron, Neal, Cliff, Marc, they’d all tell you, it’s just a marketing term - superior, ultra select, ultra superior, superior superior, ultra ultra, first-grade, first-class. Given that seed from my own orchard has ended up sold by Blake, I know first hand. It’s not a commentary. Blake has good seed. So does everyone else with a non-wild orchard.
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Thanks, Peachy. After perusing your personal orchard grow list of select superior cultivars, I deem the seeds you sent to Blake to be select seeds of superior pawpaw genetics; of which the honorable Blake Cothron purveys nothing but.
My list is really really outdated lol. Pawpaw tastes differ. There are plenty of pawpaws I have no care for that others do: NC-1, Prima, Cawood, a bunch of unnamed seedlings, etc… Dax would probably say these are aces, while mamuang would probably disagree.
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I have 5 Cawood grafts growing that have yet to bear fruit, you mention you do not particularly care for this variety. Please say more about this old cultivar. I have scant data other than it having rated as high in KYSU taste tests as Queen Susquehanna.
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If you like NC-1 or Prima, you’ll probably like Cawood.
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Thanks, Peachy. You have once again been most helpful. It is nice that you share on this fine and fruitful forum.
I first sampled Cawood a couple of years back, and I did process some recently. However, when you’re plowing through about pawpaw by the pound, after 50 odd pounds, everything really does start to taste the same. I will say that the brewery that I gave a bunch of pawpaw too found it to be quite strongly flavored and they seemed to like the strong stuff for their sour pawpaw beer.
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Excellent news. I have high hopes for this ‘Cawood’ cultivar here at the Fiefdom. Perhaps a Pirates brew! Wabash Cannonball and Captain Cawood the cutthroat! 
Oh well, I gots plenty of time to work on it before I get some fruits.
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I’m not really into sours, so I’m not the best judge. @TJ_westPA or @Vid may have had pawpaw beer. Not sure.
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I tried a few different pawpaw beers at the Ohio festival back in 2016. Devil’s Kettle Brewing made a really interesting beer called Devil’s Paw. Not sure if they make it anymore. It was a Brettanomyces fermented blonde ale with pawpaw pulp. Lots of funky and fruity flavors to it that tasted very odd to me at first, but it grew on me the more I tasted it and I ended up really liking it due to it’s unique complexity and actually being able to taste the pawpaw in it.
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I’ve had this local one (for me). It was pretty darn good, likely from wild fruit. It’s been a couple of years.
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Of the few pawpaw breweries I chatted with, they all told me they get wild pawpaw pulp. I might ask for a bottle of the brew my fruit was dumped into. Not sure cultivars makes that much difference in sours with that much fermentation going on.
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You can try some pawpaw wine from this spot (they ship).
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Our Pawpaw wine is cloudy because the fruit has more protein that other fruits and if we “fine” the wine to make it clear we lose much of the delicious flavor. So we go for leaving in all the flavor - and we think you will really appreciate it.
This suddenly sounds a whole lot less appealing to me.
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Thank you, TJ. A Brettanomyces fermented blonde ale with funky and fruity flavors, with beaucoup Pawpaw pulp! Superbulous! Devil’s Kettle Brewing you say 
Sounds witchy! Maybe even owned and operated by a gaggle of Pirates wenches! Just my kinda brewery for sure I shall now google it and venture into the Witches Den! Thanks again for the Pawpaw Intell TJ. You are a true asset to the forum, same as Peachy. 
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