Greetings Blueberry. I have two questions. Is this Asimina triloba tree that you speak of a graft or a seedling? Would you be willing to allow me to purchase this tree from you so that I may plant it in deep alluvial soil by the river and allow it to grow as a natural, multi-trunked, suckering colony? I shall compensate you handsomely. Please send me a personal message if the answer is yes. Thanks.
The scalloped potatoes have cooled. Please dig in. Your opinion is highly valued.
I am from Georgia and have many relatives there! Would you be so kind as to share which county it is that you are growing your pawpaw cultivars?
My family has lived in Gwinnett County for many generations, and thatās where my pawpaws are growing. Where in Georgia are you growing your trees (assuming you are still there)?
And since you planted over 30 grafted cultivars that are all growing well after a number of years, would you please share which nurseries you ordered them from?
Upon reflection, I guess I canāt fairly say that all of my pawpaws are growing āwell,ā since I donāt have a basis for comparison, but I can say that none have died. Some definitely look better than others, and they are all slow-growing compared to my other trees. I do want to point out again that this region is probably good pawpaw country, as the woods visible in the pics below are full of wild ones, beginning almost immediately inside the woods line. I donāt know if that is true for everywhere in Georgia, but it certainly seems to be so here.
Above is one of the KSU Chappells, pretty representative of the median (maybe a little bigger). They are all upright growers and healthy-looking.
Above is a Shenandoah. This cultivar doesnāt seem to grow very vigorously here ā they are all about this size, around the bottom quartile of the size distribution, with Mango and NC-1 at the very left end of the curve, having barely put on any growth in several years.
As to the nurseries ā I ordered the majority of my pawpaws from OneGreenWorld, including the ones pictured above. Some were 1-gallon trees, but many were just 5.5-inch pots (including the Chappells, if I recall correctly). I ordered a couple pawpaws (Allegheny) from Ty Ty, and a few more from Burnt Ridge. I may have gotten some other individual trees from other nurseries, but OGW was where most of them came from.
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I checked today, this tree is in a pot about 1.5 gallon, not growing through the bottom of the pot, and is alive. Forked, one limb about 30 inches, one shoot/sucker about half that.
First, it is a seedling I bought, (and previously sold some of itās siblings as āedible landscapingā plants), and from whom I acquired it Iām not 100% sure after two decadesā¦possibly Savage Farm Nursery in TN or Lawyer in MT.
Second, Iād sell it to a good home.
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Thanks Blueberry for your kind response. I shall provide this tree a great home. It may even think it has died and gone to Pawpaw Heaven. 
How do we proceed?
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Iāll let you send me a private message, then.
Iām not looking for profit, just cover expenses.
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Some of you have been asking about Lehman pawpaw varieties. Like all pawpaw varieties, they have their pros and cons. I have fruited a few of them and they are superior varieties but not necessary better than all others. Bennyās Favorite I found to be good but not amazing. The fruits are not very big, the seed weight seemed high and the flavor and texture was good but not amazing.
Mariaās Joy is heavy producing.
I paid Jerry Lehman to ship me some of his fruits a long time ago, and they were all labeled. I used this info for the Pawpaws book. They were large and good but again not as good as others Iāve had in terms of texture and flavor profile.
I think Lehman varieties have a few similar advantages in that he was breeding for very large fruits and heavy production. So most Lehman types seem to really pump out the fruit production. They have won multiple awards at the Ohio pawpaw festival. Texture and flavor is usually very good as that was part of the criteria as well. Granted, I have not tried them all, and taste and preference is objective and based on opinion.
However, Iāve also noted some of his varieties seem very prone to Phylosticta, especially VE-21 which seems very susceptible.
In my opinion they have a lot of potential and are better than most of what is out there, especially in terms of size of fruits, namely on a few of the cultivars, such as āJerryās Big Girlā. They will be used for future breeding efforts for sure.
Anyone got photos of Lehman varieties youāve fruited?
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You are probably aware that the āMangoā cultivar that you are growing is a Georgia native. Most records indicate it as originating at the University of Geogia in Tifton. The original mother tree was discovered in the area of the Okefenokee wetlands. It is a water baby. Very vigorous grower, surpassed only by Chappell.
I donāt know what is wrong with my Mango. If I had to guess, Iād probably blame it on bad rootstock. It is right next to other pawpaws that are growing better. I might eventually dig it up and replace it with another Mango, but Iām hoping that maybe it has just been spending all its energy on sending down a big taproot and will suddenly take off one season (doubtful, though).
May I humbly suggest a thick layer of mulch, a fertilization program and regular watering? Your trees appear to be growing in dry soil.
I am very happy to receive any of your suggestions. I have no doubt that 95% of the posters in this thread have forgotten more about pawpaws than I have yet learned, and my successes (to wit, not killing any of my pawpaws and having the luck that they have so far survived) cannot be attributed to anything but serendipity. Also, Iām sure that I am still years away from getting my first pawpaw fruit, so I need my luck to continue to hold out before I reach a real milestone. Here is what I am doing now:
Mulch. I mulch all my trees quite heavily twice a year (whenever I can visit). I use shredded oak bark that I can get by the truckload. It degrades very fast ā much faster than pine bark, but my thinking is that it will replenish nutrients better and more closely mimic the forest duff that the wild ones seem to do so well in (the woods here are, after all, largely oak). I do wonder if I am robbing the rich soil of the nitrogen that breaks down the mulch, and that it could actually be slowing growth as a result. For this winter, I had planned to lay down cardboard before mulching, both to stop the weeds and hopefully to isolate the mulch so it doesnāt rob N from the soil, but in light of this thread, I am now hesitating because maybe I should not change what has been working so far.
Fertilizer. I fertilize all my trees very lightly with urea in the spring (which probably just accelerates the rapid breakdown of my mulch), but I am not there enough to do a regular program, and my feeling is that a person of my low experience level is apt to do more harm than good with fertilizer, especially in a place where the soil is so naturally fertile. My family members, sadly, are not very interested in my fruit trees beyond picking and eating any ripe fruit that should magically appear, so I cannot rely on them for maintenance and have to handle things like fertilizer and mulching whenever I get back for a visit. Thatās why my trees were selected for what I hoped to be super low-maintenance types (pawpaws, jujubes, scab-resistant pecans, mulberries, persimmons, blight-resistant pears, etc. ā no peaches, apples, or any of the other really good stuff that I estimated would require both spraying and skillful care).
Soil / watering. The soil does look dry in the pic, but if you were to dig your fingers an inch or so down, it would be damp, as there are a lot of small rainstorms or drizzles, usually several per week, and there is a lot of organic material in the soil. The last few years have probably been even wetter than average, which is good, as the trees arenāt going to be watered except for rain (they are much too far away from any water spigot, and nobody but me will water them, anyway). My hope is that theyāve gotten their taproots down far enough by now to reach perpetually moist soil. In general, I think that all of my fruit trees are much more threatened by too much humidity, including disease and waterlogging, than by too little. I think it would take a very long time without any rain to really dry out the soil.
I donāt know much about soil, but the soil near the woods seems very good. It is black, well-draining soil for several feet down before turning into red clay. It might be worth noting that the woods has many creeks / streams, several of which appear to originate nearby (I donāt know if that is geologically significant).
Despite the pics, the soil around my trees is normally covered with a (gradually-decreasing) layer of mulch. The last of the degraded mulch was probably only recently washed away (itās hard to see in the pic, but these trees are on a slope), which you can tell from the fact that there is no grass (bare sunlit soil does not remain bare for long in Georgia, and I use no herbicides).
I am hesitant to offer advice due to the fact that you have had much greater success than I with trees from TyTy nursery Ga., and One Green World Oregon. It appears the Pawpaw Gods truly Favor you, Marten.
Again, I am happy to get any advice from you or anyone else. If I happened to communicate in any way that I consider myself an authority on pawpaw cultivation, it was unintentional. I havenāt even produced a single fruit yet, and I knew next to nothing about pawpaws only a few years ago. However, it is challenging for me to implement most advice, since I cannot do regular maintenance.
I do admit that I entertain an idle fantasy about a day, many years in the future, when I will have widely-spaced, tall, majestic, thick-trunked pawpaw trees, the like of which nobody has seen, growing happily in their ancient homeland, producing delicious fruit with no maintenance, and improving the local stock with grafting and cross-pollination until my familyās little corner of Georgia becomes a genetic refugium for pawpaws. If that day ever comes, then yes, I might strut a little. Realistically, I am no breeder or arborist, I know that I will be lucky to make it to the point where I am even reliably getting fruit from a few trees, and Iām sure I will eventually take heavy losses. For instance, even though there seems to be every kind of bug here, Iāve not seen any evidence of ambrosia beetles, and perhaps they will make their appearance and ravage some of my pawpaws in my absence. But now you have me thinking that I will show up one visit to find that all my pawpaws have died.
As to nurseries: I stopped ordering from Ty Ty after I bought two large supposed Morus nigra trees (which I ought not even be trying to grow, I know) and they turned out to be Alba seedlings. To be fair, though, the other trees that I got from them (some pecans and a Revival chestnut) were healthy and seem to be growing well (hopefully they were not also wrongly labeled).
OneGreenWorld is quite expensive, especially with air shipping, and the trees they send are tiny. But I, personally, have had my highest success rate with their plants. Iām pretty sure that almost everything that Iāve ordered from them (not just pawpaws, but many other trees) is still alive, and Iāve not seen any evidence so far of mislabeling.
Some questions for you, if you donāt mind:
Are my pawpaws are too widely spaced to ever get pollinated? I donāt have them in uniform rows because I wanted an organic, natural look, but they are planted in groups of about 5 to 10 trees with roughly 10ā between trees (sometimes more), and the groups are isolated from one another. Hand-pollination is not a workable option for me. Although there is no shortage of flies and beetles, I will note that the wild pawpaws in the woods are often flowering, and yet I have never seen a fruit (at least not since I started looking in the last few years). On one hand, I donāt actually need a lot of fruit ā a few per tree would be more than enough, and I want the trees to look nice and not too crowded when (if) they mature. On the other hand, I would like an excuse to plant more trees.
If I do plant more trees, what would you recommend? I have a disproportionate number of Shenandoahs and Susquehannas because my early research led me to believe that they were the ābestā cultivars ā Shenandoah for newbies and Susquehanna for true pawpaw connoisseurs. Now I am learning that the Lehman varieties may be the ones to beat, and I only have one (Mariaās Joy), which I stashed in a marginal location (a little too much shade). Alternatively, given that my goals are to eventually have healthy, long-lived, low-maintenance trees that are beautiful in their own right, with just āgoodā fruit being sufficient, should I plant seedlings of known parentage and avoid grafted trees entirely (as is recommended with chestnuts)?
Finally, speaking of the Pawpaw Gods, they frowned on my attempt to grow pawpaws from seed. I bought a big bag of seeds from Red Fern Farms that were supposed to be Shenandoah x Susquehanna. I stratified them myself by packing them in moist peat moss, putting them in several layers of sealed ziplock bags, and storing them in the refrigerator through the winter. They seemed fine when I opened the bag, not dried-out and with no mold. My plan was to plant the seedlings throughout the woods near the existing wild pawpaws. I put some into cups and planted the rest directly in the woods in the spring. However, I must have done something wrong, because not a single seed germinated.
Maybe squirrels and other varmints stole your seeds?
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Could be, but the ones in cups were all duds, too.
Will squirrels eat pawpaw seeds?
I have found that sometimes you gotta give those seeds a second winter, and some of them will come upā¦ 5 o r 10 percent perhaps.
Seeds too dry before or during stratification and the odds go way down of germination.
Iāve had over 50% for sure germinate from any and all pawpaws.
Sometimes itās 80 or 90% and one year later 5% more decide to come up.
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KSU did a trial on the influence of rootstock in 2004. They just talked about again a couple weeks ago: Third Thursday Thing: Pawpaws - YouTube
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One of the major challenges with developing root stock for pawpaws is that pawpaws cannot currently be cloned or divided easily. Yes, yes, people are attempting.
As an example, apple rootstock (say M111) is cloned via mass stooling (vegetative reproduction) in field, effectively creating mass amounts of identical rootstocks easily, which provide near identical, replicable and predictable results once grafted and planted out. With pawpaws this is not currently possible, and so at best we can start seeds for rootstock. This works well however the seedlings will inevitably have some differences as they are genetically unique and not clones. So any 'rootstock studies" being done will have little practical benefit. Even if someone was to conclude 'Sunflower" seedlings produced vigorous rootstock, fine and good. But, the performance of āSunflowerā seedlings, for instance, may be effected by what āSunflowerā is being pollinated with in the orchard that provided the seed, as that will effect the final genetics present in the seed. Also, the availability of cultivar-specific seed is in extremely short supply.
If anyone is thinking about digging suckers (another method of vegetative reproduction) and using those for rootstock, this might work but is very impractical especially on scale and will likely produce inferior specimens and have high losses.
I have grown from seed thousands of pawpaws (did over 2000 this spring), and grafted nearly as many and I see no difference in the performance of the seedlings I use for rootstock, besides there always being a few duds that do not grow vigorously (maybe 5%-10% overall). I am currently getting pencil thick caliper, 3-4ā tall pawpaw rootstocks in 18 months from seed, grown organically. Once grafted these grow with incredible vigor within a few months, and once planted out have performed extremely well in a variety of locations.
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My Mango pawpaws were on the tree this morning.
This afternoon, they were on the ground.
It is too bad that the animals did not finish just one or two. They had to eat them all. #%$@ā !!
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Very kind of them!!!
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