For cheap real estate? Try southern WEST VIRGINIA maybe. You could probably even buy an abandoned mall for $50,000 dollars. Once coal mines closed, most other things closed too.
I second your idea to leave the seedlings ungrafted. My best tasting pawpaw is a seedling from good parents sold to me by Edible Landscaping. You might have the next greatest pawpaw discovery right there in your seedlings. This is exactly the kind of experimentation and grow-out we need more of. Well done.
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Hambone is right, I would take the best ones and pot them up. Just start potting up everything you want at the new house and let it hang out till the time arrives. Instant orchard.
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So I started some pawpaw seeds in a plastic coffee container in my window and they are now putting out their tap root… I’m not going to be able to plant them until next spring at the earliest and I don’t have room for a set up outside of tree pots, so they would need to stay inside…
Has anyone grown them in 2L soda bottles with the bottom drilled out and top cut off? I don’t want to buy a big pack of tree pots when I only need a few. Unless anyone else has suggestions on random at home items that work well for the long tap root.
The late John H. Gordon opined, back in the 1990s, that if he were 30 years younger, he would select the largest-leaved seedlings of superior named-variety pawpaws for outplanting, rather than planting out grafted specimens.
Two things… I - and others - have experienced a fairly high incidence of delayed graft failure in outplanted pawpaws… leaving one with just the seedling rootstock; and… seedling pawpaws often seem to have fruit quality similar to that of the ‘mother’ tree… certainly if the seed is of named cultivars, pollenized by other improved selections, there’s a good likelihood that those resulting seedlings will have good to excellent fruit quality.
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That’s the way I usually do it,if there are no large treepots available.
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