The pawpaw patch

 A few Octobers ago, my next-door neighbor asked one morning whether I’d heard cats fighting in the backyard the night before. He’d been kept awake by animals screaming near the fence that divides our properties. I went to check out the area and found broken branches in a pawpaw tree. My theory is that raccoons were fighting over the ripe pawpaw fruit.

Pawpaws--raccoons love them

    Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is America’s largest native fruit. I highly recommend this tree for its decorative appearance as well as its fruit! I planted a young sapling about ten years ago. By sending out root suckers, it’s grown into a patch about 12 feet wide and tall. The tree’s large leaves give it a tropical look.

Pawpaw trees add zing to the landscape with their large leaves

    Until the “fighting cats” episode, I didn’t realize the tree was bearing fruit. That day I noticed some yellow fruits that had fallen to the ground. Looking up, I saw clusters of green ones on the branches. 

    Pawpaw fruits look a bit like mangoes. Mine don’t get more than four inches long. The smooth skin covers yellow custard-like flesh surrounding up to a dozen large seeds shaped like lima beans. 

Pawpaw seeds

The fruit’s delectable taste is somewhere between banana and mango. 

 

Pawpaw fruit is a seasonal treat

     Birds, opossums, and raccoons enjoy pawpaw fruit, and they’re great at sensing when it’s ripe. That means I have to be on my toes to share in the harvest. During last year’s drought I got none. I suspect that thirsty animals grabbed the pawpaws as soon as they were edible. This year I’ve snagged a few ripe ones from the ground under the tree.

Ripe pawpaws

    Most people in the Northeast haven’t encountered pawpaws except in that old song, “Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch.” The reason for the lyric “Picking up pawpaws, puttin’ ‘em in your pocket” is that the fruit isn’t ready to eat until it falls to the ground. Eaten too soon, it has a mouth-puckering taste like under-ripe kiwi fruit. 

     We don’t find pawpaws at Whole Foods yet because the ripe fruit doesn’t last long enough to ship to market. Kentucky State University’s Cooperative Extension Program is working on this; they’ve made pawpaw research their specialty. Their nutritional analysis puts pawpaws’ antioxidant content equal to cranberries’.

    Pawpaw is a tree of the continental interior. It likes humid summers and dislikes coastal breezes. Native Americans are credited with having spread pawpaws from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Washington and Jefferson enjoyed the fruit, and it nourished the Lewis and Clark expedition when they ran out of food.
 

"Hungry? Try the pawpaws over there."

    The National Park Service reports that pawpaws are the most common saplings in their forest monitoring plots around Washington D.C. This is partly because deer don’t like pawpaw leaves, which contain nasty-tasting insecticidal chemicals called acetogenins. When other trees are decimated by overpopulated herds of hungry deer, the pawpaws are left to soak up the sunlight. 

One deer is charming, thousands defoliate the landscape--photo merrilyanne

     Suppressing wildfires also favors pawpaws, which are less fire-adapted than other trees. Someday we may see pawpaws where we used to see maples and oaks.