Growing pawpaws: growing tips and an update on my trees

hello this is Angela with Parker's permaculture I tried to do an update this morning and I got rained out it was pouring and we are supposed to have six or seven straight days of rain but I've gotten several questions or requests for an update on my Pappaw trees so I wanted to get that done because there's a little break in the weather here so I put papa trees then a few years ago and I have a couple videos about planting them and taking care of young Papas and I'll have the links in the description and then also embed them in this video so Papas are one of my favorite fruits I feel like I said that about everything because I really like fruit but Papas are a tsamina trial Oba they are the only temperate member of the custard apple family so I have one here and one here and one behind this clematis in the side yard back there and I planted them a few years ago and I got a lot of comments and feedback about those videos so Papas grow in North America in the United States figure in 26 States I believe they don't naturally occur in Oregon so you they need a little babying which is what some of my other videos were about they need a little babying when they're young and I got some updates like hey how are they doing now that they've you know exited that infancy and there was more self-sufficient how are your Papa's doing so I want to talk about it I'm going to walk through here you can see that my Papa's are planted in a food forest setting right so I try and have integrated systems of my orchards are incorporated with the rest of my garden so I'm gonna move around this way come through all this lady's mantle and Nigella we're currently remodeling our living room so there may be some noise as my husband is cutting some wood for me while I'm taking a break from painting so okay so here's one of my pot pies I grow only improved Peterson Popeyes so mr. Peterson if you look on his website you can just google Peterson Papa's I can also put a link he's been working on cultivating and refining the Papa's and improving them for more than two decades and if you want to Papa that you grow in your garden you can't beat his I really enjoyed Papa's wild pawpaws as a child but the flavor of his the production quality size of the fruit overall sweetness and reduction in bitterness cannot be beat so if you want a successful Papa you need to I would encourage you to get a Peterson one they're worth a little bit extra you have to pay and mr. Peterson has done a tremendous amount to advocate for Papa cultivation so like I said Papa's are the only temperate member of the custard apple family to have a really tropical look to them they have these leaves but a really large lovely-looking and they turn bright yellow in the fall as the tree matures it has a pyramidal shape so there are really lovely specimen tree in your yard you do need two of them of two different varieties or two seedlings to get fruit that's why I have three I mean I would have more if I could have room for more improved Peterson Papas that are grown in sunshine you're looking at getting between 20 and 50 pounds of fruit off that maturity so I got these little tiny sticks from one green world nursery that's located in Portland Oregon but they do ship Papa's are a tap rooted species which is a little bit unusual for a fruit tree I mean everything about them is a little unusual to have a tropical look to have that pyramidal shape they have these leaves that look really cool they have flowers that are pollinated by flies and a little bit by beetles and the flowers don't smell floral they smell kind of like well some people don't like the smell but I think it smells like when you've like sourdough bread a little bit or a little bit like and some of the early parts of when you're brewing beer has a yeasty smell to it not not terribly unpleasant it's not like a you know like some of those cacti that the flowers that are fly pollinated smell like rotten flesh doesn't smell like that so pawpaws like I said they're tap rooted so that makes them unusual as far as fruit trees go so for me here in Oregon with my clay soil and poor drainage that means that I really had to create a microclimate that mimics more what they need so that involved you can see here below tons of ground cover plants well initially the first few years of this garden I spent my time rounding up mulch and mulch and more mulch and also loosening the dense clay soil encouraging things like moles to do it for me I know folks don't like moles I love them they aerate your soil really well other things I did to get ready to plant pawpaws as I planted things like rhubarb things like sterile Russian Bocking 14 comfrey which have big gnarly roots that can go very deep and they help loosen and open up that soil these plants are also dynamic accumulators in a really good mulch plant so here you can see this young pop huh and I have a Shannon Doha and a Susquehanna and a Rappahannock or the three varieties that I have so if you look at this I have deep mulch you can see here I built up a Huggle bed I wanted to create for that taproot a really thick well draining organic material that way I'm gonna set my tap rate up for success so once you plant a Papa they don't want to be transplanted in fact they do best if you plant them if you germinate them from seed and a really deep pot and then you plant them once so this Papa and the one to my left and the one in the backyard all were planted when they were very young and they were never moved okay there are a tiny little whip when Papa's are young they need shade so like I said they've grow in the riparian understory in the central and eastern parts of the United States this means they like moisture they don't like wet feet and because they naturally occur in that understory they like shade they're really really prone to sunburn if you look here I'm gonna link to my earlier video I shaded them for the first two years of their life exclusively like they were shaded from spraying all the way into October because they will sunburn and die the quickest way to kill your young Papa is to give it direct intense sunlight so you can check out that video for what I did the first couple years so now that they're mature and this one's about six feet tall the one to my left is about five and a half the one in the backyard is about five and a half they are no longer getting babied I take care of them the first two years by protecting them from the Sun and I water them the first two years bucket water them deeply once a week and that's because being in the riparian understory they like to have access to a constant supply of water they don't like wet feet but they need consistent water when they're young now once they get to this stage I'm no longer protecting them and I am no longer watering then they subsist on rainwater only okay so this is how they're looking now so years three four five what you're gonna get is a strong looking plant that is starting to get that pyramid shape now they can't eventually get to twenty feet tall my plan is to clip them at eight feet so I can reach the fruit without a ladder and also so that when fruit falls because it will fall when it's mature it hits a dense layer of cushiony mulch and it doesn't have to fall that far this fruit bruise is really easily so so have I gotten fruit set on it this year the answer is no in Oregon they can take a while to really start flowering and you need that cross-pollination between two varieties so I got this fruit this tree was covered in flowers the spring not my other two didn't flower yet so I didn't get fruit set like I said before they have kind of a cool looking almost leathery looking flower in some ways it reminds me a little bit of a persimmon blossom it is fly pollinated and you can hand pollinate it with a brush if you want to but because I didn't have flowers on my other trees and there aren't any other paw Paw's that I know of in my neighborhood nothing got pollinated on this tree so I'm hoping to get fruit in a couple years paw Paw's our plant you really need to be patient with you want to front-load that work you want to water it the first few years you want to protect it from sun you want to let it do its thing when it's a teenager like this and be patient and then when it comes into maturity and is really flowering you can expect to get a really good consistent harvest of fruit for a long time I've seen other folks complain about growing paw Paw's in Oregon particularly there was a permaculture business that is no longer here in Oregon actually really fairly close to my house in Northeast Portland and the owner when I toured his property complained that he couldn't grow paw Paw's he tried to grow them in an area that had formerly been a driveway with a really compacted soil and that doesn't work for this plant because it needs to be able to throw down that deep hopparoo and he also grew it in an area where it wasn't supported by that thick layer of mulch to help it conserve water and also where it was buffeted by too much wind so if you look here this is my neighbor's hedge and I've talked in other videos the wind comes in from the Columbia Gorge this way so everything grown along this edge does well being sheltered from the wind if we look at the leaves of a Samina try low Bob and try not to step on things in this bed here okay but look at the leaves here you can see they're really large keep in mind this is a young plant they're very large and that and they're not leathery and they're not hairy and that means that they lose water through their leaves either by intense sunshine but also wind so this plant not only should you not grow it where you used to have a driveway but you really want to protect it from high wind because again and then wild it's growing in that understory so protect it from wind so that it doesn't have water loss give it a thick coat of mulch to protect it from water loss from the ground and you will eventually get fruit off this plant so winter is an Oregon don't bother it it doesn't get powdery mildew I found what it's very little to slugs to the leaves other than that nothing has bothered it so far the plants look really healthy I love how like delicate and floppy the leaves are has a really nice look to it so this plant does leaf out really late again kind of like a persimmon it leaves out late so don't stress if you have overwintered it and it hasn't leaped out yet you can see those little tiny brown leaf buds very early and just hold out it will Leatha so this plant again I'm gonna keep doing updates I just had gotten so many questions it's probably the second most common question I get is how are your Papa's doing because I've really struggled to grow them they haven't done well where I am what are you doing differently than I'm doing and are your Papa's still going and you can see from having planted a 10 inch to 12 inch long whip I now I'm getting these really nice healthy-looking trees in just a few years because I took care of them when they were little and it gave them the conditions they needed to thrive I think this is a great plant for any permaculture garden the fruit only has a couple day long shelf life it doesn't ship it's a plant that like you don't grow it or you don't live in Indiana or Kentucky where you can forage for this plant the only way to get access to it is to grow it yourself and because it's a good-looking plant it's a great landscape plant as well so it will look good in any garden whether it's a permaculture garden or whether it is a more structured garden if you've got an HOA and you have restrictions on what you can grow this plant is at maturity just as pretty if not more pretty than any kind of landscape tree and again especially because it's got a flush of bright yellow leaves in the fall it has Beauty all year long okay so that's my update on how my three paw paw trees are doing here in Oregon which is not their native habitat looking real healthy real good I'm gonna go back in and continue remodeling my living room thank you all for watching and please I'm trying real hard to listen to those questions and comments and and I want to make content that you all appreciate so that's why I made this video so if there's other things you want me to cover and as someone who to ask me about growing currant so I'm going to be doing that soon so yeah please leave comments if you have if you have them and I definitely will read them and try and make content that you all find useful and can get something out of so alright I'll be back soon thanks

Channel: Parkrose Permaculture

Views: 19,304

Keywords: pawpaw, permaculture, food forest, asimina triloba

Id: Aizh6tY5Vfg

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 07 2020