Asimina triloba

And so I kept that with me as I, you know, just continued to be a person who spent time outdoors.

And then became really interested in the natural world as I wrote my first book, uh, Pawpaw, which is this cultural and natural history of, of this incredible native fruit, uh, that's this custard apple that grows throughout the Eastern United States.

And writing that book sent me on a journey all throughout where this fruit grows wild, from Louisiana to Southern Ontario, from the Atlantic, you know, well west of the Mississippi.

And so it w- you know, writing... working on that book really put me on the path that I'm on today, which is, uh, you know, a love of, of ecology and the, the native and wild things that are in, in the Eastern United States, and, and many of them not found i- in other, other places of the world.

Tama likes to edit the wild plants that grow on her land, and then she takes note of what helps those plants succeed and what she can do to help them.

We pick a lot of pawpaws.

Pawpaws is an eastern native tree and then it's become kind of trendy recently.

Whenever there were ones that were not really that edible or they were all mushed out or something, we would throw the seeds in our compost pile, which is kind of just the side of my shed, and we just throw the seeds there randomly with other big leaves or things like that.

And It wasn't paying attention, but I think about three years later, I was walking around in like kind of the late fall, and I was like, why are there trees in the compost pile? And there was a leaf there, and I smelled the leaf, and I realized there's a pawpaw tree.

Peaches got really slammed.

Pawpaws, I know also for a lot of the region.

Was that the case for you too, Michael?

Well, they purposely grow things that are super adapted here.