Pawpaws

Yeah.

Um, Asimina triloba.

All right.

The American pawpaw.

Everything is out there, you know, putting out fruits, making, making new stuff.

An abundance of, uh, trees and f- flowers and ...

I'm just looking at the genus Asimina, and it looks like it's all different kinds of pawpaws, but they're all pawpaws.

So what do they mean by ...

You know, pomegranates are very, very hardy.

Pawpaws, fringe trees.

Those are all super low-maintenance matings.

And you have them all available at Quality Green Specialist Nursery.

It appears to be growing in Pennsylvania.

So I'll kind of say that, again, we're at the kind of northern end of the range here in Pawpaw or in North America for Pawpaws.

Historically in Pennsylvania, if you were to look at the herbarium specimens, these are pressed and dried plant voucher specimens that are stored at museums and that sort of thing.

You could see that there's a clear line where pawpaws kind of drop off, and that's really about a third of the way up from the southern end of the state.

Not necessarily to the existence of those pawpaws, although that can be a problem in the long term, but to the productivity.

And so what I mean by that is wild pawpaws are often associated with shady forested conditions, especially in these floodplain areas.

Pawpaws, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, are adaptable to full sunlight.

And in fact, they produce more flowers and fruit in full sunlight or along the edge of a forest or in a gap of a forest than they do in the shade.

And Blandy, which did not open until 1926, was not founded until 1926, actually still got some of those seeds from the winning pawpaw plant from that 1916 contest and planted them out here at Blandy.

Pawpaws never really took off in the grocery stores or anything like that, just because it has such a short shelf life.

But they grew really well at Blandy for the longest time.

But after almost 100 years out here at Blandy, they kind of got forgotten and maybe overgrown a little bit.

We'll also have some pawpaw crafts and other activities and other places where people can just learn more about pawpaw history.

Another thing that we're very excited about this year, we also are going to have a local expert, Neil Peterson.

He's of Peterson Pawpaws, and he's an expert on the fruit, and he's actually going to be giving a talk during the event.

One talk at 1.30 and one at 2.30 for people who really want to learn more and really dive into what pawpaws are all about.

And it is perfect for growing pawpaws in.

And they have planted 40 pawpaw trees there.

So what I suggest, Mugsy, is that you join the Paw Paw chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society and go to their meetings.

And so the next meeting for the Paw Paw chapter is September.

Let me just see right here.

September 14th.

And so good luck.

And I think that they'll be able to help you really well.