gardening: observing, planning, designing, and editing
I have been sporadically raking and moving leaves around the last couple of weeks, although most of the raking is still to come. Most leaves are still firmly attached to their plants. I love fall colors, so it is worth getting away from my desk in the afternoon.
People seem to get uneasy when you tell them that you have to cut around seeds, so I took a couple of pictures to show pawpaw innards.
First, cut around the long axis with a paring knife. The flesh is soft, so it is easy to use the seed as a knife stop inside the fruit. Continue reading “A Quick Peek Into a Pawpaw”
Pawpaws are very odd trees. They look very tropical with their big leaves. The fruit have a wildly attractive scent, but are plain looking, very delicate, and highly variable in size. Fruit size varies with the number of seed set inside. The littlest pawpaw in the photograph below probably has a couple of seeds inside, while the biggest probably has a couple of dozen—and they are big seeds. Continue reading “The First Pawpaws Are Ripe”
…Not just the drop season, but riots.
If you have ever raised apples or pears you are well aware of the June drop, when fruit whose seeds were not fertilized drop all over the ground.
If you raise pawpaws, you learn about riots. It seems to be an annual event that occurs about when you start to wonder just when it is going to rain. Some four-legged characters got into the tops of my two pawpaws a couple of days ago and tore off a lot of fruit, taking a bite (or more) out of dozens of pawpaws before tossing them overboard. The ground was littered. What type of characters? I did not see—I only found the wreckage on the ground in the morning. I suspect raccoons—I have caught them red-pawed in the past—but I could be wrong. Do possums eat pawpaws?