Daily Farm Photo: 7/10/06 #2

Tana & BB: Which One's The Mother & Which One's The Daughter?

Daily Farm Photo: 7/1/06 #2

DDD Under The Pawpaw Tree!

I had so much fun reading all of your comments regarding the mystery food in the 7/1/06 Daily Farm Photo. There were some very interesting guesses, and many of you did correctly identify the unripe fruits as pawpaws. (For those of you who thought they were walnuts--we do have many black walnut trees on the farm.)

As I mentioned, I finally tried my first pawpaw last year. I had heard many people describe the taste as similar to banana custard. I have never actually had banana custard, but the pawpaws didn't taste banana-ish to me at all (though the texture of the very ripe fruit is somewhat custardy.) The only word that kept coming to my mind was "tropical." To me, pawpaws have a completely unique (and very pleasant) flavor. Unfortunately they are chock full of large seeds that makes eating them rather difficult.

I now know that the reason our trees don't set fruits every year isn't just because we often have late frosts that kill spring flower buds (which is why we don't have an orchard down here--or lilac blooms every year). It also has to do with the fact that, according to Wikipedia, "the flowers emit a weak scent which attracts few pollinators, thus limiting fruit production." Bees ignore pawpaw trees. They are instead "pollinated by scavenging carrion flies and beetles."

Well, I don't know what the deal was last year (because we certainly didn't "locate rotting meat near the trees at bloom time to increase the number of blowflies" as large growers apparently do--we have enough problems with meat eating predators already), but 2005 was definitely The Year Of The Pawpaw. The tree in the photo above, which hangs over the spring box, was absolutely loaded with pawpaws. The ground was covered with them, and I was constantly fishing them out of the water. This year I saw maybe 8 or 10 fruits on the entire tree. According to Joe, we will have to beat the raccoons to them.

Click here to learn all kinds of other interesting facts about pawpaws from Wikipedia. And thanks to Aunt George for finding this other informative link about pawpaws.