Paw Paw Harvest Begins! Native North Amer Fruit, KY State Univ Paw Paw Program, Recipes 🍨

- Paw Paw Harvest Begins (and More!). Oct. 9, 2023. EdibleAcres (edibleacres.org).
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- "Pawpaws are a delicious fruit, so why don't we find them in our supermarkets?" Berkshire Eagle, Oct. 6, 2023. Ed.

I’ve got a couple of tropical fruit trees growing in my garden in Western Mass. and they are flourishing despite winter temperatures that drop well below zero on occasion. These are pawpaws, a cold hardy member of the custard apple family (the Annonaceae), a family that also includes such tropical treats as the cherimoya and the soursop. Personally, I find the fruits of the pawpaw even more delicious. They are large — the plump, green-skinned fruits may measure up to 6" long — and when ripe they are filled with a custard-like flesh that tastes like a cross between mango and banana, with perhaps a hint of pineapple.

Pawpaws, even though they are members of a tropical plant family, are natives of eastern North America, grow wild as far north as southern Ontario and as far west as southeastern Nebraska and eastern Texas.

Why don’t we find these delicious fruits in our supermarkets? I posed that question to Sheri Crabtree, a Horticulture Research & Extension associate at Kentucky State University. Crabtree helps to manage KS’s Pawpaw Program, the only full-time academic research program focused on this fruit. KY State (& Crabtree) grow lots of pawpaws. As the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s national clonal germplasm repository or gene bank for pawpaws, KY State maintains a collection of 2,000 pawpaw trees collected from 17 states, in a 12-acre orchard at the KSU farm.

Crabtree explained that pawpaw fruits have a couple of characteristics that have traditionally kept them out of commercial orchards. Orchardists prefer fruit like peaches or plums that can be picked while they are a little underripe and hard so that they may be shipped in bulk across the country and set out on supermarket shelves as they ripen. The quality of such survivors can’t match that of fruits that have ripened on the tree, but their ease of handling and durability compensate for that, at least in the opinion of mass marketers.

Pawpaws do not lend themselves to such treatment. If picked before the fruits start to soften, they never ripen. And once they have softened, pawpaws bruise easily, discoloring the fruits. Nor do they last long on the shelf. Once fully ripened, they last only 2 to 3 days, or 5 to 7 days if kept refrigerated. Kentucky State has been working on promoting pawpaws as a crop for small farms to be sold in local farmers markets or processed into ice cream or brandy. As Sheri pointed out, though, they are also ideally suited for home gardeners such as me...https://www.berkshireeagle.com/arts_and_culture/home-garden/thomas-christopher-be-a-better-gardener-pawpaw/article_7538a012-5efb-11ee-b5ee-2b8baec90a4a.html
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🥧 "Paw Paw Recipes and Uses," KYSU Edu. Pies, Custards, Cookies, Breads,
* Pawpaw Custard Pie: 1 c. 2% milk, 1 c. cream, 3 eggs, ¾ c. sugar, 1 c. pureed pawpaw pulp..https://www.kysu.edu/academics/college-acs/school-of-ace/pawpaw/recipes-and-uses.php
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- (Wiki). Asimina triloba, the American papaw, pawpaw, paw paw, or paw-paw, among many regional names, is a small deciduous tree native to the eastern US and Canada, producing a large, yellowish-green to brown fruit. Asimina is the only temperate genus in the tropical and subtropical flowering plant family Annonaceae, and Asimina triloba has the most northern range of all. Well-known tropical fruits of different genera in family Annonaceae include the custard-apple, cherimoya, sweetsop, ylang-ylang, and soursop.. Pawpaw fruits are the largest edible fruit indigenous to the US..https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba