We had come home from the pawpaw festival with saplings in order to fill in the empty spots in our “orchard”. It was hard enough to decide which variety we brought home, but now the really hard part started. We had to plant the buggers. We were expecting the process to be easier than the first planting. Not so much. The problem was the weeds that we had allowed to grow. We had to locate each previous planting spot and then rip out all the stuff we needed gone. The recent rain also meant we had not been able to get out there with the brush hog before starting the project. So everything was over grown.
We did not make our usual early start on September 30. Now that fall is nearly here we have to wait for the sun to come up and the temps to get a bit higher. As I pulled out the weeds, I had to be careful not to yank out the pawpaw too. It was easy enough to identify the ones that were actually growing, but so many were just sticks. Those I had to tug on and if they resisted, they stayed. The mulch had to be pulled away from them and more dirt added. I think that one of our problems was the depression we left the first time. It allowed the rain to pool and from what I read, pawpaws don’t like wet feet. As I pulled the mulch and then the weed cloth away, we were delighted to find actual signs of life on more and more of our “sticks”.
We had brought our generator out to THF as it was needed in order to run the big drill. Ron would use that to re-dig the planting holes. While he worked on that, I kept yanking out weeds. I reached the end of the first row and grabbed a handful of the tall white flowers to pull out. They came out easily but they brought some lovely ground wasps with them. Within seconds they were all around me so I dropped my tools and bolted. Ron had no clue why I was heading his way until he heard me yell BEES. He took off his hat and preceded to smack them. What he didn’t realize is that the hat’s buckle had come apart and every time he swung it, the metal buckle hit my ear. He was so intent on the wasps that he didn’t even hear me yelling to stop. I pulled off my fleece jacket (thank goodness I had that on) and we ran to the shed. We waited for about 10 minutes before venturing out to find they had dispersed. Needless to say, I did not finish weeding the end of that row.
Weeding, drilling and planting. The two of us worked our way up and down the rows, filling in where needed. This was really one of the hardest work days I had been through in a while. It was the weed pulling itself that got to me. By the end of the day, my back and arms were massively sore.
Ron decided he wanted to put the cages back on this year. He is hoping they will give just a bit more protection to the plants so they make it safely through this winter.
By 3:30 we were finally done. Every one of our new plants had found a home. In fact we could have used two more. Those were the holes we did not get to because of the wasps. We still had dozens of seeds waiting in the frig so maybe a couple of those will survive and fill in the gap for us. Ron marked the older plants with a red flag. The new ones had no flag but the cage. The ones we had hope for but had only tiny signs of life were left without cage or flag. We ended up with 19 survivors from our 2016 planting which was so much better than the 8 ones we had previously counted. With the addition of the 18 we got in PA, we are back to our original amount. As the new plants were grown in a region that has similar winter weather, we are more than hopeful that they will not only survive but thrive here. Ron come home with these higher expectations after he went out to Cornell University yesterday to attend a workshop on pawpaws. He got a lecture from Andrew Moore who wrote the book Pawpaw: In search of America’s forgotten fruit. I mentioned him two years ago as he was a speaker at the Mother Earth News Fair. He also got a tour of Cornell’s pawpaw orchard and came home with a basket full of fruit.
During our research we have learned that pawpaws are eaten by everything from foxes to squirrels, racoons and opossums. But nothing eats the tree itself or the seeds. It takes from 5 to 6 years of growing before you will see any of the fruit itself. And this is the only host plant for the zebra swallowtail butterfly. 
Which is just fabulous. I cannot wait to see the first one out on THF. We have been making some of our plant choices based on whether it is native to our area and almost more importantly, what insects it attracts. It will take a few more years before we see the results from our planting of coneflowers, milkweed and other wild flowers. And I cannot wait.