Sunday, July 10, 2011

I Got Paw Paws!


I've been watching the pawpaw tree (Asimina triloba) for fruit pretty carefully—and hey! I got pawpaws! I didn't really expect to get fruit because this tree is "self-incompatible," meaning that the pollen of one flower cannot fertilize the ovary of another bloom on the same tree. In order to produce the fruit I've been waiting for, the bloom needs pollen from another unrelated pawpaw. Now I have only one tree, and the nearest one I can find is on the campus of the nearby community college, approximately 1,500 feet away.

How can pollen possibly travel that distance? It hitchhikes on a fly. This spring I got photos of what I believe are fruit flies on the blossom of my pawpaw…
but can we expect a 2.5 millimeter fly to travel 457 meters to find another tree's bloom? Well, either a fruit fly has no trouble flying almost 183 thousand times its body length, and has the power to smell a blossom 0.3 miles away, or—more likely—there's a closer pawpaw that the flies aren't telling me about.

I've blogged about my pawpaw tree and its pollinators in May and the how the Zebra Swallowtail uses it as a host play last July. Yes, I'm a little obsessed with it. I'm dreaming about tasting the ripe fruit in the fall, which I'm told tastes like a lemony banana. True, the squirrels will probably get it long before I do, but I can dream can't I?

6 comments:

  1. That is awesome! Despite having lived in Ohio most of my life I've never tasted pawpaw, so if you do get your hands on any of the ripe fruit I'll be very jealous. Apparently the property in Ohio where I worked last year had some pawpaw trees but I wasn't there in the fall to look for the fruit. I only recently realized that to people in other parts of the country "pawpaw" can mean papaya - little do they know!

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  2. It would be fun to attend the 13th Annual Ohio Pawpaw Festival, but believe me if I get one I can taste, I'll have my own festival!

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  3. wow. neat that you have fruit! you have some determined pollinators there! :)

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  4. I certainly do--apparently, flies are as busy as bees!

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  5. Good luck on getting a PawPaw fruit! I planted three trees about 18 yrs ago. It took them 15 years before they flowered. (They're growing in the red clay of a former Georgia cotton field.) First year flowering nothing happened. Second year I helped out by plucking a flower from one tree and smearing it around on the stigma of a different tree. Got three fruits and they mysteriously disappeared before they were ripe. This year I let nature take its course and have five fruits developing, all on one tree. Then storms knocked over a wild cherry tree and it took the top out of my largest PawPaw. Maybe next year I'll get a crop.

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  6. Hi Dale! My tree is only about 6 years old, but I'm lucky with my soil. Even though this part of my yard used to be an alley way and it's loaded with hunks of concrete, between the rocks the clay is fertile. However, my fruits were knocked down after I wrote this, by a mammal/mammals unknown!

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