Paw Paw Tree - Asimina triloba - How to eat a Paw-Paw fruit and harvest seeds

Learn how to eat a pawpaw fruit, and how to harvest the seeds to grow your own paw paw tree.
The common Pawpaw is a native small tree (to 40 feet, with a spread equal to or greater than that) found east of the Mississippi. There are seven other species found in North America, but this one is the most widely found in nature. Although it will tolerate full sun, it prefers shaded woodlands, with deep, fertile, loamy soil. While it is not as mobile as bamboo or sumac, the plant, when happy, will start to form a thicket, suckering from the roots and colonizing an increasingly large area. In the wild, it out-performs many other understory species, creating what later became known as the proverbial ‘pawpaw patch.’

Flowering occurs in spring (for us in coastal Connecticut, it is late April into early May), when the rich red-purple to dark maroon small (1 to 2 inches across and deep) somewhat fetid-smelling blooms occur, closely attached to the branches. The pollinators are flies, carrion beetles (I told you the flowers were smelly), fruit flies, carrion flies and others. Because of the somewhat iffy weather, some years pollination seems just not to happen. On our tree this year, we got more than twenty fruits, most all of them within two feet of the ground on a tree that is fourteen or fifteen feet tall. This suggests to me that the pollinators are ground-dwelling or low-flying.

The fruit is the real reason to grow Pawpaw, although the flowers are nice if not exactly showy, and the fall color is certainly worthy (see photo below). The fruit can range from a quarter-pound up to over a pound by weight. When ripe, which is when they turn yellow or light brown from green, they are an excellent source of vitamin A and C, as well as unsaturated fats, proteins, carbohydrates, a rich balance of amino acids and better than apples and pears as a source for potassium, phosphorus, magnesium and sulfur. They are sweet, with a fragrant aroma and a custard-like texture. It’s sort of a cross between a banana and a mango and a pear and an apple. It’s really hard to describe; you’ll just have to try one.

Next year, if the harvest rivals this year, we will have a pawpaw festival, with ice cream, puddings, cakes and etc. I’ll provide the pawpaws…

The genus name is from the First Peoples’ name for the plant, assimin. The species name for our plant is from the three-lobed calyx. The common name is thought to derive from the Spanish word, Papaya, to which the fruit of this tree is nominally similar. The family orientation is Annonaceae, a large family in the order Magnoliales, consisting of many tropical species (in fact this is the only hardy genus in the entire family) such as ylang-ylang, soursop, cherimoya, custard-apple and sweetsop.