Friday, August 20, 2010

Pickin' Up PawPaws & Puttin' Em in My...Desk?

"Pickin up PawPaws, Put 'em in my pocket!"
"Pickin up PawPaws, Put 'em in my pocket!"
"Pickin up PawPaws, Put 'em in my pocket!"
"Way down yonder in the PawPaw patch."

So I work in an old civil war home off the square in the city square in Fayetteville. On MWF, there's a hot dog stand there. Our fruit specialist where I work and I went to grab a dog the other day. He's been doing a lot of work on pawpaw fruit production lately, so we had PawPaws on our minds. He talks about pawpaws, I talk about poultry, the sheep and goat people talk about sheep and goats, the farm energy people talk about farm energy, well, you get the idea.

The fruit below is a ripe PawPaw. The PawPaw is native to the Midwestern/Eastern US. It's actually a member of a mostly tropical fruit family, even though it occurs all the way up into Michigan. The smell of a PawPaw is quite heady, like a mix between a banana & pineapple. You eat the inside which has a consistency somewhere between a ripe cantaloupe and custard and the taste is really fruity, and complex. It's quite an experience. The tree is just as interesting, with big emerald green leaves, obligate to shade as a sapling, and flowers that go after flies with a flower that smells like roadkill instead of flowers that lure pollinators with perfume
While I was getting my hot dog, guy found a pawpaw tree and picked an unripe fruit right off the square. While he was buying his hot dog, full of kraut the way God intended, I walked over to the PawPaw tree and check under it, found a ripe one lying on the ground, and snatched it up. It's the thing that looks like a potato, but it smelled heavenly.
Apparently, there are two pawpaw trees on the square, and I picked the right one while the fruit expert picked the wrong one. Yeah, I'm not gonna let that go soon! To his credit though, he gave me half of the PawPaw as a sort of finder's keeper reward.

2 comments:

  1. I never knew foraging could be so...Doritos-like;) I have enjoyed your blog since I heard you call in to Geek-Farm-Life. Nice PawPaw*

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  2. Thanks Craftiness. Yeah, the Doritos tree was right next to the PawPaw tree;)

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