Modern Geekery

Last year, I decided to plant fruit trees. Most folks would have chosen a nice dwarf apple and called that done. I wanted something a little bit different. After all, there are a ton of apple orchards in the area and we’re no strangers to them. One of the most delightful fruits that I’ve ever encountered happens to be one that is native to this area – the pawpaw. They’re like a tropical fruit that grows in a temperate climate. The better ones are large, custardy, and delicious, while the wild ones are highly variant in quality. None of them survive handling very well, which is why its next to impossible to find them commercially, unless you happen to be lucky enough to live near a farmers market graced by someone with a few pawpaw trees. The pawpaw is enjoying something of a renaissance, with a research program active at Kentucky State and several growers associations. After reading up on the fruit, I decided to try growing them.

I had intended to get trees from Peterson’s, since it seems pretty clear that they have spent a lot of effort in breeding tasty fruits – they’ve actually patented their cultivars. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea I did and I discovered that they had sold out of every tree for 2008. I’m generally fairly patient, but I wasn’t going to wait a year to plant. The Kentucky State website pointed me to another nursery, Hidden Springs Nursery in Tennessee, that had good breeds. Importantly for me, they carried the Overleese cultivar, which is the parent stock for most of Peterson’s trees. Last November, I ordered three trees (you need at least two, because pawpaws are not self-fertile) – one Overleese, one Mango, and one Mary Foos Johnson. I chose Davis and NC-1 as alternates, but Annie at Hidden Springs let me know pretty quickly that barring something unusual, I should get my first choices and that they’d ship around the end of March.

That just left me with the task of getting the area ready to plant. This involved a lot of stump removal and trimming back of the scrubby spruces that were planted as a fence along the north property line. I had mentioned the thought of renting an auger to dig the holes for the trees, but I figured that I’d at least give it a go and see how far I could get. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to get all three holes done in about 6 hours of digging, including the run-in with all the junk from the house’s previous owners.

The first two holes, I managed over the weekend, with a little help from Elder Daughter. We dug them about 2.75 feet deep by about the same in diameter. I’m hoping that this is a bit of overkill, but I’m intending to mix a little compost with the sandy clay of my backyard when I plant the trees, so I wanted a little extra space to work with. The nursery is shipping me 2′ saplings, so I ought to be in good shape.

I needed to move a woodpile in order to dig the third hole and so I’d thought to wait until this coming weekend to finish the project. That went out the window when I got a shipment notification from Hidden Springs this afternoon that my trees were going out today. I left work a little early and in about 3 hours this evening, I moved the woodpile and dug the last hole. The last hole disgorged its surprise right at about the 2.5′ mark – an egg storage tunnel of an ant colony. Elder Daughter was quite amazed at how deep the ants had dug and immediately exhorted me to dig out the queen so she could see it. I demurred on that.

I still need to get some more compost to spread around the base of the trees once they’re planted and I’m considering one of the nice little geotextile sheets to help keep the weeds from competing with the trees. I was a bit concerned about how well the trees would thrive in the clay in my yard, but heck – they’re native to the area. They’ve got to do ok with a little bit of the greasy red stuff that sits below the topsoil. And, to my amazement, I found that the red clay layer sits on top of a sandier, more water-permeable grey clay, as pictured to the right. Since I’ve never done this before, it will be a miracle if I don’t kill at least one of the trees, but I’m really excited about it. With any luck, we’ll start getting fruit in a couple of years.