by Andrew Moore
Central Marylanders aren’t as traditionally familiar with pawpaws as those in the western, Appalachian part of the state. But Stanton’s family makes an effort to educate their customers. They offer samples, have printed materials and signs on hand, and are able to answer the typical questions that arise.
In 2011, Allison Aubrey produced an in-depth radio story on pawpaws for NPR, which created a huge buzz for the fruit. Growers and promoters were ecstatic. Stanton had typically been able to sell fifty pounds of pawpaws a day. After Aubrey’s story, this doubled. “It was just because everybody heard about it,” he says. The pawpaws, of course, came from Jim’s orchard. “It’s fallen back this year because now it’s back to people don’t recognize this fruit,” Stanton says. “You have to explain it.” But Stanton has another tactic. He simply lets the pawpaw freaks do their thing.
“They create customers for us,” Stanton says. “Because they get in and they tend to get glowing on the thing, and talking about it. If someone’s going, ‘Wow, I love this, I’m putting it on my yogurt,’ I’ll see [other customers] looking at the fruit and next thing they’re picking up two or three. They go, ‘I guess I better get one.’” Donna Davis once told a reporter, rather diplomatically, “The people who like them are passionate about them, I suppose because it takes so much to grow them, and they have that delicate flavor.”1 But then she added something probably closer to the truth. “It’s kind of a cult thing.” Stanton has one customer in particular who comes each week to sing the praises of pawpaw. He encourages other marketgoers to buy them, lists their benefits, describes their unique flavor. He can’t help himself, he’s been bitten by the bug. “The thing is,” Stanton says, “he’s learned to grow them himself.”
An organic farm in Rappahannock County, Virginia, picks wild pawpaws from the woods surrounding its fields, which sell for twelve dollars a pound at its urban markets. And in cities from Atlanta to Chicago there’s a growing demand for the fruit. Oriana Kruszewski, a pawpaw grower in northern Illinois, says, ”We can’t produce enough to meet the demand in Chicago.” Like Stanton’s pawpaw freak, the fruit’s admirers are growing numerous, but they’re often disconnected from the sites of production. To be clear, these demands are strong among a handful of individuals, but still account for a small slice of the buying public—there are no picketers outside supermarkets demanding greater pawpaw importation.
Perhaps the pawpaw’s unfamiliarity to central Marylanders, Chicagoans, and Atlantans is what helps engender the desire for pawpaws, the paradoxically exotic native, the fruit that Americans should have been eating all along but haven’t. As long as it remains new and curious they’re willing to pay a premium for the fruit. But are those high prices sustainable? In eastern Kentucky you’d be hard pressed to sell pawpaws for twelve bucks a pound (in Pikeville, I witnessed a gentleman buy a bag of wild fruit for just a dollar). Neal Peterson remembers what he was told in (of all places) Paw Paw, West Virginia, when he attempted to sell his cultivars at a town fair. “Why should I pay four dollars a pound when I can go into the woods, and they’re free?” Improved cultivars, though far and away larger and reliably better tasting, are harder to sell in places where pawpaw culture has remained the strongest.
At a gas station on the outskirts of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, we meet Bill Mackintosh. Since 2007, Mackintosh Farms has sold Jim’s pawpaws at their home market stand, and at the farmers market in Berryville, Virginia. We’re meeting to replenish their stock. “You better be calling Jim,” Bill’s wife, Lori, had said. “They’re gone.”
“I think people are starting to think about us in September as having pawpaws, now, thanks to Jim,” Bill says. The farm’s high earners are peaches, tomatoes, and apples. “But all these little things are just more that we can do to maybe draw some other folk in.”
In the past the Mackintoshes hand-processed their pulp. “It’s several days in a row, somebody that’s sitting there working on it,” Bill says. Jim laughs, and adds in agreement, “It gets old pretty quick.” In the back of Jim’s truck is a box of pawpaw rejects, fruit that is either (or both) bruised or undersized. Bill has found someone who wants to experiment with a machine processor. “A big part of the problem is that there hasn’t been an easy way to get all the seeds out, and get the skin off,” Bill says. It’s not for a lack of trying on Jim’s part. For four years he drove to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with a four-hundred-pound truckload of fresh pawpaws. “I’d put them in coolers, or just boxes, and pray that the weather was cool and that everything would get there okay,” Jim says. One of Cornell’s specialties is food science and processing; their labs discovered a fibrous subdural layer atop the flesh that also contains polyphenolic compounds that give the fruit an off-putting bitter taste. So it’s not just the skins that contain those compounds, which might make processing pawpaws that much more difficult. The trips were educational, but Jim didn’t walk away with an economical method or miracle machine that made processing pawpaws as automated as pressing truckloads of oranges into juice.
“But if somebody made it easy for them to take that next step, that may open up several markets that we couldn’t even supply enough for,” Bill says. “I’m hoping it goes through the roof.”
Back at Deep Run the sun begins to set. We do just a little picking and prep work for tomorrow. I grab a few of the fallen pawpaws, lying in the grass—one for the morning’s breakfast—and stash them in a mini fridge, which is already stocked, generously, with snacks and water for my visit. The workday is over.
We settle in for pizza and beer. Donna tells me about first meeting Jim. While they were dating he’d given her a pair of pawpaw seedlings to plant in her backyard—a romantic gesture of togetherness between the future orchardist and forester.
Jim walks upstairs from the basement, where he’s been talking on the landline to a buyer in New York City. The buyer was haggling about price. “Can’t you put the fruit in a different [read: cheaper] box?” Jim’s been through this before—through costly (and sticky) trial and error they’d found these boxes and wrapping to be the best solutions.
The fruit is spoken for before Jim picks it. He commits several hundred pounds to each of his online buyers at the beginning of each season. But apparently this other New York buyer had made his own promises—of pawpaws to chefs throughout the city—and needed more than Jim could spare. In the end though, three hundred pounds is what Jim had, and it’s what the New York buyer would get.
The next day, I rise early and eat breakfast outside in a lawn chair. My meal consists of chilled pawpaw, and black coffee I’ve brewed in the camper. The fruit is so large—fleshy, as Neal Peterson would say—that I’m able to lazily pick around the seeds; unlike wild pawpaws, this one fruit is enough to fill me up. I have also found that the seeds—notorious for clinging to the flesh—seem to pop out with ease from a refrigerated pawpaw.
After a little while I hear Jim walking up the short gravel drive, his T-shirt tucked neatly into his jeans, ready for another day in the orchard.
Our equipment consists of four tools: clippers to snip the fruit from the peduncle (or fruit stem), plastic tubs and foam padding for storage, a John Deere cart, and our hands. In the orchard, trees are spaced eight feet apart in-row, and between rows, twelve feet. Jim determines which row we will start with, and we go up to the first tree, and look and feel. Many that we pick are already marked by faint fingerprints; Jim checked for ripeness just yesterday. They were rock-hard then, but now they’re ready. Jim tells me to give it a try. The fruit gives slightly to the pressure of my fingers, telling me it’s ripe enough. I snip the fruit from the peduncle, careful not to let any other fruit from the cluster drop. If any of the peduncle remains on the fruit, the stiff, twiggy attachment will cause the fruit to bruise while resting in storage. The fruit I pick, still nearly completely pale green, is firm and heavy.
Occasionally fragrance can be a guide. If there’s a fruity aroma
to the pawpaw—the one I’m holding has it—it’s a sure sign of ripeness. “It may not be ready for the table, but in a day or so on the counter, it’s ready to go,” Jim says. Which is exactly how we want to time our harvest: The fruit will sit in cold storage for a minimal amount of time; in a day or so it will be processed for shipping, and then finally arrive overnight on someone’s doorstep, fragrant and ready to eat.
In the first years of production, Jim lugged a stepladder around on his back. He quickly saw the benefits of pruning. Not only did it wear out his back, but climbing up and down a ladder just to check for ripeness was too time consuming. And also dangerous: Pawpaw wood is weak and flexible, and wouldn’t hold the weight of a man on a ladder. The trees today, though stout and mature, are on average no taller than seven feet.
Jim typically begins combing rows for ripe fruit in late August. As the season progresses, he recalls which cultivars ripen when (PA-Golden is first, then the Alleghenies and the Shenandoahs), which rows have been checked that week, and when to return. “If everything works out, it’s a good year, we might have fruit into the first week of October, which is usually Susquehannas.” Each row is labeled by cultivar. Yesterday, he picked all of the remaining Alleghenies. As an earlier-ripening variety, they were done for the season.
We repeat this harvesting program for several hours, filling each plastic container only one-layer deep. I cut down a cluster of three pawpaws. Two are respectable in size, as big as mangoes, but the third is an obvious runt, maybe just four inches around. “Drop the peewee,” Jim says. I toss it under the tree’s drip line and give it a little kick toward the trunk. We do the same with anything of similar size, anything too small for a mail-order customer to receive. Any fruit that even suggests more seed than pulp is frustrating to a consumer, especially considering the ten-dollars-a-pound price tag. And since Jim doesn’t yet have a system for processing the small, bruised, or otherwise disfigured pawpaws, under the tree they go.
But it’s not a total loss. With such heavy fruit production the orchard trees are bound to have problems with nutrient deficiency—and a few rows are already showing signs of dried, blackened leaves and, in general, a fatigued, drained look. The hilltop’s non-alluvial soil—a loamy clay-type mica schist—is not ideal for pawpaws. The topsoil eroded when the fields were full of corn. “It’s weathered soil,” Jim says. So then a few (but just a few, since too many could lead to fungal problems) decomposing pawpaws will aid, if only to a small degree, in giving back to the taxed soil.
Jim fertilizes in late fall or early spring. Last fall he put down a standard 20-20-20 general-purpose fertilizer of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Through soil tests he learned that the trees, in the artificial orchard setting, use a lot of magnesium, potassium, and nitrogen. And even from tree to tree, requirements can differ. “I couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong with all the Alleghenies,” he says. “Then I did the test run, and yep, they were low on nitrogen. But all the other trees were okay.”
Spring came very early this year. Temperatures reached the high eighties in early March, and other than a few frost scares remained unusually warm through the summer. “If it is stinking hot, everything will start maturing rapidly, and if there’s a drought, the trees start stressing,” Jim says. We’ve taken the John Deere cart down to a small wooden shed that houses his water pumps. “To eliminate that problem we now have a drip system on here. So we shouldn’t have any more drought issues here.”
But it’s September now and the heat has yet to abate. Under these conditions no amount of irrigation will stop fruit from ripening prematurely. “You can see like this row here,” Jim says, pointing to a straight line of Taytwos. “The problem is that when we went through this row, we would check the fruit and it was still hard. Thirty-six hours later when we’re rotating back through the orchard, there’s all this fruit on the ground. It just dropped, just like that.” The line between under- and overripe, between profit and loss, is incredibly thin.
I’ve never handled this many pawpaws, and my hands have taken on a light, chalky coating. Pawpaws develop a barely noticeable dusting on their skin, but after handling several hundred my fingertips are white. It easily brushes off on my jeans, but it’s a reminder that growing and harvesting pawpaws in a monoculture, in mass plantings like the Davises, is still new territory. These early orchards will continue to reveal new ways of understanding the fruit. Jim says the Shenandoahs, especially, give off the chalky residue. “Usually, when it’s ripening, it’ll have that on there.” It’s another tactile marker to guide the harvesting.
The wild pawpaw is thought to have few pests (if you even count the zebra swallowtail as a pest), but we’re still finding out what happens when you grow several hundred, if not thousands, on a hilltop, out of the woods and removed from native plant communities. Growers do know of a few serious problems: the pawpaw webworm (Omphalocera munroei), which spin web-like nets around the limbs, and can (though not usually) defoliate entire trees; the pawpaw peduncle borer, which true to its name, bores into flowers causing them to drop; and the Phyllosticta genus of fungus. Phyllosticta, which appears in brown spots and scales on leaves and fruit, is most problematic as it can cause fruit to crack, and split fruit is useless at Deep Run. So far, Jim has been lucky in that pests haven’t ravaged his orchard.
I’ve seen large pawpaws, but these are ridiculous. Here, fruit weighing over a pound is routine. Many clusters grow behind leaf cover, closer to the tree’s central trunk and out of direct sunlight, which is exactly where Jim would prefer they’d all grow. Anything on the outer limbs risks sun scald, cracking, and discoloration. Those on the inside are protected and able to grow and ripen relatively stress-free. And after Jim’s thinning, they’ll receive an even greater stream of nutrients once a few competitors have been removed. It’s in here, behind the tree’s mass of leaves, that I find what I swear must be the largest pawpaw ever grown. I hold it out for Jim to see. “It’s as big as a coconut!” I call out. But Jim is unfazed. At Deep Run, they’re routinely this big.
These cultivars—mostly Peterson Pawpaws; Allegheny, Shenandoah, and Susquehanna, among others—are the result of just twenty years of breeding. The kidney-shaped, often bitter fruits of the wild seem like a different species compared with the Susquehanna I’m now holding in my hands, until I remember it’s just two generations removed from the woods. As great as these fruits are, they’re just the beginning.
In addition to the improved genes of these pawpaws, Davis’s skills as an orchardist contribute to the size and quality of each fruit. In June, Davis conducts the first round of fruit thinning, reducing the miniature banana-like hands from five to seven in a cluster, to three or four, by pinching off the excess fruit. “That’s a very tedious process,” Jim says, “But if you want high-quality fruit, I don’t want any more than about ten to fifteen pounds of fruit on these trees.” Throughout the season he continues to monitor the fruit, removing anything damaged by disease or insects. It would be difficult for most pawpaw lovers to discard those young fruits, prized as they are from Atlanta to Chicago, but the benefits are proven.
When our plastic tubs are filled we cart the pawpaws back to the outbuilding. Inside, Donna, with help from Jim’s sister, Allison, is putting together stiff cardboard boxes for shipping. They lay a piece of bubble wrap in each box, cut from a large spool to the right of the worktable. The process is standardized and efficient. But the first shipments out of Deep Run weren’t so successful. Early attempts using thinner boxes meant fruits arrived crushed, bruised, and if not inedible then definitely far from appetizing. Eventually they found a winner in the current shipping boxes, which are made of inch-thick cardboard and cost a dollar each. After Donna has built a box and filled it with padding, it’s stacked with other empty boxes on a shelf against the wall. It won’t be long until every one of them is filled with pawpaws.
Each plastic container is labeled by cultivar, dated, and deposite
d in the walk-in cooler, which is kept at a very chilly thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Jim has found they can be stored like this for several weeks until shipping day. When an order is placed, Jim drives to a pickup facility for FedEx and UPS in Westminster, where he occasionally gives fruit to the employees. “They all get real excited about that,” he says.
The cooler is enclosed by a large outbuilding, where today Donna is prepping shipping boxes. It’s the most efficient, convenient pawpaw weigh, package, and storage station that currently exists. Just a few feet from the building’s rolling doors, on the other side of a gravel driveway, is the orchard.
Jim’s fruit has two main distribution streams. The first is through Earthy Delights, a specialty foods distributor based in Okemos, Michigan, that allows chefs and other home consumers to purchase an order of pawpaws Jim then mails direct. The second is through New York City’s Heritage Foods via a similar process. Neal Peterson introduced Jim to Earthy Delights, and to Heritage Foods through the Slow Food USA movement, which had recently inducted pawpaw to its Ark of Taste (a catalog of heirloom foods facing extinction).
Pawpaws are considered too fragile, too perishable to ship, one of the main excuses given as to why they’ve never been brought under wider cultivation. But Jim and Donna are doing it. Sure, the process might be expensive for both producers and consumers, but several tons of fruit each year are packaged here and delivered to wholesalers and front doors throughout the country. The pawpaws arrive ripe, fragrant, and unbruised. Down the line, there might be breakthroughs in processing, or in value-added products that might help the Davises, but shipping is not a problem. In fact, it’s working quite well.
Last year, hurricanes wiped out nearly all of Jim’s fruit. “That’s the problem with this fruit,” he says. “If you get bad storms, even a thunderstorm with a strong downdraft, wind shear, it can destroy your crop just like that.” The hurricane tore entire limbs off trees, especially those burdened with heavy fruit. “Some trees were just not salvageable,” he continues. “It was a real mess.”
