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2018 Wild Pawpaw Watch Thread

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Triloba Tracker:
Kicking off the 3rd annual "Wild Pawpaw Watch Thread!

Hard to believe this is the third year.

The purpose of this thread is to document the progress and productivity of wild pawpaw (Asimina triloba) patches.
Anyone and everyone who has pawpaws growing in their area is welcome and encouraged to contribute.

I'll go ahead and get us kicked off:
Here in TN, we have had a crazy-warm second half of February. (Also crazy-rainy.) We've actually had a couple of days reach 80 degrees. Have not had any frost in a couple of weeks at least.
Bradford Pears and Chinese Magnolias are blooming as of a couple of days ago. Daffodils, etc are up and blooming.
Sooooooooo.....are the pawpaws blooming yet?

Last Sunday (2/25) I checked the "mother tree" in Nashville that I always keep an eye on. The flower buds were definitely in action but not open yet. The size of small blueberries. The flower "stem" (peduncle I believe is the term) was quite elongated on most flower buds.
This tree has always had early-ripening fruit, so perhaps it's ahead of other trees. I haven't been able to look at my local wild patches yet.

We have some cool nights coming up, forecast around 32F, but I don't see anything that would harm the flowers. Last year we had some 20F nights in March that really zapped things.

Fingers crossed for no late freezes.

Triloba Tracker:
Observed some more trees in Nashville area today.
Rhodes are in a wooded area. Flowers not nearly as far along as the tree mentioned above.
This is good, because we have a few nights below freezing coming up. Regardless, however, nothing severe that would do much damage, I think.
Took some more cuttings today. Going to be busy with a lot of grafting later.

Triloba Tracker:
Was out at the local patch yesterday. Could’ve been my mood but overall things didn’t look so great. Just not a lot of flowers or even flower buds, it seemed. Weather has been unusually cool for the last few weeks with multiple nights below freezing. I think things are rather delayed, compared to some recent years at least. Definitely not in full swing yet. Upcoming weather is still pretty cool and wet for about 2 weeks.
At this rate we may not have much flowering for a while. We’ll see....
Oh, and other bad news is only a few of my grafts in the patch appear to have made it. Looking at them now I can see I didn’t have good technique! I think my biggest issue was I didn’t know to rubber band them tightly. So the wound tissue really messed things up- they look awful! LOL

Triloba Tracker:
I know i predicted doom and gloom last year and was somewhat wrong (crop was down for sure from 2016 though).

But this year i'm really concerned due to the bizarre weather we've had: freakishly warm late February, then a much colder March overall, and now even in the early days of April we just hit around 30F 2 nights ago and have a sub-30F low predicted Saturday night.
Add a fair amount of rain to the mix, and it's hard to envision many flowers being successfully pollinated or even alive.

Only time will tell.....

gnappi:
Thx for writing. I've read a lot about the Paw paw and I wish it would survive and fruit in zone 10.

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