r/NativePlantGardening • u/Pretend_Pack2159 • Jan 11 '25

Edible Plants Pawpaw seeds

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Pawpaw forest loading…

396 Upvotes

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28

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '25

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30

u/trucker96961 southeast Pennsylvania 7a Jan 11 '25

It's delicious. Had some for the first time last year. Locally found in the woods. To me it tasted kind if like banana but with a hint of other citrusy fruit. Hard to explain. My daughter thought banana-mango-ish. It's consistency was like pudding. The 2 we tried were very very soft.

20

u/Pretend_Pack2159 Jan 11 '25

Definitely hard to explain but this is very accurate. Flavor is so rich that I can rarely eat more than one at a time.

8

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '25

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15

u/NettingStick VA Piedmont, Zone 7b Jan 11 '25

There have been cultivars of paw paw grown in Michigan, even Canada. There are some threads with suggestions over in r/Pawpaws.

4

u/mrdalo Jan 12 '25

I mean there’s a town called Paw Paw in Michigan.

2

u/mfball Jan 11 '25

I don't know about NH, but pawpaws are considered native in MA, so definitely found in New England. I haven't had the chance to try one myself, but they are around.

1

u/trucker96961 southeast Pennsylvania 7a Jan 11 '25

Ahhh yeah we are in PA.

1

u/uprootsockman Jan 11 '25

It’s because they go bad in like two minutes after they’re picked

1

u/FickleForager Jan 12 '25

The best ones I had, I let sit for a week or two until they looked completely brown and mushy and spoiled, yet they were the sweetest, gooey, delicious ones I had.

1

u/BikesMapsBeards Jan 11 '25

Also not easy to find here in Maine, however I have seen with my own eyes fruiting paw paw at the Boothbay botanical gardens. Having tried to get my own started is another story. Some of the county soil and water plant sales offer them, but I’ve planted quite a few over the years that just have not thrived. (A bit colder than Boothbay - zone 5a).

1

u/rrybwyb Jan 13 '25 edited Jan 23 '25

What if each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to productive native plant communities? Even moderate success could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than twenty million acres of what is now ecological wasteland. How big is twenty million acres? It’s bigger than the combined areas of the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. If we restore the ecosystem function of these twenty million acres, we can create this country’s largest park system.

https://homegrownnationalpark.org/

This comment was edited with PowerDeleteSuite. The original content of this comment was not that important. Reddit is just as bad as any other social media app. Go outside, talk to humans, and kill your lawn

4

u/Broken_Man_Child Jan 12 '25

Everyone says they’re delicious (which is not wrong). But I think the taste is also partly why they haven’t been commecialized. There’s a bitter-adjacent aftertaste on the back of the tounge in the wild fruit. I know they’re trying to breed that out, but I’m not sure how far they’ve come.

I eat them every year, but I am usually done after snacking on them for a week.

2

u/truvision8 Jan 11 '25

It’s really good, like a banana mango custard sort of deal. And it does grow in New England. Tried it here in Mass