I’m thinking about trying my hand at growing Paw Paw trees which are believed to have similar anti cancer properties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_pawpaw
I wish you good luck with paw paws. They grow wild on my mom’s small spread in Indiana. I had one when I was a kid in the late 70s cut right from a tree while walking a cow path. It was the size of a baked potato and tasted like a mild banana. I don’t think they are all that commercially viable but for personal consumption from your privately owned woodland, they are a real treat.
Interesting. They don’t grow where I live and I don’t know that I’ve encountered them, but I love fruit trees and had a small orchard of them once.
This is slightly off subject, but I thank you for bringing up PawPaw’s. I’m almost 72 and sick with a terminal lung disease. I spend a lot of time on memories. When I was a very small child my mother would sing me to sleep with a song about down in the PawPaw patch. I never knew what a PawPaw was until today. THANK YOU!
I have had good luck with growing Paw Paws. I have two by the side of my deck that are about 4-5 inches in diameter and grew from seeds 15 years ago. They make a nice tropical looking screen and produce lots of Paw Paws...I end up giving or throwing them away after eating my fill. I have a wooded area in back where I throw them and it’s turned into a Paw Paw patch.
I think the secret is to get them started from seed where you want them to grow as they are near impossible to dig up with an intact tap root. I’ve tried digging up young ones that were a year old and about a foot high and the tap root was well over a foot long. Transplants may survive but they never seem to grow to any size or produce much fruit.
My experience is that the seeds seem to take a couple of years before I notice them. Maybe the first yeat is spent growing the tap root to China.
Afternoon shade is what they like, and they are very susceptible to frost when they bloom in early spring. I think proximity to the house protects mine with a microclimate and avoids frost damage.
Originally there were three along side my deck and I tried to move one years ago. It lived, but the trunk is not the diameter of my thumb and is about 5 feet tall. The other two are probably 20 feet high and have been pruned back twice.