Last fall I put aside some pawpaw seeds, to see if I could grow pawpaw seedlings (Post G22-062).
Pawpaws have a reputation for being difficult to propagate. They don’t much like to be transplanted, so it’s better to grow from seed. But pawpaw seeds have a reputation for having a low germination rate.
Putting these seeds into storage last fall was quite a process. Apparently the seeds are quite picky about the conditions they will tolerate. So I devoted an afternoon to extracting, cleaning, sterilizing, and packing up pawpaw seeds. In particular, they cannot be allowed to dry out, and require lengthy refrigeration in damp sterile medium if you are to have any hope of germination in the spring.
Or so they say.
Anyway, I followed the directions to the letter.
Its now going on July in the following year, and at this point I’m pretty sure that my germination rate is zero. Of the 25 or so seeds that I kept for myself, literally none shows any sign of life.
It’s possible that these are just slow starters. But at this point, I doubt it. So if I’m going to propagate pawpaws, I’m going to have to try something else. Likely I’ll just chuck whole fruit into containers of potting soil, and see what happens the following year. If nothing else, that’s a whole lot less work.
And, as if to mock my efforts, my pawpaws are now in the process of sending up an entire little forest of suckers, pictured above. So if I leave them alone, they’ll take over my yard.
Advice is mixed as to whether or not I can dig up a few of those and move them. Some say you can, some say you can’t. Some offer yet another labor-intensive process of severing the taproot of the sucker one year, then digging it up and transplanting it the next year.
I don’t think I’m going to mess with it. I guess the deal-breaker for me is that one of the existing trees produces an excellent-tasting pawpaw, but that’s a grafted tree that I bought from a nursery. I literally have no idea what suckers grown from the roots of that pawpaw would produce.
What I really want is viable seeds. So far, that hasn’t worked out.
