Pawpaw Trees Video

Felix from Gurney's Seed and Nursery talks about the growth habit of a Pawpaw tree in it's native habitat and in the home garden. Witness the beauty of Pawpaw trees up close and learn of their garden uses and amazing properties.

Hello, I'm Felix with Gurney's seed and nursery, and today we're talking about Pawpaw. I wanna start off a little bit about their native habitat. They are a native tree here in the U.S. and they grow from northern Florida to just south of Ontario and actually as far west as eastern Nebraska. They are typically an understory tree and what that means is, a tree will grow in a forest under the canopy, where they'll find some light, typically by stream in the lowland area and the tree will grow upwards, looking for light and as a result, it'll be somewhat spindly because the light's spotty in the understory. Foliage will be at the end of the branches and the base of the trunk will be bare. It's quite a bit different from growing a Pawpaw in full sun which we'll talk about later. One of the downsides is that the fruiting buds which require sun will be at the top of the tree, wherever that is, and your production is generally lower in the forest. Okay, so here we are at our research farm where we have a four year old Pawpaw that was planted in full Sun. Has a nice perimetral growth habit, deep green leaves, nice big size like a big leaf Magnolia, not quite as large but similar, tropical look. This tree right now is about ten feet tall. The growth can range anywhere from 15 to 30 feet at full size. But why wouldn't anybody want this in their landscape? It's a wonderful specimen, nice ornamental value and you get the fruit. Looking at the fruit on this four-year-old tree, it's very nice fruit set and I wanna point out how clean this foliage is. We've not sprayed this tree one since we planted it and these leaves have an insecticidal property in them that fight off insects. Might get a little feeding, it kills the insect. You have drops off, drop off on the insects and they don't feed any longer. There are other, some other properties in this Pawpaw tree that are anti-tumor fighting and some researchers are looking at that for a cancer drug development. So nice food, you get that in the fourth year, first year of fruiting and then it will increase production after that. So join us for our next video where we'll cover how to handle some of this Fruit and when to pick it. Thanks very much.