Pawpaw

I had forwarded an article that I had read online regarding the pawpaw to some of our friends last week since the fruit was somewhat familiar to us from previous walks along the C&O canal.  The article noted that pawpaw was actually being grown on certain farms in our area, and that the fruit was extremely tasty, and that it was becoming more and more popular, just as it had been in times past.

It was a pure coincidence that we began to see signs of the pawpaw fruit as we started our Sunday morning walk today from Whites Ferry.We noticed that the pawpaw trees were all over the place, and that there were fallen fruit under many of these trees.Out of curiosity, we picked a few fruit along the way to take back home with us. We had reached the farthest point of our walk and were on our way back to the car when we we saw somebody walking towards us actually consuming one of the fruits that he had just picked.  So we started trying out the fruit ourselves.  It was extremely delicious and the flesh was easy to extract and eat.  It was a great treat! This discovery led to increase our collection of  pawpaw fruit from from the trees as we kept walking.  We shook the trees so that the ripening fruit would drop to the ground.  Some of the riper fruit was consumed immediately.  This is what we ended up with to take back with us.

Unfortunately, some of the fruit that we had collected to take back was too ripe and would not hold its form when carried.  By the time we got back to the car, some of them had burst, and we had no choice but to consume them immediately.  But some fruit did make it home.  So we will be having really fresh fruit for the next few days.  An experiment will also be conducted with the seeds…