Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  John Popenoe, a former director of the Fairchild Botanical Garden (1963–89) and former horticulturalist for the Federal Agricultural Marketing Service, was another of the volunteers (Popenoe happened to be the son of Paul Popenoe, and nephew to Wilson Popenoe, plant explorers and scientists who were colleagues of David Fairchild’s). Ray Jones, who in 1991 began publishing the The Pawpaw Tracker newsletter in California, even traveled cross-country to assist Neal in his experiments. There were others, including Zhanibek Suleimenov, Stevik Kretzmann, and Lorraine Gardner, devoted friends and volunteers, helping to pick fruit, conduct taste tests, and clean seed.

  In 1988, Neal formed the PawPaw Foundation, a nonprofit with the goal “of contributing to a pawpaw revival by promoting scientific research in the areas of pawpaw breeding, growing, managing, harvesting, fruit quality, and use.” Also in the early 1990s, Brett Callaway was in the process of establishing the Kentucky State University Pawpaw Program; by 1994, KSU became the USDA National Clonal Germplasm Repository (or gene bank) for Asimina triloba. A small but dedicated force of pawpaw enthusiasts, both amateur and professional, was beginning to coalesce, and Neal was very much at the heart of the movement.

  “I think it will take about another 25 years to get the strengths and weaknesses of various varieties sorted out and to get breeding programs going,” Neal told the Washington Post’s Hank Burchard in 1999. “But it’s going to be fun all the way; we can have our fruit and eat it, too.”1

  Around this time, Neal knew of a few farmers planting large, commercial pawpaw orchards. With his advanced selections emerging, he was ready for the same. In 1998 he bought property in Pendleton County, West Virginia. After nearly two decades of work, he would finally have his own orchard on his own land. The project required more than a quarter million dollars. He retired from the USDA and, to finance the orchard, cashed in his pension early. He gambled everything.

  Pendleton is a thinly populated, remote county in West Virginia, located at the headwaters of the Potomac River. Here, Neal planted a ten-acre farm of three thousand grafted seedlings that were all a year and a half old. Unfortunately, 1999—the year his trees arrived—would record the worst drought in seventy-five years. Pendleton County hadn’t been this dry since the Great Depression; even the region’s corn crop failed. The young transplants never stood a chance.

  Neal had been on a tight schedule, he says. He retired in 1998, and the grafted trees arrived the next spring. He had no way of knowing what that summer would bring. If the trees arrived just one year later there would have been no drought, and the trees would have been older and stronger. Perhaps Neal would today be the owner of a successful commercial pawpaw orchard. Instead, he lost the farm. “Maybe there’s a bit of an American tradition to go all out and place everything you’ve got on the bet,” Neal says, “and, well, that’s what I did. Including my pension.” He invested everything, his entire retirement from the USDA, on pawpaws, and he lost. “You can say, ‘Pawpaws or bust,’ and I went bust.”

  As devastating as the experience in Pendleton County was, his second-round crosses at the Wye orchard were beginning to produce. Neal had studied, analyzed, crossed, grafted, and regrown the superior varieties. And now the pawpaws were going to market.

  Neal had data; he knew what impressed his friends and colleagues; he’d partnered in Regional Variety Trials with a number of universities in half a dozen states; and KSU’s pawpaw research program was now nine years old. For a short while Neal would cold-call chefs at DC restaurants, dropping off boxes of fruit to get feedback and stimulate interest. But there was a still a big, nagging question. “What do people think of these things?” To find out, Neal decided to bring pawpaws to market in the nation’s capital.

  “We need to select superior varieties that are good enough and might be the basis of a farming commodity, that could take their place along with other fruits,” Neal says. At that time, so few people were growing them—typically just one or two trees in a yard because of a regional interest in Appalachia, Ohio, and Indiana. “Pawpaw deserves more than that,” he says. “That’s why we started selling at the farmers market”—to bring pawpaws to the people.

  The Dupont Circle FreshFarm market was established in 1997. At its peak each summer the market features forty farmers offering fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, cheeses, pies, breads, fresh pasta, cut flowers, and soaps and herbal products. The historic neighborhood—gentrified, educated, and with disposable income—was an ideal proving ground for the pawpaw as a high-value commodity. The fruit was labor-intensive and wouldn’t be cheap. Despite Neal’s faith, and his decades of work, it was still unknown whether anyone would actually want to buy and eat them.

  Every Saturday Neal made the hour-and-a-half drive from the Eastern Shore to DC. The fruit was picked Monday through Friday, and the next morning it was ready to go. By midday, market work could be as exhausting as the orchard: rise early, drive, unload, stand on concrete, and attempt to explain to first-time customers, briefly, what these strange-looking fruits were.

  On September 17, the Friday before market day, the Washington Post ran a three-page spread about pawpaws, with color photos, recipes, and a summary of Neal’s work. “Science has discovered a tree that bears delicious fruit, kills bugs and fights cancer,” Hank Burchard wrote. You couldn’t buy this kind of hype. He went on: “Ripe fruit can be hard to find, unless you have your own secret pawpaw patch. Happily, this Sunday fresh pawpaws from one of Neal Peterson’s research groves will be offered at the Dupont Circle farmers’ market.” The story would prove to be an incredible break.2

  Before the market’s opening bell had rung, a line had formed thirty people deep, all intent on buying pawpaws. They had come from across the region, as far as Baltimore, people who hadn’t eaten one since childhood. “And that of course is a very significant event for pawpaw eaters,” Neal says. “‘I haven’t had one since I was a boy!’ ‘I haven’t had one since I was a girl,’ they’ll say. ‘I remember loving them so much!’” There was a mystery to pawpaws. In these people’s minds, pawpaws had vanished, and all of a sudden they’d reappeared on Neal Peterson’s market table.

  Other vendors looked on with amazement; Neal was sure they were wishing for that kind of attention, buy-in, and devotion. Buyers were filled with child-like wonder. What are these things and why haven’t I heard of them? People wanted entire boxes, which held twenty-three pieces. “Five dollars a pound, and people didn’t flinch,” Neal says. Customers were rationed to two pawpaws. “Can you imagine that?” Neal laughs. They had brought all the pawpaws they could pick and sold out in two hours. There wasn’t a moment’s pause in the selling. Subsequent weeks and years weren’t equal to that, he said, but, “With rare exception, we always sold out.”

  Apples have Golden Delicious, Arkansas Black, Granny Smith, Pink Lady, Sundance, and Pumpkin Sweet. Tomatoes: Black from Tula, Cherokee Purple, Jubilee, Yellow Pear, Pritchard’s Scarlet Topper, and Pink Accordion. And pears: Bon Rouge, Elektra, Harvest Queen, Moonglow, and Luscious. Clearly, pawpaws would need great names too. But giving out names requires discretion. “You only give a name to it when you have that certainty, and you’re going to release it to the public,” Neal says, “pretty much like naming a child.” For a few years Neal stuck to numbers as identifiers. Some customers at the DuPont Circle market even came to know which particular fruits they liked, 2-9 or 1-7-1, for example, and would ask for them each week. But 1-7-1, as a named variety, isn’t too friendly. It isn’t warm and inviting. It certainly doesn’t tell a story. “It’s like a Social Security number rather than a name,” Neal says.

  Consumers at the market identified 1-7-1 as a fabulous fruit, which didn’t surprise Neal. “I’d been growing these things since they were seeds,” he says. “I watched them grow up and flower and start to fruit. But it wasn’t a surprise to me, a shock, that this was a good tree, a good fruit.” Neal recalls his friend Stevik, who taste tested, picked, and sol
d fruit at the DC market, asking him, “Why do we bother with any of those other varieties? This is the very best.” But that wasn’t Neal’s philosophy. He wanted a diverse selection for genetics, but also because different people have different tastes.

  Nurserymen acquainted with Neal’s work encouraged him to release his varieties to the public. Jim Gilbert recalls how frustratingly careful and meticulous Neal was, not wanting to release any inferior, untested cultivars. “We kept telling him, ‘Let them out, let people grow these!’” he laughs.

  Neal eventually chose to name his cultivars for American rivers with Indian names, a tribute to the pawpaw’s native habitat and to its original horticulturalists. And so 1-7-1, this exceptional fruit, became Shenandoah.

  After three years at Dupont Circle, Neal’s market experiment was finished. In 2003 his company, Peterson Pawpaws, began online sales of his trademarked, patented varieties: Allegheny, Susquehanna, Shenandoah, Wabash, Potomac, and Rappahannock. The world’s best pawpaws were now available to anyone who wanted them. Kentucky State University’s Kirk Pomper says, “For a plant breeder to come up with even one great, or two great varieties in their lifetime is an achievement. You think, Neal came up with maybe five—that’s the lifetime achievement award in plant breeding right there as far as I’m concerned.”

  In the early 1990s, an opportunity arose that could have been a monumental breakthrough. A product development specialist from Ocean Spray wanted to experiment with pawpaws. Neal was ecstatic. This was it! And all he had to do was ship one ton of pawpaw pulp to Ocean Spray’s facilities in Massachusetts. But a ton was impossible. Neal was only producing a couple hundred pounds. Even combined with other growers of high-quality fruit, it still wouldn’t be enough. It couldn’t be done.

  If Neal had been able to supply Ocean Spray, and if they had developed a marketable product, it clearly would have been a game changer for pawpaw as a crop. But this wasn’t the case. And the inability for anyone to supply Ocean Spray with enough pawpaws was a red flag for the problem of developing pawpaws: If consumer interest grows, will there be enough fruit to go around?

  Pawpaws needed to be broadly marketed—something that an Ocean Spray juice would have absolutely accomplished—but there was a risk that demand, or nascent, budding interest, would outpace supply. It wasn’t hard to imagine interest growing exponentially. Just look at kiwi and pomegranate, even açaí and other so-called superfruits that seemingly overnight were added to all manner of juices and products. But it wouldn’t amount to anything if there wasn’t enough fruit.

  It’s one thing for a traditional farmer to add a patch of heirloom, organic tomatoes; to add a few apple trees in an established peach orchard. Apples and tomatoes have a reliable, proven market. But to plant a pawpaw orchard, a tree fruit for which there isn’t really any demand, a tree fruit that needs six years of waiting before it produces—a period filled with a good amount of anxiety over who is going to buy these strange things if they ever do produce—is a far different thing. Neal had lost his farm in Pendleton County. Who else was willing to take the risk? Who would come along and plant an entire pawpaw orchard?

  — CHAPTER EIGHT —

  IN THE ORCHARD

  In rural Carroll County, Maryland, two-lane roads pass woodlots, hunt clubs, and small farmsteads. It is quaint, unassuming, well-kept country. But turn right onto a narrow, one-lane drive, climb a small hill shaded by thick woods of hickory and oak, and you’ll see something rather unusual. The very top of the hill is treeless, cut open to the sky, making the landscape look like the smooth dome of a friar’s tonsure. After a bit of grass and wildflowers the compact, orderly rows of Deep Run Orchard appear, where Jim and Donna Davis operate the largest commercial pawpaw orchard in the country: more than a thousand trees on five acres.

  Even if there were hundreds of pawpaw orchards, theirs would stand out as exceptional. The Davises pick and ship two to three tons of fruit—up to six thousand pounds—each year. Every pawpaw person in the know speaks of Deep Run with reverence. So I’ve come to the Davises’ orchard this September to help pick and pack fruit, to learn firsthand what a first-rate commercial pawpaw orchard should look like.

  When Jim bought the land in 1996, it was fallow, a former cornfield. Since then, he and Donna have built a beautiful home just a few yards from the orchard and are two decades into reforesting the rest of the property, planting sweetbay and umbrella magnolias, red maples, oaks, and other native trees. Jim raised and released bobwhite quail and ruffed grouse, the first young fowl to browse this hilltop in decades. Ensconced by nature, the two are at home; Donna is a forester for the state of Maryland, and though he is an indoor landscaper by profession, Jim too is an outdoorsman and naturalist at heart. The interior of their home is decorated with Jim’s collection of Indian arrowheads, many collected on Youghiogheny River canoe trips. Among their artwork is a print of Audubon’s colored engraving of the now-extinct Carolina parakeet.

  In addition to reforesting and reintroducing wildlife, Jim also wanted an active farm project. Carroll County extension agent Tom Ford introduced Jim to Neal Peterson in the early 1990s. Neal was then looking for a site in Maryland for one of his Regional Variety Trials. Jim had eaten wild pawpaws in the past, but Neal’s cultivars really impressed him. The two became fast friends. Once, I asked Neal what he was most proud of looking back on his career. His friendship with Jim Davis ranked at the top.

  Jim is soft-spoken and kind, but beneath his easygoing demeanor is a stubborn experimentalist. “I don’t like people telling me I can’t do something,” he says.

  Most people he talked to said it just wouldn’t work, that there’s simply no market for pawpaws. “That’s what intrigued me in the beginning, the challenge of trying to introduce this fruit to the market,” Jim says. “And in the beginning, I really had no idea if this was going to work or not.”

  “I think a challenge and a difficult pursuit motivates him,” Neal Peterson says. “And he obviously has ambition. He didn’t just plant a couple trees in the backyard.” Indeed, Jim’s orchard has grown steadily from one acre to five. He has invested in irrigation, cold storage, and a barn’s worth of farm equipment—all things a commercial orchard needs—not to mention countless hours of hard work. And, like Neal’s attempt in Pendleton, it was all a gamble.

  The majority of Jim’s fruit is shipped overnight to high-end customers through marketers and distributors like Heritage Foods and Earthy Delights. Last year, retail customers paid a hundred dollars for a ten-pound box of pawpaws. A majority of that cost is in shipping; boxes are overnighted to customers from a facility in Westminster. If you’ve ever eaten pawpaw in New York City, in a restaurant’s dish or from a specialty grocer, chances are the fruit came from Deep Run.

  Like most pawpaw growers, and plenty other farmers, the Davises have careers outside the orchard. Throughout the year, pawpaws demand a certain amount of attention—watering, fertilization, pruning, pollination, and so on. But when the fruit is dropping there’s time for nothing else. “Sunrise to sunset,” Jim says. Donna took vacation days to be in the orchard this week; Jim somehow makes it work.

  Jim was happy to show me the ropes, but most years he doesn’t hire outside help. Picking pawpaws, especially for Davis’s high-end customers, must be done carefully. It’s certainly not as intuitive as gathering nuts, nor as forgiving as harvesting apples, pears, or bananas. The treatment of oranges, piled atop one another and left to rest for days under the hot Florida sun in the back of a tractor trailer, would be an unthinkable way to handle pawpaws.

  Unfortunately, there’s little in the way of color change or color break to guide a pawpaw picker. Most pawpaws won’t turn from green to yellow while on the tree. Rather, it’s all in the touch. Each pawpaw must be given a gentle squeeze between forefinger and thumb, feeling for the slightest bit of give. This means Jim and Donna test each pawpaw, multiple times, before harvesting. More than six thousand poun
ds are handled this way—that’s three tons of fruit checked, rechecked, and finally handpicked.

  If a pawpaw is picked too early, it never ripens; if you wait too long, it falls. I know of at least one other grower who pads the ground with beds of straw. Foragers, meanwhile, are able to gather fruit from the forest floor and still make sales at markets. But due to food safety regulations, Jim won’t sell those that hit the ground. And he’s had a few bad experiences, including helpers picking fruit too early (a waste), and fruit handled too roughly, which then bruises and discolors. “I’m getting a little older now,” Jim says, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at him, “so occasionally we have a few family members come in, but it’s just mainly my wife and myself.”

  We spend most of the first day hauling fruit. Our first stop is to Macbride & Gill Falcon Ridge Farm. Stanton Gill, who runs the farm with his wife and kids, buys ninety pounds of pawpaw. He will resell the fruit—along with his own Asian pears, cherries, apples, grapes, blueberries, figs, and currants, depending on the season—at farmers markets, but also takes fruits to restaurants, another important aspect of the business that Jim just doesn’t have time for. “They’re looking for local-grown fruit that you can’t get other places, and looking for unusual,” Stanton says. “And this fits right under the bill for them.” Not far from Deep Run, in Westminster, Bud’s at Silver Run recently served flambéed pawpaw ice cream for one of their wine dinners. The ice cream was made by South Mountain Creamery, a dairy in nearby Middletown. Jim hopes a local winery or brewery will also become interested in pawpaws.