by Andrew Moore
Our booth offers many people their first taste of pawpaw. Jim Davis, Neal Peterson, and certainly everyone at this booth would rather have it that way; they recognize the importance of first impressions. “You can have a good pawpaw, and a real bad pawpaw,” Davis told me in his orchard. “And that’s why I caution people who collect in the wild. It’s a roll of the dice. You don’t know what you’re going to get. And if you had a bad experience it’ll probably turn you off for the rest of your life.” Not only can a wild, bitter pawpaw taste terrible, but under- or overripe fruit can be emetic. At this booth, however, with the fruit sent away in paper bags and offered as samples, Ken, Lance, and Nate know exactly what kind of experience each customer will have. They can’t guarantee everyone will appreciate the texture and flavor, but they can be confident in the quality of the product.
As a biologist, Ken Drabik is interested in pawpaws from a scientific perspective. “I’m really fascinated from the genetics point of view of it,” he says. “Ultimately when the pawpaw genome is sequenced, I feel quite confident we’re going to find some interesting genes, probably unique to fruit anywhere. Because even though they are part of the Annonaceae—which are indigenous to a very large area of South and Central America—they are very much removed from them as well.”
But it’s not just the science—he’s caught up in the excitement just like I have been, like Neal was, and like Stanton Gill’s pawpaw freak in central Maryland is. In fact, when Ken first drove to the festival straight from Chicago he soon went to work. “I didn’t leave the booth for like three hours,” he says. “I just stayed there and talked and talked—eating samples—and immediately I just jumped in and just helped him cutting fruit.”
“It’s very exciting to be a part of the rediscovery of the fruit, and trying to find a way for people to reintegrate pawpaws into their diets and into their lives, into American culture and into American commerce,” Ken says. “You kind of feel like you found a lost treasure.”
Ken, a backyard grower with about a dozen cultivars, drives the eight hours from Chicago each year. And several years ago, when the pawpaw crop from Maryland to Kentucky had been decimated by late frosts, he drove all the way to Deep Run, loaded what little fruit Jim could cobble together, then drove back to Ohio. “We were sold out within two hours,” he says. About twenty minutes later a group of four elderly women arrived, who had arranged to be driven the four hours from their nursing home and were heartbroken. They’d not had pawpaws in decades, and would have to wait another year. “I was just so devastated by this,” Ken says. “So I kind of feel a responsibility to come and have pawpaw.” And no matter how trendy pawpaws have become, if Ken and Nate and Lance hadn’t made this trip, and certainly if Jim Davis wasn’t growing them, this cultivated fruit would not appear at the festival. The producers are still few.
But most years there’s plenty of fruit to go around. And standing behind his booth Ken is often handing over pawpaw to men and women who haven’t tasted it in thirty or even fifty years. “Sharing in that joy that people have, it’s an experience you can’t beat,” he says. “There’s a thread interwoven between so many concepts, and individuals and organizations, and it’s just a nebulous and warm and wonderful energy.”
Although these improved cultivars are considered to be the best that exist, and at least twice the size of most wild pawpaws, Lance Beard still says the best pawpaw he ever had was as a child in the Missouri Ozarks. Lance was interested in nature and wildlife from a young age, but had not yet seen a pawpaw when he visited his great-uncle, the first person he’d met who actually had. So they rode in a pickup truck down to the bank of a small river and loaded up a bucket’s worth. Lance was told, “You just go set those on the windowsill till they start to smell really good, and that’s when you want to eat them.” None since—not even Deep Run Orchard’s—have lived up to that first pawpaw. “It had an intense caramel flavor. I loved it,” he says. “And I never saw a pawpaw again for twenty-five years. I thought they must only grow on that one riverbank in that one area in Ozark County, Missouri, and if I ever go visit there again and am lucky enough to go at the right time, maybe I’ll find some.” Years went by, and then the Internet came along. He read about the Ohio Pawpaw Festival and about Neal Peterson. Now he can’t help but work the festival every year.
“I wouldn’t say I prefer a wild pawpaw, because there’s too much variability,” Lance says. “But if you can get the pawpaw at the right time—which is generally when you’re standing under the tree and they just fall, and either you eat it right then or you take it back and put it in a sunny window—it’s just something different. Something different happens to the fruit.”
Yet Lance also recognizes the need for an appealing commercial fruit. “It’s hard to market something that you want to get wrinkly and brown and have an intense aroma of caramel that will fill up a room,” he admits. “That’s not what people are doing with these.”
Some folks taste the Peterson fruits then walk to purchase the smaller, less expensive pawpaws found elsewhere. There are two other vendors selling pawpaw this year. The Herbal Sage Tea Company—a wildcrafting business based in Athens—is offering fruit gathered from the local woods. I was at their booth Saturday morning, drinking fresh-brewed coffee, as a team of hired foragers unloaded a burlap sack of recently gathered pawpaws. They were then arranged on shelves from small to large, priced low to high, and as cheap as a dollar apiece.
Chris Chmiel, of course, sells pawpaws grown at his fifty-acre Integration Acres farm, as well as fruit gathered by his network of foragers. He started this festival to create buyers for that wild abundance. When that interest peaked, he found ways to incorporate the fruit into all manner of products. So along with his fresh fruit are pawpaw Popsicles, pawpaw autumn harvest chutney, pawpaw green tomato relish, pawpaw-spiceberry jam, various goat cheeses (produced from the goats that graze beneath his pawpaw trees), frozen pawpaw pulp, ramp crackers and ramp pasta—a full line of an Appalachia Ohio terroir. But there’s one item at the festival that draws the most attention: pawpaw beer.
Pawpaw growers love talking about pawpaw beer. Even the more reserved among them smile mischievously when conversation turns to the kegs at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, as conversations of the festival invariably do. Under the beer tent, cash is traded for tickets, which are then given to festival volunteers (the most coveted volunteer task) who pour your choice of beverage. This year’s offerings: Pawpaw Pale Ale from Zanesville’s Weasel Boy Brewing Company; Pawpaw Wheat from Athens’s Jackie O’s Pub & Brewery; Pawpaw Saison from Akron’s Thirsty Dog Brewing Co.; another pawpaw wheat from Cleveland’s Buckeye Brewing Company; non-alcoholic pawpaw soda from Athens’s Do It Yourself Shop; as well as your typical domestic drafts. But really, on this day, why would anyone choose to drink something without pawpaws?
You can taste the fruit in some of them, but for the most part it’s just kind of fun to say you’re drinking a pawpaw beer. And in keeping with Chmiel’s ethos, since all these wild pawpaws are produced each year, allowing them to ferment and be added to beer means they’ll at least get used. They’ll ferment readily, in a brewery’s tank or in the woods; you might as well control the process and create a quality beverage. Further, there’s a limit to how many pawpaws you can, or should, eat. But having them in a pint glass allows the celebration to continue.
To recap: that’s four pawpaw beers from four Ohio breweries. And all of the pulp used in making these brews is supplied by Chmiel. This is exactly Chmiel’s success: He has found willing co-conspirators. Beyond brewers, there’s Snowville Creamery, a local dairy that whips up pawpaw ice cream for the festival every year. In addition to farmers market sales, restaurants in downtown Athens feature pawpaw products (Fluff Bakery, for one, makes a rich pawpaw cheesecake). Pawpaw beers are on tap in local bars—Jackie O’s and Casa Nueva in Athens—and elsewhere throughout the state. Chmiel now supplies pulp for an heirloom pawpaw curd producer
in Chicago. And here at the festival, vendors are encouraged to make creative dishes with pawpaw—for which Chmiel also supplies the pulp.
This is a model that any pawpaw grower can follow. Find a local creamery or ice cream shop, find a brewery, find a willing, creative chef. If you’ve built these relationships before your first heavy crop comes in (even offering Chmiel’s pulp for early experimentation), there will be a local stream for the fruit. Chmiel certainly markets his products, but so does everyone who walks away from a good cup of pawpaw ice cream or enjoys a pint of pawpaw pale ale. The word-of-mouth enthusiasm for pawpaws is driven by these products—ice cream and beer—which, unlike pawpaws, are familiar and loved, and without a doubt will be consumed. So just add pawpaws.
Chmiel was also the first to offer a commercial, branded, frozen pawpaw pulp. For nearly twenty years Integration Acres has been successfully pulping and freezing the fruit on a scale that has yet eluded every other producer. And perhaps most important, the product is available year-round. Unless there’s a run on pawpaws, the pulp can be shipped anyplace, anytime.
Pawpaws do well in the freezer. Unlike other fruits, frozen pawpaw pulp keeps its bright yellow color and flavor for up to three years, though Integration Acres also adds ascorbic acid to its pulp, which helps. Integration Acres offers fourteen-ounce packs through its own website, and through distributors like Earthy Delights, for twelve dollars a pound. The bags are kept cool with ice packs and shipped overnight in Styrofoam coolers (the price per pound is not high, but the shipping rates cause the overall price to jump considerably). The availability of frozen pulp allows potential customers, from chefs and brewers to creameries and juice companies, to sample the product during any of the eleven non-pawpaw months. Even better, the unacquainted don’t have to fuss with pulping, peeling, and de-seeding the fruit, a time-sensitive and somewhat intimidating process, not to mention the uncertainty of fresh fruit arriving in good condition. The fruit’s short season has been a limiting factor to marketing over the decades, but Chmiel’s pulp goes a long way toward ameliorating that.
Most other large-scale pawpaw growers lament that they have no time to pulp the fruit, bag it, label it, freeze it, and market it, while simultaneously tending their orchards and other late-summer and fall crops (and, for most, other full-time careers). I can’t say for certain how Chmiel does it. When I first asked to tour his facility a few years ago, Chmiel was too busy with the festival, with the harvest, and with his campaign for county council (which he won). So this year, since Chmiel is giving a talk under the Pawpaw Tent, I take the opportunity to find out more about his process.
“At home, what we do is we wash them, and we take them in half, and we kind of squoosh them out.” Chmiel quickly demonstrates on an imaginary pawpaw. “And then if you have an onion bag, or a mesh bag, that works really well. Put them in the bag and most of the seeds will stay in the bag. We use some machinery for the seeds because we’re dealing with tons at a time sometimes, so there’s a way to do that.” I push for more clarification. “That’s pretty much it,” he says. “We wash them, we squoosh out the pulpy seeds, and then we take the seeds out, and then we freeze them.”
Later, while sampling food from various vendors, I gain some further insight on processing pawpaws from another Athens County resident. Since 1988, Brenda and her husband, Nisar, have operated the Ali Baba’s food carts in the Athens area. In 1994 the family bought a nearby home on six acres. While exploring the woods, her children found strange fruits growing along a stream. Brenda had no clue as to what they were. “They look kind of rotten,” she says, “And I said, ‘Oh, kids, don’t touch this stuff.’” It wasn’t until the first Ohio Pawpaw Festival—at which Ali Baba’s was a vendor—that Brenda learned that those strange wild fruits were pawpaws. Ali Baba’s has served its food at every festival, but recently Brenda began incorporating pawpaw into her homemade desserts: pawpaw fruit fudge, pawpaw spicebush cakes, and pawpaw marzipan. Brenda and her children harvest pawpaws growing on her property and bring them to the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks (ACEnet), a business incubator that, among other services, provides the commercial-grade kitchen facility required for most processed food products, such as jams, sauces, and pawpaw pulp. At ACEnet, along with industrial ovens, choppers, coolers, and freezers, is a machine called a pulper finisher that can separate seeds, skins, and stems from any number of fruits, including pawpaws. “When they came up with the machine at ACEnet, I said, ‘Oh, great, you guys take care of it,’” she says. “They can take out those seeds—because otherwise we’re cutting them in half, I was peeling them, and basically just mushing it up with my hands and pulling out the seeds. It just took forever.” ACEnet is another reason why Athens County is the pawpaw’s capital (ACEnet is also where Chmiel first began processing pawpaws before building a commercial facility at his own farm); there’s infrastructure that allows pawpaw growers and pickers to make efficient use of not only their fruit, but also their time.
On one morning of the festival, I join for breakfast a young couple who are cooking pancakes on a cast-iron griddle in the common area between tents. They currently live and work on a farm in Johnstown, Ohio where the wheat and eggs in the pancakes, as well as the maple syrup, were produced, but they’re looking for a homestead of their own, perhaps near Athens. One of their reasons for attending the festival is to investigate the local sustainable agriculture scene, a community that includes the likes of Snowville Creamery; innovators like Chris Chmiel; and Shagbark Seed & Mill, a new processing facility that produces, among other items, stone-ground heirloom corn and whole spelt flour. It’s the type of community where small, creative farmers can find support and partnerships.
Many at the festival, like the couple from Johnstown, are interested in pawpaws as a component of permaculture. Short for “permanent agriculture,” permaculture is a sustainable design system modeled on naturally occurring ecosystems. And the pawpaw, as a native plant resistant to the ravages of most pests, is the poster child for American permaculture. “A lot of these native plants, they’re just efficient,” Chmiel says. “You’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here. These things have been growing here for a long time.”
Chmiel’s Integration Acres is a model of that system. “When I started this whole thing, I put an ad in the paper,” he says. “I put a bounty on pawpaws.” He drove around southern Ohio gathering pawpaws from various property owners. “I went to this one guy’s house, he had a bunch of goats. And all he had left in his pasture were pawpaws.” Although goats are known for eating just about anything from tree branches to trash, Chmiel says they don’t eat pawpaws. Not the leaves, not the twigs, not the fruit. Like deer and various insects, they’re repelled by the plant’s Annonaceous acetogenins and other compounds. Chmiel confirms that pigs are also repelled by pawpaws. “I’ve raised hogs for years and have tried to feed them pawpaw skins and such . . . no luck,” he wrote in an email. “For whatever reason, I’ve never met a hog that liked a pawpaw.”
Permaculture principles suggest that animals and crops don’t need to be as segregated as they tend to be in conventional agriculture. “If you look at agriculture in general, most people are either plant people or they’re animal people,” Chmiel says. “I think if we can’t think more interdisciplinary, maybe we’re missing some opportunities to be more efficient.”
So Chmiel decided to raise his goats in the pawpaw orchard. This arrangement—the dense grouping of livestock and fruit crop—is economical for several reasons. First, space is not wasted. But further, with the goats’ manure spread throughout the pasture, Chmiel doesn’t need to buy fertilizers. “I don’t have to spend any time or energy,” he says, “my goats are working for me.” And the goats’ manure not only provides nutrients to the soil, but attracts pollinators as well.
Chmiel has pawpaw orchards, but he also collects from the wild. He cultivates patches on his own property as well those of his neighbors (his bounty on pawpaws s
till stands). But he doesn’t stop there. He will even plant trees on the edges of cow and horse pastures belonging to other property owners (a very Johnny Appleseed thing to do); fencerows are great locations for pawpaws.
When Chmiel started Integration Acres farm, he managed wild stands to make them even more productive. The first step was to remove canopy trees, the ashes and sycamores casting too much shade. Then he analyzed the fruit. Chmiel wrote notes directly onto the trunks of trees with a Sharpie marker on the quality of fruit, production load, whether it produced early or late season, and so on. Those with good qualities were kept; the poorer ones were removed. Thus an orchard was culled from the existing thickets. Rather than clear-cutting the land and replanting with grafted cultivars, he took what already grew and made it work better.
Chmiel also uses permaculture to address another concern: the handling of fallen fruit. He plants ground ivy, a wild mint, under his trees. “It has a lot of vines, and it builds this cushion,” he says. “Your pawpaws, they fall into that, they don’t even touch the ground. Then when you’re out there picking them up, it’s like finding Easter eggs.”
Integration Acres finds value in another wild Ohio crop: It processes black walnuts by the tens of thousands. Although many species of plants are killed by the juglone chemical released by the tree’s roots, twigs, and nuts, pawpaws aren’t—the two trees are forest companions. After processing tons of walnuts each fall, Chmiel uses the hulled shells as mulch in his pawpaw orchards. The juglone released by the nut hulls does not affect the pawpaws, but it does keep other weeds from growing. Everything is integrated. Chmiel says it’s “like turning trash into treasure.”
Others have begun intercropping in similar ways. On his tree farm in southern Indiana, George Hale planted more than three hundred black walnut trees for future timber harvests. In the meantime, though, he wanted to increase the land’s productivity, and so he decided to plant pawpaws, of which he is a great enthusiast, in between the rows of black walnut. The pawpaws were planted about ten years ago, and Hale says they are producing quite well. The presence of the pawpaws doesn’t detract from the value of the lumber, and Hale is rewarded with one of his favorite fruits. Elsewhere, in the parts of maple syrup country that overlap with the Pawpaw Belt, the fruit could find a similar niche in the sugarbush.