Pawpaw
Asimina triloba
Shade as a seedling, sun as a tree, and roots that must never dry — moisture is the whole of it.
- Type
- Fruit · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Flower color
- Yellow
- Sunlight
- Full sun once mature, but shade over the young trees.
- Watering
- Keep it consistently moist; drought is what it minds most.
- Feeding
- A balanced feed in spring, over a generous compost mulch.
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Flowering
- May
- Pruning
- Little to do beyond clearing dead wood in late winter.
- Apr–May Bud Break
- May–Jun Flowering
- Jun–Sep Fruit Set
- Sep–Nov Harvest
- Nov–Dec Leaf Fall
- Jan–Apr Leaf Fall
- Plant spacing
- 9 ft 10 in
- In-row spacing
- 9 ft 10 in
- Between rows
- 14 ft 9 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody, with a taproot it keeps
- Working depth
- 24 in–5 ft
- Can reach
- 10 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 20–33 ft across, about 1.5–2.5× the width of the plant
It anchors downwards as well as sideways, which is what lets it stand in a gale and what makes it hate being moved. Plant it small: past a few years in the ground a taprooted tree transplants badly, and often not at all.
A brittle taproot and very few fine roots, so a pawpaw resents being moved more than almost any other fruit tree: plant it small, from a deep pot, and do not disturb it again. It suckers into a patch from the roots, which is what it does in the wild.
The habit is Pawpaw’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- Generally trouble-free No notable pest or disease problems when grown in the right conditions — one of the easy ones.
Comfrey, Clover, Wildflowers
Green-leaved fruit, like this one.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com