Don’t pooh-pooh the pawpaw: Unfamiliar fruit could catch on
Waterford farm has been growing them for a while and is now selling trees
Waterford — Growing on five trees at Hunts Brook Farm are pawpaws — large, oblong fruit that are now light green, blending in with the leaves, but will be brown or even black when they ripen in September and October.
When cut open, they are yellow on the inside and contain large black seeds.
The fruit has a “cross flavor between a pear, banana and pineapple, so it sort of tastes like it should be a tropical fruit,” said Rob “Digga” Schacht, owner of Hunts Brook Farm in Quaker Hill. “They call them apple custard fruits in the islands.”
Schacht has been growing pawpaw trees since he got them from Old Saybrook farmer David Brown, of the Hay House, about 10 years ago. But he just started selling the trees this year.
Schacht said he sold 15-20 trees as part of the farm’s annual plant sale, held the third weekend in May. His customer base is largely people who tasted the fruit once or twice before and really liked it but have struggled to find it.
“It’s all an experiment, really,” Schacht said of selling the trees. “I had one person contact me who said the trees didn’t make it, and I had another person saying they had.”
But it will take a few years for the trees to mature and produce fruit, so the jury is still out on whether the taste of the fruit will be worth the hassle of keeping the trees, which thrive under shade trees, from taking over a yard.
The five pawpaw trees at Hunts Brook Farm appear to be neatly contained, but to keep them as such, Schacht has had to take out many shoots growing from the bottom.
The odds are most people aren’t familiar with the fruit or the trees. So what is a pawpaw?
It’s a small deciduous tree with large, simple leaves and roots that spread underground to form pawpaw patches.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the indigenous region for the pawpaw stretches from Northern Florida to upstate New York and Ontario, and to the westernmost parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
The easternmost area is Fairfield County, and Schacht said he has never seen a wild pawpaw in the woods of southeastern Connecticut.
He recommends that those seeking the fruit try the farmers market in Chester or Waterford but said he has never seen one in a grocery store. Schacht has sold his pawpaws to restaurants a few times, and he said the Oyster Club in Mystic made pawpaw brulee with them about four years ago.
The largest edible fruit native to this country, pawpaws have three times as much vitamin C as an apple and are also high in potassium, iron, manganese, riboflavin and niacin.
It’s tough for Schacht to say how many people in the area grow pawpaw trees.
“Who knows how many people out there have them and they just eat them and don’t talk about them and don’t sell them?” he said.
But he does feel that pawpaws were “suddenly all the rage” after coverage from NPR in the last several years. Sally Halsey, director of the Eastern Connecticut Community Gardens Association, said the tree has popped up in conversation a couple of times recently.
But Richard and Chris Ladyga, who have a profusion of pawpaws on their property but have never tasted their yield, don’t understand the appeal.
When Chris found out Schacht was selling pawpaw trees at Hunts Brook Farm, she asked if he warned people. Earlier this year, Chris and Richard Ladyga had a clear path to the shed at the back of their 1-acre property on Bindloss Road in Mystic. But now it’s all overgrown.
“Anybody who wants to buy one has to understand that these guys are ferocious,” Chris Ladyga said. “They’re worse than poison ivy.”
Asked if there’s anything she likes about her pawpaw trees, she paused and then said they likely help as a noise buffer against traffic from Interstate 95, which abuts the backyard. Her husband chimed in that at least trees are good for cleaning the air.
The reason they have the trees to begin with, Chris Ladyga said, is that a previous owner of the house was a tree wholesaler. Along with pawpaws, the Ladygas have mimosa, pink dogwood, evergreen, black walnut and hickory trees.
They weren’t able to identify the pawpaws as such when they moved in nine years ago but got more information by reaching out to Maggie Jones, executive director of the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center.
Jones feels it’s a tree that doesn’t get much love.
“Some folks are more interested in naturalistic landscaping, but most aren’t, so they plant a tree where they want one tree,” she said. Jones added of pawpaws, “They send out lots of roots, and pretty soon you’re spending lots of time trying to cut down all the little suckers.”