Aaron von Frank

Hi James! Sounds like a perfectly good plan for your pawpaw seeds. We’ve never seen radicle development on our pawpaw seeds until conditions are ideal for germination, namely: 1) adequate cold stratification, 2) consistent warmer soil temps, AND 3) ideal moisture. You won’t be able to get criteria #2 and #3 met until your seeds are in their smaller pots outdoors. Best of luck!

Aaron von Frank

Interesting, thanks Jason! Do you happen to know if you got a named pawpaw variety or a wild type? As mentioned in the article, we’ve heard various pawpaw breeders claim that they’ve developed self-fertile varieties, so perhaps you have one of those? Or perhaps you got lucky and found a wild pawpaw that happens to be self-fertile.

Another possibility is that you have wild pawpaws growing fairly close by that you don’t know about. This is a less likely scenario since they’d have to be pretty close to your pawpaw tree for pollination to occur since pawpaws are fly-pollinated, not bee-pollinated. Ergo you’d probably be able to see the wild pawpaw trees without much searching.

Aaron von Frank

Great questions, Cady, thanks! My thoughts on your three questions:

1. Yes, we recommend keeping your pawpaw saplings in pots/containers for the first few years. That’s because young pawpaws (up to ~3 years old) actually don’t do well in full sun. They’re adapted to grow as understory plants that only grow large once there’s an opening in the canopy (a larger tree falls) or an opening at the edge of a body of water/river. You can mimic this growth pattern by starting them in containers and keeping them in part shade during the warm months (especially afternoon shade) until they’re 4-5 years old, after which you transplant them to their final full-sun spots.

It’s also very easy to cold-stratify pawpaw seeds using this method. I always take a bunch of seeds from particularly large, tasty pawpaws and plop them in a pot to overwinter outdoors. They then cold stratify and stay wet on their own with zero work required. Then they germinate in the spring. I’ll grow ~10 saplings in a 1-gallon pot this way until they’re 2 year old dormant saplings. I then separate out the individual saplings, pot them up into larger individual containers while the plants are still dormant in late winter, being careful not to do too much damage to the roots. I’ve never lost a sapling this way. (Be sure to use potting mix, not garden soil or you risk soil compaction and poor root development.)

I think pawpaw’s reputation as not being easy to transplant is probably due to people digging up wild saplings/runners and doing significant root damage prior to attempted transplant.

2. No, I wouldn’t recommend bringing your containers inside to overwinter unless you want to make extra work for yourself and cause a bit of plant stress by not letting them experience winter/dormant period, which is actually good for plants adapted to do as such.

Pawpaws are extremely cold-hardy so they won’t be damaged outdoors in pots in your Ag Zone. And since rain is free and doesn’t require you to produce it, that’s something else you don’t have to remember to do.

You could feasibly continue to grow pawpaw saplings in containers for up to 5 years, but you’d need some fairly large containers by year 5, prob 5 gallons or so.

3. We put mulch over our pawpaw seeds prior to germination and also keep mulch in the pots for however long until we transplant them out. With the saplings, you don’t want to bury the trunks or you can rot and kill the plants since they don’t form adventitious roots. So: not too thick a mulch layer, and taper it down to the soil line as it approaches the sapling trunk.

The reason for mulch: it reduces weed seed germination in your pots, and it helps maintain more even soil moisture and soil temps in the pots. I have no actual scientific data to support this, but since pawpaws: a) tend to grow in forests with deep leaf litter on the forest floors, b) are later stage plants in ecological succession, and c) likely have numerous species of symbiont mycorrhizal partners, mulch helps both mimic that environment and promote a more fungal-dominated soil system.