tricholabus mitchelli orchard

this weekend i went down to check on any remaining paw paws, and do a little looking around the property with a focus on identifying locations which might be good for planting the seeds i have. i did a lot of walking, and marked some locations as i walked through. i marked the trails i walked by dropping pins on a google map. later i connected the pins with lines and ended up with a pretty close representation of where the trails are.  it was an amazing day with great weather. highs in the low 70s the wind was gusty enough that the leaves were blowing out of the trees, and the leaves were big enough, and crunchy enough that it sounded like it was raining. i don't really care for poplar, but i was loving them on saturday.  there are a number of areas that could be great foraging fields. setting those up should be pretty easy. for now, i just need to plant some wild paw paw trees in the woods. i can do some clearing as i go, but for now the shade will help the paw paw grow. the ...

  after a night and a good bit of the day at my mom's i returned home to this smiling face, and an amazing smell. denise made paw paw bread! it was really good. she basically used her tried and true banana bread recipe, and subbed in paw paw pulp. its a winner!

 i think my plan is to put some seeds in the ground this fall so they can stratify naturally. I can't have a bunch of seeds in my fridge all winter. i think i will plant the seeds from the trees that have been most productive in an area to see if they can pollinate each other and make more seeds from highly productive trees. i might have an opportunity to go down to my mom's this weekend. if i have most of a day to spend down there i am not sure if it would be better to do more clearing than seed planting. there are a couple of trees that i would like to check, and probably some areas where i should do more exploring 

  so the big excitement here is that i chopped down a small tree. that is all. but it was the first major feeling thing. like i made a paw paw patch or something.  i also picked a few. enough to get an ice cube tray worth of pulp. we put some more pulp in a resealable zipper bag. i am writing this fairly after the fact, and can't seem to remember much of what i did. that's probably a good argument for writing more timely blog posts. it is also a good argument for why i am doing this blog in general.  

i need to come up with a plan. but i’m not sure that i am quite there yet. my last trip down still saw unripe fruit on trees. my original notes also have a stand of trees labeled “20+ fruit, multiple trees” in a spot which I have not been back to. i think my next trip down there is going to need to be to check that spot in particular. future trips will be to locate good patch locations.  at this point i don’t really have much to go on in terms of quality. i have some seeds from the cultivars that i got from the paw paw festival, and some more that i collected from the fruit i picked last friday. my thinking right now is to find a little patch that won’t be in my way for my wild cultivation or my future orchard. i also don’t want the seeds to mingle with the existing fruit. i will have to pick a spot for those to go in.  the seeds i have from the indigenous fruit i have fairly well separated. from this last harvest i organized them by productivity. within the trees that had the...

 made some pretty big progress with mapping recently. google my map let’s you edit and annotate maps muuuuch more extensively than google maps. adding notes to google maps is very limited. you can add a label with a note and a marker, but that’s about it. google my maps let’s you change the marker to different icons and different colors. the best part though, is that I was able to overlay a grid. there are paw paws all over my mom’s land and the surrounding areas. i need a way to track the quality of paw paws and the productivity of the trees. sectioning off the property in a grid, and the numbering the trees in that grid cell. each cell has a two letter cartesian designation, and as i identify trees, i think the two letters and a number will suffice.