Raleigh Pawpaw

09/07/2025

Thank you to everyone who came out to the pawpaw field day in Winston Salem! Also congrats to Ryan, who won our 2 pound 5 ounce Potomac fruit! This was my 5th year at this event and I always enjoy talking pawpaws with people. So much so this year that I forgot to take more pictures.

09/06/2025

Winston Salem pawpaw field day tomorrow (Saturday)! I'm sad to say it looks like I won't have pawpaw fruit for sale, but we'll have grafted trees, Raleigh Pawpaw shirts, beauty berries, stickers, and a home grown + homemade pear vinegar (doesn't contain pawpaw). Also we'll be raffling off this 2 pound 5 ounce pawpaw!! I've heard a few other vendors will likely have some pawpaw fruit.

Center logo for the shirt done by and she designed and made all the stickers too!

2026 pawpaw season is a long way off, we hope for a much better crop!

08/31/2025

08/30/2025

Halvin, or Halvin's Side Winder, came out of Iowa from a wild selection. Iowa is on the very Northwestern edge of the pawpaw native range. Halvin has been reported to be early ripening and have excellent cold hardiness, but here in Raleigh this cluster ripened just this week. I pulled 2 soft fruits from the cluster and let them ripen on the counter for a few days, then went back and collected the rest of the cluster yesterday, August 29th. This is another branch from a multi-graft tree that had its first ripe fruit weeks ago, and the rootstock's wild fruit has ripened as early as the last week of July. The fruits are generally supposed to be medium in size, like those pictured here. Despite the tree being scraggly after being grown in a pot until flowering age, it's doing well enough to support these cultivar branches.

Aroma: honey, melon, hint of pineapple

Flavor: pineapple, honey, melon, ripe cantaloupe, hints of citrus. The flavor itself is very well balanced and not overly sweet.

Texture: great to excellent. Creamy, not mushy.

Skin: good, fairly thick, minor blemishes

08/29/2025

The spotted lanternfly is rapidly spreading in NC! With two new county detections in the state just this year, it is important to know what to look for with our new scouting guide!
Learn what to look for, when and where to look, and what to do if you discover them.
https://forestry.ces.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Spotted-Lanternfly-Scouting-Guide-4.pdf?fwd=no

08/21/2025

Last year on August 20th I harvested 30 pounds of pawpaw. Today I got about 3 pounds. The figs and hazelnuts filled my basket more. It's great to see my other plants maturing and producing, but I'm not Raleigh Hazelnut 😭

08/16/2025

Harvesting some of the pawpaw in this low yield year.

Harvesting pawpaws and talking about different cultivars - Potomac, Susquehanna, Shenandoah, Wells, Pennsylvania Golden, Prolific

08/07/2025

This is a painful and necessary update, but the harvest in my orchard this year will be minimal. Last year was the first "good" year for the initial 80 or so trees that were planted in Spring and Fall 2020. Even though the trees really took off last year, I have less than a hundred fruit on the trees, whereas last year I had about 100 pounds. I was expecting double or more this year. We had a beautiful Spring with plenty of rain, but about a 10 day period of cold weather and heavy rain in the beginning of April at the start of peak bloom. There wasn't a freeze, but I believe the very heavy rain knocked all the pollen out of the flowers, then I didn't see pollinators for about a week and a half. Despite doing my best to attract flies with manure and hand pollination later, there was a lousy fruit set.

08/01/2025

Today's lesson: always label, take pictures, and notes on your orchard plants and cultivars! It took me an hour to search through pictures and videos to confirm this broken label was a VE-21 pawpaw cultivar on a tree I grafted multiple varieties to! All I had was a scion order receipt and a video from 2023 that I took a year after I grafted them in 2022. I later found the broken label I had saved, but if I can't confirm 100% which cultivar I have, I can't in good conscience sell scions, fruit, or select seed by that name! Anyway, I'll try this VE-21 fruit for the first time this year!

07/31/2025

Jerry's Big Girl is a big winner. This pawpaw is one of the most unique I have tasted. A cross between Sunflower and Sam Norris 15 created this unique pawpaw cultivar, bred by the late Jerry Lehman. Sometimes referred to as JBG or its orchard research name 250-39, Jerry's Big Girl has placed 1st in the Ohio Pawpaw Festival contest for both Best Pawpaw and Biggest Pawpaw categories over the years. Under the right conditions, it has been known to produce fruit over 1 pound regularly. This is also the only cultivar I've tasted so far with a distinctive peach flavor! This one was also a little bruised - it went from Nektar Flow Farms in Indiana to the Ohio Pawpaw Festival then here to North Carolina before I took pictures and tasted it in 2024. This fruit was 7 ounces.

Aroma- ripe peach, papaya, mango, pineapple, hints of honey

Flavor- peach! Pineapple, hint of citrus rind bitterness

Texture- thin, creamy, light on the tongue

Skin- on the thin side

07/31/2025

They’re native. They’re creamy. They’re vanishing.
Learn to grow and savor pawpaws before the season slips away.

Workshop on Saturday, August 2 at 9am - includes a pawpaw tasting and 10% off any same day Pawpaw tree purchase! Sign up at https://windingstairfarm.com/

03/22/2025

Spring ephemeral hike with coordinated by