365 IN 365 - Rare Treat

Jennifer Armstrong is the creator of this series of posts, published bi-monthly, entitled 365 in 365. These posts will help guide us all as we accept the 6D opportunity to diversify our plants in order to nurture and nourish our microbiome and thus improve our health and wellness. You can join us for this year-long event either via our 365 Facebook group or by following along via our 365 website page.

I am a lifelong gardener, and that means everything that a person with a green thumb can do in a house and yard. In other words, no orchard, farm, or vineyard, but flowers, shrubs, vegetables, herbs, berries, ornamental trees, and houseplants. But it’s only been in the last couple of years that I have developed an interest in native plant cultivation. As a plant-based eater, I’m very conscious of plants, and food plants in particular. I’m sure you are, too. My growing concern about pollinators and their decline - and the impact that can have on the food web - has steered my gardener’s attention to native plants.

So, nerd that I am, I have done a deep dive into native plants, including edible native plants. That is how I learned about the pawpaw, North America’s largest indigenous edible fruit. Botanically, their family is native to the Caribbean and South America, but the pawpaw split off from its cousins a very very long time ago, and established itself as a cold-hardy tree with a range up and down the eastern part of North America, even up into Canada. Lewis and Clark found and ate pawpaws on their journey west. Jefferson grew pawpaws at Monticello. Indigenous people throughout the lands east of the Mississippi ate pawpaws and utilized other parts of the tree. The tree is an understory tree, growing about 15 to 20 feet tall. It used to be common for people to have pawpaw trees in their gardens, or to go foraging in the woods for pawpaw patches in the late summer, early autumn. There was a time when pawpaws were well known.

So why have you (probably) never seen a pawpaw in a store, or on a menu, or eaten one? The fruit is sweet, similar in texture to a mango, reminiscent in flavor of a banana or other tropical fruits. The fruits are vaguely bean-shaped, ranging in size from crab apple to pear to mango. They look like stubby green bananas, and a bowl of pawpaws will perfume your kitchen with a sweet, floral fragrance. It seems like they should have a broad audience.

The reason you (probably) haven’t met them lies in their delicacy. Pawpaws ripen and fall, and almost immediately begin to spoil. The flesh is very soft. Their very delicacy makes them unsuitable for any kind of commercial agriculture - they don’t last long enough to ship, and they don’t ripen off the trees so you can’t pick them green. Like truly perfect sweet corn - where you start the big pot of water boiling before you go pick the corn - pawpaws must be eaten where they grow.

Naturally, as I learned about the pawpaw I felt that I absolutely just had to try them. And of course I planted two in my back yard as soon as I the spring arrived. I put my request for pawpaws to eat out to the universe, - i.e. Facebook - and the universe answered. “There’s a guy…” a local friend told me. “Get on his list.” So I contacted the guy, and I got on his list. And this morning I got the text message. “How many pawpaws do you want?”

Gentle Reader, I acquired about two pounds of pawpaws. The guy lives in an average subdivision not far from my town, and in his back yard he has two mature pawpaw trees - very pretty in shape, about fifteen feet tall. As the fruit ripens he collects it and then he goes down his list and sees who wants them. He told me he had someone driving from New Hampshire (I am in upstate New York) to get a bag full. That’s at least a couple of hundred miles! The fruits are indeed just as advertised: soft, sweet, custardy, like a mango and a banana had a baby. There are large inedible seeds, and the skins are inedible; getting the fruit out is a bit of a mess, but they are lovely. I can well imagine the delight of generations of North American indigenous people and settlers and homesteaders, keeping a watchful eye on the pawpaw trees as the fruit began to ripen: waiting for the soft thump of the fruit hitting the ground, and then gathering around to eat them before the raccoons and porcupines and bears and deer and squirrel had their fill, licking the juice from their fingers, and then throwing the seeds into the woods to become the pawpaw trees for their children and grandchildren. What a welcome gift they must have been.

I don’t mind that they won’t show up at the grocery store. There are some things that are made special by their scarcity and finickiness. A rare treat will always be a rare treat. I’m hoping that the trees I planted will bear fruit in another ten years or so, and I’ll let you know if that happens. But meanwhile, if you find out that there’s a guy… get on his list.

About Jennifer Armstrong

Jennifer Armstrong has spent her life making things; she has had a long career of writing books for children, decades of gardening, painting, making music, and cooking. A 2023 graduate of the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies course in Plant- Based Nutrition, she has also combined her interest in sustainability with her love of food by learning how to can and dehydrate, saving as much of the local harvest as possible for use throughout the year.  She lives in upstate New York.

Jennifer is both a blog writer and event moderator at 6D Living. Her blog post series 365 in 365 will explore how we can all diversify and improve our microbiome. Jennifer is also an administrator for our public, world-wide event of the same name. This free event is a year long community activity with one goal only - get more people on the planet a wider variety of plants.

About our 6D Community Activity - 365 in 365

This is a 365 day challenge to try 365 different plants in your nutritional routine over the next 365 days. We will explore new and known plants, share their nutritional benefits as well as recipes so we can all enjoy the splendor of the plant world and improve our health - as a united community.

We know that the diversity of plants we eat determines our microbiome health, which in turn determines our overall health and wellness. Our goal at 365 in 365 is to try to get as many different plants as possible into our bodies over the year - steadily becoming healthier together.

We invite all our members to share recipes, new plants they have 'discovered' for themselves as well as resources where we can all find these wonderful gifts from nature no matter where we live in the world.

This is an international plant-based community for curious minds which want to learn how to be healthier, happier and more balanced in their lives. This is a group of hope and encouragement for all sentient beings on the planet we call home. This activity/event is taking place both on Facebook as well as our 6D Blog - you can join via either venue, or join both by sharing your journey through comments and posts!

Be well

Stop.Breathe.Focus.Move.Flow.