Not everyone knows what a pawpaw is. Until more recently, it has been discarded and forgotten, falling in and out of favor over the years. For some, it is a luscious dessert, a delightful treasure hiding in the woods. For others, it is, to say the least, an acquired taste (and texture). It is an enigma.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service hosted a delegation of government and private sector representatives from Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay who traveled to the Washington, D.C., area to learn about sustainable, climate-smart agricultural practices being implemented in the United States.
WYE ISLAND — Residents of the Perry Point Veterans Administration Medical Center, located near Havre de Grace, recently visited Queen Anne’s County, where they treated to lunch at the Veterans
WYE ISLAND — Residents of the Perry Point Veterans Administration Medical Center, located near Havre de Grace, recently visited Queen Anne’s County, where they treated to lunch at the Veterans
Slicing into the fruit’s golden flesh.
Twenty-five Years ago, I was walking the woods along the Potomac not two miles from the White House with my foraging mentor, a cranky, gravel-voiced woman named Paula Smith. “It’s a weird tree, okay?” she called over her shoulder as we walked into the gloom of the woods. “The flowers are sorta liver colored and don’t smell too good. That’s ’cause they get pollinated by scavenger insects, blowflies and beetles. You really want to help them out, you hang some roadkill in the tree.”
I was suddenly less interested in finding and eating the largest edible fruit in North America, but I didn’t want to tell her that. We soon found a cluster of the spindly brown trees, but none that had fruit. “A lot of ’em don’t produce,” she said. “They need the right amount of water at the right time.” The next cluster each stand of trees is often a single organism, she explained had bunches of green fruit the size of baked potatoes.