To my great surprise, this morning when I checked the tracking for my Pawpaw trees, it had been updated. "Out for Delivery," it said. Cool.
The mailman dropped off the box around 1 pm and after he left, I went out to get it, excited, but also a bit pessimistic about what condition it would be in.
The pessimist in me always seems to win out.
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| Shipping box, crushed open on one end. |
The box was crushed open on one end. As I pulled it the rest of the way open, I discovered that unfortunately the end that was crushed was the end where the tree roots were, and the plastic wrap around the roots had been jarred and pulled loose during their adventure.
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| Poor little dried out trees, exhausted from their long road trip. |
The little tree roots were pretty dry.
But I went ahead and put them in a bucket of water as the instructions said to and let them soak the rest of the afternoon.
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| Trees soaking in a bucket of rainwater. |
When I got off work, I took the little trees around back and planted them. I mixed some of the rotten wood from the log pile into the hole, thinking that might help hold moisture for the roots (if they are still alive). I then gave them a good deep watering.
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| Planted and caged. |
The last thing was to put some protection over them because young Pawpaw trees are very sensitive to UV light and are easily damaged by strong sunlight.
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| Protected from the sun. |
I had a couple of old shirts and I wrapped the arms around the cages - it really looks like the arms of the shirts are lovingly hugging the little trees. I tied a hay twine around the shirts to hold them onto the cage.
And so there it is - the beginnings of my Pawpaw patch. Will they make it? I hope so. I have to remind myself that plants want to live, and they can take quite a bit of abuse, whether it be from the water roaring through the woods when the creek floods, or USPS crushing the box they're in and sending them all over the place! (I did file a claim with USPS, but I'm not very hopeful that anything will ever come of that either. There goes my inner pessimist again....)
And to be even more pessimistic, I really don't have much hope of ever getting any fruit off of these trees either. While that would be nice, I suspect they're both the same "type" of Pawpaw tree (wild type Pawpaws) and from what I've read they probably won't pollinate each other. (Now honestly, that seems odd to me because how do they ever produce fruit in the wild if they can't pollinate each other?)
But to be optimistic for a change, even if they never make any fruit, I just think the tees themselves are beautiful, and they are the host plant for the Zebra Swallowtail (Neographium marcellus), which is also beautiful. That's really one of the main reasons I decided to get them. I want to do everything I can to provide host plants for as many species of caterpillars as I can.
I have one other Pawpaw tree ordered, and Derek at Food Forest Nursery has thrown in a second one, I think to help make up for the trouble USPS caused on my first order. He didn't have to do that - it was very kind of him! I've decided to put the new trees in the east yard, near Zelda Scissorhands' house. If any of the Pawpaw trees survive, I hope they'll put out some root suckers that I can then try to transplant down into the woods. I would love to start replacing the worthless privet trees with some high-value native trees.
But we shall see. I'm getting my Pawpaw cart ahead of my horse, as they say.