Good day, I'm in the planning process of planting a 30+ Paw paw patch. For those who don't know, paw paws have to cross pollinate in order to get fruit. I have a spreadsheet listing all of my trees identifying which ones are early or late. I have these listed below plus other named cultivars. For my paw paw growers, do you know if if these listed below are early or late? I have to plant the early plants with the early plants.

Mango
Pa Golden
Shenandoah
Taylor
Rappahannock
Overlease
Sweet Alice

Thanks!

Enjoy!  I've got some wild pawpaws ripening as we speak. 

I know PA Golden is quite early.  Shenandoah is late-ish, I think because of the size of the fruit (Susquehanna and Sunflower are the only ones I've heard of that bear later).  Rappahannock ripens just before it.  Overleese, I assume, ripens early because it's closely related to NC-1, and NC-1 is quite early.  I don't know about the others. 

Good luck!

Ok thank you very much ! It helps a lot !

I thought there would be more pawpaw growers out there. Hmmmm....

I can't seem to post my replies here. I'll try one more time but I'll probably have to just go on the computer tomorrow and do this over again. Anyway, I do grow a lot of pawpaws here in South Central Washington state.

Dennis, can you describe the taste of a pawpaw? Im curious. Can you grow this tree in a pot?

Dennis, I'm planning on planting two varieties side by side: Sunflower (late) and PA Golden (early).  Sunflower is supposed to be self fertile, at least to some degree but I was hoping they would cross pollinate each other even though the ripening times are different.  Is this not true?

Hi Meg!  You can grow PawPaws in pots for about 2 years.  After that, you have to plant them in the ground.  They have an extremely long tap root!  When the seed first starts to germinate, the tap root is 12 inches long!  Here is a lady who started growing them here in NC about 5 years ago.: 

I thought I remembered seeing a few flowering or ripening charts from kysu or by Peterson a while back, I did try to find them last night but could not...

Dennis, after I saw your reply I did some research on this and found a very relevant research paper:

http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/ppf/Pomper%20et%20al.%2062(3).pdf

See Table 3 in the paper.  The peak flowering dates for PA Golden and Sunflower are pretty much right around the same date.  The differences in ripening seem to be due to what happens after the flowers form.  So I think I'm good with those two varieties.  There were some other varieties that flowered particularly late or early though:

"Late-flowering cultivars were ‘Middletown’ and ‘Wells’, which were about 8 to 10 days later than the early flowering cultivars ‘NC-1’ and ‘Overleese’, and the advanced selection 2-54 (Table 3)."

Thanks Steve! I'm loving that paper!

Thx, Dennis. I can only grow stuff in pots. My lot is tiny :-(. I shall love Pawpas vicareously through you..,