A taste of the tropics

ELK COUNTY — Greg Pickett spends a lot of his fall as a bowhunter, sitting in trees and looking toward the ground.

Last Sunday morning, he spent an hour on the ground looking into the treetops for pawpaws.

"Look at all of them up here, this tree's loaded," Pickett said. Seconds later, he gave the stout sapling a few hard shakes and green fruit the size of small potatoes rained down around him.

"It's amazing, but most people don't know anything about these," he said, testing a pawpaw's ripeness. "I've been picking pawpaws most of my life. I love to eat them. I think they're danged good."

Pawpaws, also spelled "papaws," are found over much of the eastern United States, roughly from the eastern one-third of Kansas and Oklahoma to the Atlantic.

The El Dorado Lake area seems to be about the westernmost population.

Kelly Kindscher, a Kansas Biological Survey botanist, said the plants are one of the most unusual native to Kansas.

"It's a kind of tropical plant with these huge, tropical-looking leaves and bizarre, banana-looking fruit," Kindscher said. "In the spring they have these reddish flowers that seem out of place."

Preferred pawpaw habitat is in the understory of tall forests, where the soil is mostly damp and shaded.

Their leaves are among the largest in Kansas, often a foot in length and five or six inches wide.

Pawpaw trees normally range from 10 to 50 or more feet tall and grow in colonies.

Pickett was amid a colony that his family has picked from since his grandfather bought the farm in the early 1950s.

"I guess they hadn't been here too long when grandpa came in one day and said he had some trees that were growing little watermelons," Pickett said. "Grandma knew they were pawpaws. "I've always looked forward to this time of the year because they're getting ripe."

Pickett showed how to get out-of-reach fruit from a tree. A few shakes of a tree's trunk normally dislodges any ripe fruit.

It wasn't uncommon for a tree in that particular grove to hold eight to 10 pawpaws. It's his best patch.

"This spot almost always has a lot of pawpaws, but they're not really big," he said. "I have another place where the trees are a lot bigger. The pawpaws are bigger, but there aren't nearly as many. And there are groves where you hardly ever find any pawpaws at all."

The trick last Sunday was to find pawpaws that were ripe enough to eat.

Pickett said they need to be soft to the touch. Many he picked last weekend will have to be allowed to ripen on his kitchen counter.

Eventually he found a five-inch pawpaw that was about as soft as a ripe pear.

He broke the fruit and squeezed both halves between his thumb and forefinger.

He put the yellowish, pudding-like pulp in his mouth. Seconds later, he spit the brown, dime-sized seeds.

"I guess some people don't like them, but they're pretty sweet to me," he said. "They kind of remind you of a banana."

Pickett has a friend who can make them into wine.

His wife, Amanda, substitutes pawpaws in banana bread recipes.

"It's really good," Pickett said. "But I really just enjoy picking them up and eating them."

He often puts a few in his pocket when he's heading to a tree stand or working cattle.

In the right place, he can collect a bunch in a hurry.

"Probably the best I've done is two five-gallon buckets in about 20 minutes," he said. "But I was really hurrying."

He'll also be hurrying to collect as many as he can from favorite pawpaw groves in the next week or so.

"You've got to get out here early and get them if you want very many," he said. "The hard part is beating the (raccoons), opossums and deer to them. About everything out here loves them, too."