Photo: Scott Bauer, USDA — Public domain · source
Survives zone 4 through 8
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Custard texture; banana-mango-pineapple — excellent, but poor shelf life. ⚠ Eat the flesh only — the skin and seeds concentrate annonacin, a neurotoxic acetogenin, and are not food. A minority of people get stomach upset from the flesh too; try a little first.
- Hardiness
- Zone 4–8
- Habit
- Tree
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Sept–Oct
- Mature size
- Small tree 3–8 m; containerable when young
- Light
- Partial when young (seedlings scorch in full sun) — FULL SUN for best fruit once established
- Soil pH
- 5.5–7.0 (slightly acid)
- Environment
- Woodland
- Native range
- Eastern North America, from New Jersey and southern Ontario south to Florida and west to Nebraska and Texas — by far the most widespread and cold-hardy species in the genus.
- Status
- Cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 3–5 yrs grafted, 4–8 from seed
- Growth speed
- Slow to establish — seedlings grow slowly for the first two years while the taproot develops, then accelerate. Typically 5-8 years from seed to first fruiting; roughly 3 years for grafted cultivars.
- Spacing
- 250 cm (98 in) apart — about 6.3 m² (67 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Simple, alternate, spirally arranged, obovate-lanceolate leaves 25-30cm long and 10-13cm wide, with a wedge-shaped base and smooth entire margins, clustered and drooping toward branch tips; leaves emit an unpleasant odor when crushed.
- Root system
- Deep-reaching taproot plus a shallow network of horizontally spreading rhizomes responsible for its root-suckering colony formation.
- Fruit description
- Large, yellowish-green to brown, berry-like fruit, 5-15cm long and 3-8cm wide, weighing 20-510g, with sweet, creamy, custard-like flesh tasting of banana, mango and cantaloupe — but with very poor shelf life once ripe.
- Propagation
- Usually grown from cold-stratified seed (60-100 days at roughly 2-4°C/35-40°F) or from grafted named cultivars. The notoriously long, fragile taproot makes bare-root transplanting of seedlings difficult, so pawpaws are typically raised in deep containers and planted out young with minimal root disturbance.
- Pollination
- Pollinated by flies and beetles rather than bees — maroon flowers mimic carrion in color and scent to attract carrion flies and beetles; the tree is also the sole larval host plant for the zebra swallowtail butterfly.
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
Fertilizing. Prefers rich, loamy, moisture-retentive, slightly acidic to neutral soil (pH 5.5-7). Young trees benefit from a balanced fertilizer applied every few weeks during the first half of the growing season — unlike its lean-soil-adapted Florida relatives.
How it spreads. Spreads by root suckers from shallow, horizontally spreading rhizomes, forming dense, well-rooted clonal thickets and colonies over time — a habit not documented in the Florida scrub Asimina species.
Growing tips. The only genuinely cold-hardy species in the genus — hardy to roughly USDA zone 4b-5 through zone 8, unlike its Florida relatives, which are subtropical or warm-temperate and unsuited to cold climates. Self-incompatible, so it needs cross-pollination from a genetically distinct tree, and takes 5-8 years from seed to first fruit (grafted trees around 3 years).
Grow journal
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