Bringing back the Pawpaw one tree at a time

The pawpaw is making a comeback one tree at a time.

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“It’s a large native fruit, it’s part of the custard apple family and was once widespread across the Carolinian forest zone,” Brooke Martin, coordinator of the Simcoe Community Food Forest, said Saturday. “But now there are only a few populations and those are not genetically diverse.

“Carolinian Canada Pawpaw Parade is distributing trees each year to help increase the genetic diversity of the tree.”

Martin was at Waterworks Park on Chapel Street in Simcoe on Saturday to plant two pawpaw trees with the help of local residents.

“We want to plant trees here because people aren’t that familiar with them and to help people learn about an Indigenous native fruit,” Martin said. “It’s also an act of reconciliation because it used to be a good source of food for Indigenous people and because of colonization and deforestation, the (pawpaw) population decreased.

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Pawpaw trees are primarily pollinated by flies, primarily the green bottle fly and beetles. They can grow more than 18 feet (5.5 meters) and begin to produce fruit after six or seven years of growth.

“People say it has a mango, pineapple citrus, tropical flavor to it,” Martin said. “It’s growing in popularity and people are going into the wild looking for clusters of them.”

The fruit is expensive because it’s so rare and now people are starting to cultivate other varieties of them, Martin said.

But right now they spoil pretty easily and are not being used as a commercial crop.

“But the number of people looking for them is growing,” Martin said.

The pawpaw tree planting was one part of Saturday’s event, which also included the planting of a pollinator garden at the park led by Sherry Shrubb of The Pollinator Project, an initiative the began a year ago.

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A local farmer brought in bees from another country because there weren’t enough bees to pollinate his crop. The farmer gave hives to Sarah Judd of Meadow Lynn Farms on Decou Road which led to The Pollinator Project.

Shrubb became involved in 2019 when she learned that pollinators were in trouble in the world.

“I discovered that the easy fix, the way that we can all help is to plant native plants,” Shrubb said. “It can be one plant in a month on a balcony, in a community garden.

“One of the things I’ve learned is plant them and they will come. If milkweed is planted monarchs will appear, Shrubb said.

“It’s magical,” Shrubb said. “When you plant a native plant and then wait to see what shows up.

“It’s one thing we can all do and it’s fun and it’s easy.”

The pollinator garden is the fourth to be planted in the Simcoe area and Shrubb hopes more will follow soon.

“Hopefully, this will keep going,” Shrubb said “My goal is to plant as many native plants as we possibly can in Norfolk County to support bees, butterflies and wildlife.”

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