If I’m going to make a
habit of running
our chickens in the woods in the winter, it makes sense to gently
mold the woods to meet their needs better. With that idea in the
front of my mind (and since the chickens spent the weekend scratching
around in the paw paw patch), I started pondering how to get my paw
paws to bear fruit.
For those of you
unfamiliar with the species, the paw paw is a small wild tree that
produce large fruits in the late fall. They love floodplains,
which means I have a couple of patches growing wild on my property, but
I’ve never seen a fruit on my land.
I suspect there may be
two problems involved. The first one is the easiest solved —
light. Our paw paws are growing in the understory of the forest,
where they have plenty of light to produce leaves but perhaps not
enough to make fruit. I suspect that if we cut down a box elder
or two, our paw paws could soak up more sun and maybe grow more
vigorously.
The second problem is
thornier. Paw paws are clonal plants, which means that new trees
can pop up from the roots of nearby trees and that a small paw paw
patch like mine is likely really just one individual. You need
two different individuals to get pollination, so I might need to plant
some paw paw seeds to add a bit more variety to the mix.
It’s probably worth
jumping through a few hoops to get our paw paws to produce because I’m
pretty sure our chickens would love them (and the insects that would be
attracted to the sweet flesh.) Meanwhile, our flock is simply
enjoying the diverse landscape of the paw paw patch, where they find
grass seeds to nibble on and dry spots like this to turn into a dust bath.
Paw paws for chickens
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About The Author
Anna & Mark
Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton are a pair of back-to-the-landers who have been homesteading for over a decade.
I’ve read a little about pawpaw (we dont know much about it in Europe), but it seems that if you want good yields, you need to hand pollinate it
BTW excellent blog, i plan myself to design a chicken fodder the permaculture way.
Paw paws are native here, though, which makes me think that they should set pretty good yields on their own if you get the conditions right. But we might not have figured out those conditions yet….
As an addendum to this post, I read in Harvey Ussery’s new book that he’s tried feeding paw paws to his chickens and they weren’t interested. However, he does think paw paws have a place since his black soldier flies love them.
I’ll look forward to hearing about your chicken pasture system!
The hand pollination was adviced for North America too, it seems pawpaw is a lazy tree on fruit, cause it propagates by suckers.
BTW, pawpaw trees are so expensive to buy here, and it seems so hard to sow and graft that i think i’ll never give a pawpaw to chicken 🙂
Pawpaw (Asimina Triloba)is pollinated by the Monarch Butterfly, Carrion Beetle, Carrion Fly, Lady Bug, and many more insects attracted to rotting meat (look at and smell the flowers). The trouble is that wild patches tend to be of a single seed genetic mono-culture with multiple trees suckered up off the roots of a single parent, so you’ll collect pollen from one area to take to a different area to pollinate. Hand pollination is useless unless you get pollen from different set of genetic parents. Grafting scion wood into a patch from another patch from another area can increase cross pollination. These areas may be any distance not possibly connected underground by the roots, say 50 feet with no pawpaw trees in between. Check out the Ohio Paw Paw Festival near Albany, OH.