Paw paws for chickens

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.