Gardeners' Holidays 2018: Harvest Home

Well, we finally made it through this brutally hot summer. For once, fall weather has arrived right on time according to the calendar, and my house is already decked out in its fall colors, with a little basket of autumn leaves on the side stoop and a row of Jack Be Little pumpkins in the front.

That means it's also time for Harvest Home, the Gardeners' Holiday that celebrates the peak of the fall harvest. This year, however, we celebrated it in an unusual way: rather than feasting on produce from our own garden, we did a little foraging. Or at least, Brian did.

A couple of days ago, one of his coworkers showed up with several pawpaw fruits that she said had come from a tree located close to their workplace, just outside of the campus boundaries. Pawpaws, for those who don't know, are a native fruit found throughout the entire eastern half of the U.S., as far west as Texas. The landscaper we consulted about our yard back in 2012 actually suggested a pawpaw tree as a possible good choice for our front yard, but we were reluctant to commit to a tree whose fruit we'd never actually tasted. You see, pawpaws are pretty much impossible to find in supermarkets, because they're too delicate and fast-ripening for large-scale shipping. So the easiest way to get a taste of it is to find a tree growing wild, as Brian's coworker did. (That may be changing, however; according to NPR's "The Salt," interest in pawpaws has grown dramatically in the last couple of years, to the extent that some have labeled it "the hipster banana." In fact, right after we both tried them for the first time on Thursday, we discovered a bin of them at the Whole Earth Center that identified them as the produce of a local farm—something we'd never seen in there before, as far as I can recall.)

From the outside, these weren't much to look at: sort of mottled, brownish-green ovoids about the size of my fist. According to a video Brian found online, there are two ways to eat them: you can slice them or just cut them in half and scoop out the pulp. (The peel isn't edible, but there's no good way to remove it from outside without destroying the squishy inner portion.)

So he sliced one open, revealing soft, creamy-yellow flesh studded with large, dark-brown seeds about the size of an almond. We each sampled a cautious spoonful, not really sure what to expect. A piece I found on NPR's "The Salt" described them as "a cross between a mango and a banana," with possible hints of pineapple, but to me, the flavor wasn't mangolike at all, though the soft, slippery texture was a bit reminiscent of a slightly overripe mango. It was more like banana than anything else, but with a distinct perfumey quality—I really can't think of any other word for it—that was unlike any fruit I'd ever tasted. I honestly found it a bit off-putting, but Brian liked it enough not only to finish the fruit he'd started, but to go out in search of the tree the next day and scavenge a couple more. After eating one more of them today, he says he's still kind of on the fence about it; he mostly likes it, but he can't decide whether that odd perfumey element to the flavor is appealing or disturbing.

Nonetheless, he's intrigued enough by the fruit to save the seeds from the ones he's eaten so far, carefully keeping them moist and cool in the refrigerator as The Survival Gardener recommends. He admits he's not sure yet where he could plant them; the site described them as an "understory tree" that likes to grow in the shade of larger trees, so he thought perhaps the shaded back corner of our yard (currently home to a massive pile of concrete chunks left over from our patio project) would be a good spot for one.

However, I'm not sure it's really worth devoting space in our yard to a tree neither of us is sure we like, especially when the California Rare Fruit Growers site says "Avoid heavy, wet, alkaline soil." I think a better use of the seeds might be to seek permission to plant some along the Meadows Trail, a short hiking trail through woods adjoining the Raritan River just outside of Donaldson Park. That would give everyone in town—including the local wildlife—a chance to try this unusual fruit, rather than saddling us with a whole harvest to dispose of on our own.

All in all, I'd say that I'm pleased to have had the opportunity to try this unusual native fruit, but I'm in no hurry to eat it again. However, if Brian persists in his plan to grow them—and succeeds—I'll probably give them at least one more try. Our old edition of The Joy of Cooking, in a single brief paragraph on pawpaws, says "The taste for these, we feel, is an acquired one"—so I should probably make at least a little bit of effort to acquire it.