Laurie Lockwood scored a widthwise seam across the center of a pawpaw, cupping the fruit gingerly in the palm of one hand and clutching a serrated knife with the other.
She broke through the peel with the brisk upward thrust of her knuckles, and two seeds encased in a translucent membrane looked back at her like beady eyes. Those would be spat out — both the fruit’s seeds and skin are toxic to humans, causing symptoms as moderate as nausea and as severe as neurological damage when consumed over a long period of time.
But the pawpaw’s flesh is not only safe to eat, it offers a sweet, mellow flavor reminiscent of mango, melon and jack-fruit, along with a tender mouth-feel resembling that of a ripe banana or avocado.
Lockwood stood beside her pair of small pawpaw trees along Route 132 in Canterbury, traded the knife for a spoon and offered simple instructions to demystify how to savor the fruit.
“These are messy, just don’t be shy and don’t be wasteful. Put the whole thing in your mouth with the seed, and just eat the flesh off the seed, just get everything off it,” she said. “It’s a brand new thing for a lot of people. When I tried it, I was like, ‘Oh my god. This is just too good to ignore.'”
For a short season of only about a month, an abundant harvest of pawpaws invades Lockwood’s mudroom. Baskets of them warm the windowsills, their fragrant bouquet permeates the air and her phone begins to chime with requests.
Pawpaws are rarely found in grocery stores largely because of their short shelf-life, explained Lockwood, who has grown pawpaws on her land in Canterbury for years. The fruit is soft, its skin tends to bruise easily and consumers are generally predisposed to be wary of blemished produce.
Those limitations don’t bother Lockwood. In early October, she brought a basket of about a dozen pawpaws to Granite State Naturals and, following store manager Wil Ricci into the kitchen, invited staff to sample the fruit.
Ricci grew up on a fourth-generation farm in Waltham, Mass., meaning “this produce thing is in my blood,” he said. Still, the pawpaw was one fruit he’d never heard of, and its “creamy mango-ish banana-ish custard-ish” delight made him an instant convert.
The store put out a basket of pawpaws, with all the necessary disclosures about their skin and seeds, and watched their supply vanish.
“We ran out in 24, 36 hours. We reordered, and we just reordered again. It’s been an incredible hit,” Ricci said. “People were not just buying one of them, people heard we have them here and they were just coming in like, ‘I heard you have pawpaws.'”
Lockwood also makes pawpaw deliveries to the Canterbury Country Store and said she wouldn’t dream of selling the fruit farther afield. Since last year, when she gave out 100 samples at the Canterbury Farmers Market, people have sought her out for a taste from her pawpaw trees and a share of her knowledge of pawpaw cultivation.
She has presented workshops on pawpaws to her local garden club, to the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Hampshire (NOFA-NH) and to visitors at an heirloom apple orchard in Vermont during their pawpaw harvest.
Pawpaws grow abundantly in patches across eastern North America, from the Midwest to Appalachia to the Florida panhandle. They bore a special significance for Native Americans, who used its fruit for food, its leaves and stems for medicine and its bark for crafting rope, string and baskets, according to the Adkins Aroboretum in Maryland.
“One of the really cool things about them is they adapt well to community gatherings. They’re all ripe at once. You can’t take them anywhere. You can’t process them in a lot of ways, and so people come together and eat them and buy some and share them,” she said. “I like that aspect of it, even though it means I’m not going to be shipping them off and making tons of money from far-flung places. That’s fine. Because they’re so rare, people come for them.”
Lockwood’s workshops provide an education for many people unfamiliar with the fruit. She explains the idiosyncrasies of growing pawpaw trees, how saplings grow mighty roots before sprouting even an inch above the ground and how those strong root systems can birth “sucker” trees that siphon vital nutrients from the parent plant.
Years ago, when she purchased her first pair of trees from an exotic fruit catalogue, Lockwood herself knew little about pawpaw cultivation.
If she knew then what she knows now, she said she might have planted the saplings in the fecund soil behind her barn across the street, where manure was deposited, enriching the land, for at least a century by her estimates. On that same fertile soil, Lockwood has two young groves of pawpaw trees teeming with life.
The trees, planted closely together and numbering about 30 in each grove, don’t require wire plant protectors like apple saplings, since their acrid leaves put off pests and predators. Instead, Lockwood uses cardboard, designed to tamp down weeds, to identify the infant plants.
Lockwood prodded the ground, covered in patches of sheep’s wool to deter invasive jumping worms, with a stake more than two feet long. The soil, soft and yielding, unlike the rocky soil across the road, swallowed the stake almost whole.
The trees are five years old already, and Lockwood expects them to bear fruit by the time they’re seven. When they do, she’ll be handling a more bountiful pawpaw harvest than she ever has before.
No sweat.
“As I’m building the awareness, I shouldn’t have any trouble getting rid of it.”