Every Appalachian Creek Bottom Had a Pawpaw Patch. Here's Why You've Never Seen One in a Store.

🔗 90 secrets Appalachian grandmothers never wrote down. How many are left in your family? https://burlsizemore.com/porch-almanac Burl is a narrated character. His stories are dramatized; the garden ways in this video are real and documented. In September of nineteen sixty two a produce man pulled up to our gate wanting twenty crates of pawpaws for a hotel dining room in the city. My grandfather gave him one crate for nothing and told him to bring it back and tell him what happened to it. What happened to that one crate is the whole answer to a question people ask every fall. Every creek bottom in these mountains had a pawpaw patch, the biggest wild fruit in North America, and still you have never seen one for sale in a grocery store. There are seven reasons, and nobody is to blame for any of them. We go through one year in the patch to find them, from the September smell to the yellow leaves of October, the dark red flowers of spring that only flies will visit, and the green fruit of summer. Along the way you will learn how to tell a ripe one with your thumb, why a whole patch can bloom and give almost nothing, why the seeds have to stay wet and cold all winter, and how to grow your own today. I am Burl Sizemore. If there is a creek bottom near you, walk it next September with your nose. You might be standing in a patch and never know it. https://burlsizemore.com/porch-almanac