cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22446624
Have you ever had an especially rewarding, adventurous, dangerous, or really stupid experience of harvesting/foraging fruit?
I tend to live a sheltered life, so I don’t have anything too exciting to share. I’ve harvested bananas with a hornets’ nest on the underside of a leaf multiple times, but nothing unusual ever happened. I’ve gone wading through the swamp looking for aguaje, but the anacondas had already been hunted to extinction in that area. I’ve stood under a fruiting durian tree without a helmet, but it seems that durians don’t just fall from the sky when I’m hungry.
Does anyone have an exciting or uplifting story to share?
Pawpaws. I moved somewhere that pawpaw trees are super common, and I started seeing trees everywhere. By harvest time, though, I couldn’t find any fruit. It turns out that it spreads vegetatively, and it can’t self-pollinate, so if it looks like you found a dozen trees, you most likely just found 1, and it will only produce fruit if flies visit the flowers after traveling from whereever another grove may be.
Later, I happened to be in the middle of a run through the woods, and I smelled a really strong tropical fruit smell. I found a grove that happened to be really well pollinated, so i got to eat a whole bunch and fill my pockets with more to bring home.
To this day, i still primarily find pawpaws by smell, not sight.
That is awesome. That’s like North America’s version of durian. One more reason to save the forest.
Oddly enough, in a lot of places pawpaws grow, they are becoming more common. The removal of natural predators and strict restrictions on hunting have lead to deer being overabundant. Deer eat the seedlings of many trees, but they don’t eat pawpaw leaves. This is giving pawpaws an edge over other types of tree.
One recommended way to increase pollination of the trees is to spray the trees with a fish emulsion to attract flies, but I can’t bring myself to create a spray bottle of fish and get myself covered in it while walking through the woods.