Hello Dear Reader,
The one plant I was most proud of in my little garden was my
home grown Red Paw Paw. I simply kept the seeds from a bought Red Paw Paw, dried them out and planted them when the time was right. The tree initially seemed very healthy, in fact it was very healthy, bearing lots of fruit, for the first few years and then...Da Da Daaaa... the dreaded blackspot appeared on the leaves.
I did quite a bit of research on this blight of a fungal infection and all the information told me that no matter what you did, you would never beat the blackspot and eventually it would make the tree and fruit very sick.
Well, that is exactly what happened, I kept cutting off the visibly infected leaves and fruit but to no avail, I made the decision to cut my loses, so to speak, and take it out of the garden completely. I am very upset by this loss but I am heartened by what I learnt on Gardening Australia last week.
Jerry Colby-Williams, from Gardening Australia, did a segment on growing Red Paw Paw in our climate, he learnt from trial and error that a southern variety of the Red Paw Paw didn't succumb to the Black Spot like our Queensland variety does, hey that's wonderful news. He has two huge Red Paw Paw trees growing in his amazing garden which, he said, are about 3 years old, they look much older than that, being multi branched and heavy with fruit.
I emailed Jerry to see if he would post me out some seeds, cheeky, I know, of course I would pay them, but he let me know that any excess seeds and seedling are sold exclusively at his open garden. His wonderful garden "Bellis" is open to the public for an open garden during May each year, looks like I will have to wait until then to try to grow a successful and disease resistant variety of Red Paw Paw again.
The fallen tree
I won't plant anything in this area again for quite some time to make sure I am not sharing the fungal infection around. As I am
changing my complete garden I will just wait to see what I will do with this space.
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