Pietro's Paw Paws, an extremely focused native nursery

As I traveled to the various Florida garden festivals this spring, the one vendor I encountered the most was Terri Pietroburgo, with her baseball hat, her wagons filled with paw paws, and her enthusiastic spiel on her favorite native plant, the paw paw. She apologizes, in advance, to the vendors stationed near her for the repetition.

She was at Heathcote Botanical Gardens, Vero Beach Garden Fest, Marion County Spring Fest, the Wildflower Festival in Deland, the EPIC Garden Fest in St. Augustine, the Spring Fest in Winter Garden, and at our own FNPS meeting in Tallahassee. I'm sure there were more events that she attended, that I did not.

She takes great care to explain how important paw paws are as the only larval food source for the zebra swallowtail butterflies. She describes how the fruits taste (It's one of our few native fruits.), how large the plants will get, and most importantly how to plant them so that they'll survive.

She started looking for paw paws to buy in 2004 when she was building a butterfly garden with her daughter. Unable to find a good source and after a great deal of research, she decided that she would grow them herself. Paw paws have very long taproot and the "normal" nursery pots are not deep enough to accommodate the taproot, so she found a source for the tall pots in Oregon. She plants two seeds in sandy soil in each pot and sells them when they are two or three years old.

Terri gives detailed planting instructions with each sale. Dig the hole in a sandy spot as deep as the pot. Slice the bottom of the pot off and make a slice down opposite sides of the pot, hold the pot together, lower it into the hole, and then pull the two sides of the pot from the hole. Water thoroughly each day for several weeks and then gradually reduce the watering as the plants become adjusted.  As with any newly planted tree or shrub, you may need to augment the irrigation during droughts for two years or more.

Terri will also wholesale her paw paws to other native nurseries. You can contact her at 1bushwoman@embarqmail.com.

Ginny Stibolt

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wednesday's Wildflower:Spanish Needle

Image
Spanish Needle, Bidens Alba Submitted by Donna Bollenbach, Suncoast Chapter Biden's alba , all photos by Donna Bollenbach Nothing attracts more butterflies and bees than a simple white flower called Bidens alba . Also called Romerillo, Beggar’s Tick, Spanish Needle or Monkey’s Lice, this Florida native wildflower is the third most reliable source of nectar for pollinators in our state. There would be many starving bees and butterflies if not for the Bidens family of flowers. More so, Bidens alba and its sister plant, Bidens pilosa , are both edible and have medicinal value. Yet, many gardeners have a love/hate relationship the plant, and some even consider it a pesky weed. Why?
Read more

Florida Native Azaleas

Image
Piedmont Azalea, Rhododendron canescens. Photo by Lilly Anderson-Messec By Lilly Anderson-Messec While growing up in North Florida, I began to recognize the arrival of spring by the boisterous show of white, pink, and fuchsia blooms of azalea shrubs. The house I grew up in had large, mature azalea hedges with a variety of different colors and forms. Every spring, my mom would bring in vases full of them and my dad loved to point out the showy shrubs as we drove through town. I suppose I assumed these plants were native, but most likely I never gave it a thought. I didn’t differentiate a native plant from a non-native one because I didn’t yet know the importance of native plants as the basis of our functioning ecosystems. I was so surprised when I learned the azaleas I was so familiar with (Rhododendron indicum) are actually transplants from Asia! They are favored by the horticultural industry for their fast, vigorous, and dense growth of evergreen leaves and large, showy blooms. Curio
Read more

Paradise Tree: Beautiful and Useful

Image
"The native Paradise tree is more useful than Google, and easy to grow." And how could any blogger resist leading off with this intriguing quote from the Key West Garden Club? I am a Master Gardener and a Master Naturalist, but I only know so much; so I always check out  statistics from experts before posting information about plants. I have a beautiful Paradise tree in my yard, it came from the raffle table at my chapter's program night about six years ago.   Paradise tree                Simarouba glauca For the first six years the little tree had a perfect, closed, cone shape; but just this summer I was astounded one morning to walk out and notice that my tree had changed. The canopy had begun to open up, there were open spaces between the layers of branches. It seemed to happen overnight. Proving again that a garden is constantly in motion, which is one of the fascinating things about observing them. Pinnate leaves of the paradise tree The leaves
Read more