Thanks, David! Our Pawpaws are obviously different than the well known variety, Asimina triloba. As a kid, we always visited West Virginia in the summer when school was out. So I never was up there during Pawpaw season but I knew about them and that my Pawpaw (that means "Grandpa" in West Virginian) Ray loved them. In 2014, I went up to Louisa, KY for a genealogy conference and then we went over to WV to visit Grandma. It was around the last week of September and the Pawpaws were ripe so I had to honor my West Virginian heritage by trying one. I thought they were pretty good but I think it's weird that the ripe ones are the ones that look bruised. My aunt had to teach me not to pick the green ones.
It's funny that so much of the East Coast doesn't realize we have small Pawpaw species down here in Florida that are just shrubs. But then my dad met a man a few days ago who had Pawpaw bushes in his yard, and he had never heard there was the tree kind that grows up north!
