Yesterday was a lovely day at SAFF. It’s gotten cooler and feels much like fall all of the sudden. On the way over, we stopped at the pawpaw patches and found about eight more ripe fruit. Each one has 10 to 14 seeds inside in two rows. We probably have several hundred seeds. Some we have already planted in pots to overwinter outside and cold stratify in nature. Others we have cleaned and placed in a container in the refrigerator to cold stratify for 70-100 days and then we will plant. We will determine best practices from our experience but we hope to add many more trees next year. We are excited to use these to sprout new trees for our pawpaw grove that hasn’t been productive for us yet. While down in the pawpaw patch, we noticed the Sourwood tree. We have quite a few of these down by the main waterway at the bottom of the slope growing, in some cases, right next to the pawpaws. We are still thinning out the forest in every location to allow more light in and room for our trees. We are especially doing this around our older pawpaw trees to encourage production of fruit.

We went out to the northern edge and found where the road began and we cut back small trees growing up through the rocks of the road. We cut back grassy areas. We cleared everything we could easily. We got a third of it cleaned up except for the largest pines we will have to use the chainsaw to remove. We imagined this would take us much longer to clear. We were beyond thrilled to get that much accomplished in one swoop.