North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Jwlehman@aol.com]

In a message dated 7/2/2013 6:41:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
sherwindu@att.net writes:

> Not to belabor this point too much, I feel a comment is due here.
>    Jerry's method insures that the sucker plant can survive on it's own.
>    One can achieve the same effect by moving the plant to a pot or
>    into the ground, being careful to keep as much soil on the roots,
>    as possible.  The only advantage of a pot vs. in the ground, is that
>    the pot can be placed in a protective environment.  Otherwise, the
>    root development would seem to be the same leaving it next to
>    the mother tree or moving it
.

Hi Sherwin,

Sorry, I can't agree with the underlined sentance. Typically the sucker 
plant has few of it's own roots. What few there are can break off even trying 
to keep as much soil as possible. The chances of successfully transplanting a 
sucker pawpaw is greatly increased by not disturbing what few hair roots 
they typically have for one growing season.  

We can theorize all we want but what someone needs do is locate a pawpaw 
cluster with 20 nearly same sized suckers. Then dig and pot 10 and the other 
10 root prune then water and fertilize the same as the potted 10.  


I don't have any scientific data to back me. But I have dug a few pawpaw 
suckers and transplanted w/o success.  

Jerry