I have property in zone 4a. It's in WI about thirty minutes south of Lake Superior. I had read that they have pawpaw at UW Madison so I bought five seedlings as an experiment. The first year two survived the winter. The next year one of them was hit by a mower and died. The survivor is still alive after five years.
Pawpaw reproduce sexually so this year I bought five more plants from a farm in Michigan. These were older than seedlings and not cheap. Anything to wed my lone pawpaw.
Ilk know in the spring if any survived the winter.
The seedlings can be disappointing. Pawpaw is a lot like peppers. Selected cultivars are good, but wild ones can be awful. I strongly advice to plant certified cultivars of your preferred flavor. My Shenandoah has a lot of banana mixed with caramel and the texture reminds to a lemon mousse that does not taste at all like a lemon. Also wait for them to be really ripe but not overripe (The flavor spoils). The fruits fall when are ripe and then is a speed race with slugs, coons and squirrels.
It needs water and grows well were hazelnuts also grow. Take advantage also of the relatively brief but good butter yellow fall color placing for example some chokeberries (melanocarpa Viking for fruit, arbutifolia Brilliant for red color), or a Japanese maple like Seiryu fast grower vertically providing a decent canopy, rusty fall color and great under spring lights, Hogyoku or Emmet's Pumpkin have great oranges and reds in fall and a decent sized leaf that unlike Seyriu will not dissappear around the huge leaves of the paw paw but is a question of personal taste. Put each tree well spaced but close enough to be seen as one scene and plan in advance as this trees don't like at all to be moved later.
Paw paws grow happy under canopy, specially for its first years, but produce much better at full sun (flies don't like shadow). Can be hand pollinated in any case.
This is great info. I've wanted to grow some for years, but I live in CO, and won't be moving to a region where these are viable for a few years yet, so I've got plenty of time to plan. I had no idea there even were cultivars for this fruit, but I was aware they like to start in shade, then explode once started.
In the Southwest, there are many environments where a tall, shady plant grows quickly, sets the stage for plants that need only initial shade, and then the fast-grower eventually loses out on the plot once the slower-growers have a chance to establish themselves. Once those slow growers are in place, a new generation of smaller, shade-loving plants will often follow, filling in the area that the fast-growers left.
I wonder if there are analogues you're meant to plant first, to get the pawpaw going.
> I had no idea there even were cultivars for this fruit
Many breeders in USA. There are selected early (Allegheny), mid season (Prima), and late varieties (Susquehanna).
There are also selections with small fruits of 70-95 g (Allegheny, Rappanock), medium fruits (KSU Atwood, 120 g) and some able to produce a few huge fruits reaching up to 450 g (Belle, Mary Foos Johnson). On average 150-250 g are not uncommon.
Small fruits are reliable bearers. Sometimes is more convenient to have 95 fruits of 95g each of Rappahannock and one Raccoon in the garden than 7 big 400 g fruits of Belle and one raccoon. Often the biggest the fruit, the more prone to damage and fragile the skin so expect brushes when falls from the tree
Some selections provide different flesh colors: whitish (Shenandoah), yellow or orange (Wells, Mango)
-------------- Flavor and texture
Texture may vary between avocado firm and creamy melting in your tongue like a yogurt.
Acetogenins are dangerous, but the dose makes the poison. Some people choose deliberately selections higher in acetogenins like Susquehanna, KSU Atwood or Allegheny because they introduce complex flavors. Is difficult to describe a flavor, but lets say that there is banana in the background and it can be topped with other things depending on the cultivar. The flavor of Paw paw has been described as a mix of banana and one of more of this: more banana, mango, vanille, pineaple, caramel, passion fruit, bubblegum and horribly sour.
A tree produces typically between 7-12Kg of fruit each year. Some may bear until 50 pounds. The flavor is also inversely proportional to the harvest. If your clear some of the fruits, size and flavor will improve. Too many fruits in the tree one year: expect a more plain flavor and much smaller size. Overriped fruits got black spots and get sour over time, but it can last for a week in the fridge easily, probably two.
-------------- About chemicals
The tree is a cocktail of chemicals with pesticide properties. Acetogenins accumulate in the bark and seeds. Fruit skin must be also discarded. Is better to avoid completely to try infusions with the leaves, bark or flowers.
Acetogenin effect will accumulate damaging the nervous system, but eating a moderate amount for just one month each year should be reasonably safe, and some of this chemicals have anticancerous properties also.
Sunflower, Wabash, Potomac, Zimmerman and Wells are cultivars selected for decent taste with a reliable low content level of acetogenins.
Some people get their stomach upset after eating it. And in a few cases allergies and rashes can appear by contact. In this case is better to avoid it. (before discarding the fruit from your diet, you may check for other possible causes to the stomach troubles or try the low acetogenin content cultivars).
-------------- Culture
The harvest period is short, around September. The change of color in the mature fruit is subtle and it will not mature if cut unripe, so is better to check each morning for recently fallen fruits that are guaranteed ripe.
A couple of varieties (Prima, Sunflower) are sold as able to produce self-compatible pollen, but for best results is much better to have two different trees. It will need also flies in April/May to pollinate it. Neither bees nor butterflies will visit the burgundy flowers. In any case is easy to pollinate it by hand if you have two varieties. Just cut a dark red flower in its male late phase, remove the petals and use it as a small brush on paler flowers in the other tree that are recently opened. One single flower can bring 2-4 fruits, so just one gentle brush can bring a lot of weight, but you need to synchronize your move with the correct time. Repeat it for a few days to be safe.
About the canopy, it depends on your climate, if the tree has plenty of water is happy in full sun, but in very hot or windy climates the leaves can scorch or be thorn and you will need something that fast but not much thirsty. Is not a big tree, so may never reach the full sun area in a canopy but the paw paw is not really bothered by it. The tree can be pruned if necessary and responds well to pruning. The root is strongly vertical and transplanting it from soil means often its dead by breaking the main root near the trunk.
I have 3 trees. I highly recommend the KSU Atwood, which is bred for its particular flavor and high output. We live in Virginia and a cold front killed a bunch of the young fruit about a week after we pollinate the trees, and we still got around 50 decently-sized pawpaws from that tree
The Atwood is i got was grafted, so it grew easier than any of the other trees I have. I basically bought each of them at the 1 - 3 gallon range, wrapped them in burlap and plastic the first 2 winters to keep the snow from killing them, and just made sure to water them well, but not overwater. I used transplant fertilizer the first year, but not since. I think the first time I got any to fruit was 3 - 4 years after planting them. I dont consider them labor intensive at all, personally
Cause of much confusion for people who live in the (mainly asian, but also Oceania) lands of the papaya which is unfortunately colloquially called "pawpaw" by many.
Not unlike what Scots people do discussing Turnip and Swede.
Searched the article for "annonacin", "neurotoxin", and "atypical parkinsonism" and came up short. Warning about skin and seeds being generically toxic kinda buried at the end.
Anyway, I had some recently that showed up at my local co-op. The texture was nice, but the flavor was...fine? Certainly nothing magical.
The magic is a tropical tasting fruit! I have a tree and it's tough to actually get one of the fruits when they are ripe. This year I got lucky with a few that feel into my fenced garden section and I got them before the critters.
I think Durian smells more like natural gas than vomit, but I know what you mean about the vomit smell. Especially when you have a huge harvest and the fragrance is overwhelming
If this worries you, can try the cultivar Wells, selected by its low level of acetogenins.
Wild paw paws with high levels of acetogenins announce it, with horrible flavor. The domestic fruits are selected against. A correct amount adds a lot of complexity to the flavor, so can be desirable in a fruit that you eat just a month at year. I bet that you never worry about the fact that your potatoes have a little bit of solanin after all.
> I bet that you never worry about the fact that your potatoes have a little bit of solanin after all
In fairness, solanine is purely an acute poison, while annonacin has cumulative effects. Not that the compound itself bioaccumulates but the damage it causes does.
If you already have any parkinsons symptoms whatsoever, pawpaw amounts greater than 0.2 fruits per year have been shown to worsen them.
I'll take advantage of your post to remind that the paw paw belongs to the family Annonaceae.
Is important because there are a lot of delicious tropical fruits and fruit hybrids in the family like Cherimoya, Atemoya (Gefner, Achta), Sugar apple, Anon, Guanabana or Soursop. Annona alone has 170 species so expect a lot of tasty stuff.
If you visit a tropical country you will found delicious recipes, juices and icecreams made of those fruits. Remind that a moderate consumption is key, as all Annonaceae may have Annonacines in different amount. Soursop/Guanabana being one of the worse in that sense.
I can't say definitively about the taste because I've only had Pawpaws a few times [1]. They're like a slightly less ripe banana taste in a less satisfying mango texture and less sour. I'm not a huge fan of the flavor but they are good ecologically, are native, and it's just fun to be able to eat fruit growing on trees.
Has anyone else noticed how good fruit has gotten in the past years? Sumo Citruses are amazing, strawberries have gotten sweeter (it depends which ones but generally). They used to always be white in the middle but now they're often have more red.
I just had some insane blueberries where they were all perfectly sour, firm, and there was only one bad one.
There was some news about this recently sadly I cannot find it at the moment. I guess there's a scale that is used to measure sugar content; the Brix scale, and fruit is moving up the scale really rapidly over the past decade or so.
Ever had fresh, wild mountain blueberries? Most delightful snack I’ve had after a 6 hour hike, ever. Get to the right height on the mountainside, see a field of soft low bushes, not really think about it much until I sit down and realize the field is ripe with blueberries.. harvest a tub full, wash them in a mountain spring (that’s another delight everyone should experience), and enjoy one of the greatest snacks under a wide blue sky, ever to be had.
Huckleberries are also lifechanging. There are stories that people protect their favorite patches with force of arms.
Funnily enough they aren't really commercially cultivated because they need native habitat, as far as I can tell, but my parents planted a bunch as landscaping and they're happily churning out berries 50 years later.
We made huckleberry jam - strained out the seeds, threw them in the compost heap in the back yard. Next spring: a wild profusion of huckleberry plants. So sometimes it's not hard to grow them.
Wait till you see what's coming up soon. The commercial nurseries are creating some really insane stonefruit and other things like that, especially Floyd Zaiger, but they haven't become widely planted or popular yet, and stonefruit take several years to get established, so expect another profusion of fruit varieties over the next decade or so.
Flavor King is an older varietal (1991) you might hear about. Apparently they can even cause a theft problem when planted in urban areas along fences, because people will borrow a pluot, try it, and come back with a wheelbarrow they're so tasty.
I've tried pawpaws and really liked them, if you had given me the flesh in bowl and told me it was custard I wouldn't have been able to say otherwise. It also seems to be quite nutritious[1] with fiber and vitamin c. Honestly, I could do with less passion fruits and more pawpaws at my local market.
Related. Others?
Foraging for America's Forgotten Fruit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693513 - Sept 2024 (22 comments)
Consider the Pawpaw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39523641 - Feb 2024 (65 comments)
Why don't grocery stores stock pawpaw fruit? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38851025 - Jan 2024 (151 comments)
Ted's Notes on Pawpaws (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140681 - Aug 2023 (57 comments)
Why is the most American fruit so hard to buy? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33139936 - Oct 2022 (18 comments)
Pickin'em Up the Pawpaws - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29874785 - Jan 2022 (1 comment)
1765119635 | Kitchen Dispatch: A Quest to Create the Perfect Pawpaw Ice Cream | https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/kitchen-dispatch-a-que... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182152 | 0 comments
1790509089 | Behold the pawpaw, the tropical 'alien banana' that grows right here in Canada | https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.7356882 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49865771 | 0 comments
I have property in zone 4a. It's in WI about thirty minutes south of Lake Superior. I had read that they have pawpaw at UW Madison so I bought five seedlings as an experiment. The first year two survived the winter. The next year one of them was hit by a mower and died. The survivor is still alive after five years.
Pawpaw reproduce sexually so this year I bought five more plants from a farm in Michigan. These were older than seedlings and not cheap. Anything to wed my lone pawpaw.
Ilk know in the spring if any survived the winter.
I am surprised it died with the mower, I had one snapped in half, put the up part in the soil, now two pawpaws...
The seedlings can be disappointing. Pawpaw is a lot like peppers. Selected cultivars are good, but wild ones can be awful. I strongly advice to plant certified cultivars of your preferred flavor. My Shenandoah has a lot of banana mixed with caramel and the texture reminds to a lemon mousse that does not taste at all like a lemon. Also wait for them to be really ripe but not overripe (The flavor spoils). The fruits fall when are ripe and then is a speed race with slugs, coons and squirrels.
It needs water and grows well were hazelnuts also grow. Take advantage also of the relatively brief but good butter yellow fall color placing for example some chokeberries (melanocarpa Viking for fruit, arbutifolia Brilliant for red color), or a Japanese maple like Seiryu fast grower vertically providing a decent canopy, rusty fall color and great under spring lights, Hogyoku or Emmet's Pumpkin have great oranges and reds in fall and a decent sized leaf that unlike Seyriu will not dissappear around the huge leaves of the paw paw but is a question of personal taste. Put each tree well spaced but close enough to be seen as one scene and plan in advance as this trees don't like at all to be moved later.
Paw paws grow happy under canopy, specially for its first years, but produce much better at full sun (flies don't like shadow). Can be hand pollinated in any case.
This is great info. I've wanted to grow some for years, but I live in CO, and won't be moving to a region where these are viable for a few years yet, so I've got plenty of time to plan. I had no idea there even were cultivars for this fruit, but I was aware they like to start in shade, then explode once started.
In the Southwest, there are many environments where a tall, shady plant grows quickly, sets the stage for plants that need only initial shade, and then the fast-grower eventually loses out on the plot once the slower-growers have a chance to establish themselves. Once those slow growers are in place, a new generation of smaller, shade-loving plants will often follow, filling in the area that the fast-growers left.
I wonder if there are analogues you're meant to plant first, to get the pawpaw going.
> I had no idea there even were cultivars for this fruit
Many breeders in USA. There are selected early (Allegheny), mid season (Prima), and late varieties (Susquehanna).
There are also selections with small fruits of 70-95 g (Allegheny, Rappanock), medium fruits (KSU Atwood, 120 g) and some able to produce a few huge fruits reaching up to 450 g (Belle, Mary Foos Johnson). On average 150-250 g are not uncommon.
Small fruits are reliable bearers. Sometimes is more convenient to have 95 fruits of 95g each of Rappahannock and one Raccoon in the garden than 7 big 400 g fruits of Belle and one raccoon. Often the biggest the fruit, the more prone to damage and fragile the skin so expect brushes when falls from the tree
Some selections provide different flesh colors: whitish (Shenandoah), yellow or orange (Wells, Mango)
-------------- Flavor and texture
Texture may vary between avocado firm and creamy melting in your tongue like a yogurt.
Acetogenins are dangerous, but the dose makes the poison. Some people choose deliberately selections higher in acetogenins like Susquehanna, KSU Atwood or Allegheny because they introduce complex flavors. Is difficult to describe a flavor, but lets say that there is banana in the background and it can be topped with other things depending on the cultivar. The flavor of Paw paw has been described as a mix of banana and one of more of this: more banana, mango, vanille, pineaple, caramel, passion fruit, bubblegum and horribly sour.
A tree produces typically between 7-12Kg of fruit each year. Some may bear until 50 pounds. The flavor is also inversely proportional to the harvest. If your clear some of the fruits, size and flavor will improve. Too many fruits in the tree one year: expect a more plain flavor and much smaller size. Overriped fruits got black spots and get sour over time, but it can last for a week in the fridge easily, probably two.
-------------- About chemicals
The tree is a cocktail of chemicals with pesticide properties. Acetogenins accumulate in the bark and seeds. Fruit skin must be also discarded. Is better to avoid completely to try infusions with the leaves, bark or flowers.
Acetogenin effect will accumulate damaging the nervous system, but eating a moderate amount for just one month each year should be reasonably safe, and some of this chemicals have anticancerous properties also.
Sunflower, Wabash, Potomac, Zimmerman and Wells are cultivars selected for decent taste with a reliable low content level of acetogenins.
Some people get their stomach upset after eating it. And in a few cases allergies and rashes can appear by contact. In this case is better to avoid it. (before discarding the fruit from your diet, you may check for other possible causes to the stomach troubles or try the low acetogenin content cultivars).
-------------- Culture
The harvest period is short, around September. The change of color in the mature fruit is subtle and it will not mature if cut unripe, so is better to check each morning for recently fallen fruits that are guaranteed ripe.
A couple of varieties (Prima, Sunflower) are sold as able to produce self-compatible pollen, but for best results is much better to have two different trees. It will need also flies in April/May to pollinate it. Neither bees nor butterflies will visit the burgundy flowers. In any case is easy to pollinate it by hand if you have two varieties. Just cut a dark red flower in its male late phase, remove the petals and use it as a small brush on paler flowers in the other tree that are recently opened. One single flower can bring 2-4 fruits, so just one gentle brush can bring a lot of weight, but you need to synchronize your move with the correct time. Repeat it for a few days to be safe.
About the canopy, it depends on your climate, if the tree has plenty of water is happy in full sun, but in very hot or windy climates the leaves can scorch or be thorn and you will need something that fast but not much thirsty. Is not a big tree, so may never reach the full sun area in a canopy but the paw paw is not really bothered by it. The tree can be pruned if necessary and responds well to pruning. The root is strongly vertical and transplanting it from soil means often its dead by breaking the main root near the trunk.
Can’t grow them here in Seattle. Keep trying and failing.
[dead]
Maybe don't over do frequent eating of the fruit and others from its family:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba#Potential_toxi...
Yikes!
I have 3 trees. I highly recommend the KSU Atwood, which is bred for its particular flavor and high output. We live in Virginia and a cold front killed a bunch of the young fruit about a week after we pollinate the trees, and we still got around 50 decently-sized pawpaws from that tree
I’m in VA too and have been thinking of putting them in
I have peach trees going into second winter and they will likely fruit next year and are way more work to train than I want in the future.
How much labor are they for the yield and any major downsides?
The Atwood is i got was grafted, so it grew easier than any of the other trees I have. I basically bought each of them at the 1 - 3 gallon range, wrapped them in burlap and plastic the first 2 winters to keep the snow from killing them, and just made sure to water them well, but not overwater. I used transplant fertilizer the first year, but not since. I think the first time I got any to fruit was 3 - 4 years after planting them. I dont consider them labor intensive at all, personally
Cause of much confusion for people who live in the (mainly asian, but also Oceania) lands of the papaya which is unfortunately colloquially called "pawpaw" by many.
Not unlike what Scots people do discussing Turnip and Swede.
Searched the article for "annonacin", "neurotoxin", and "atypical parkinsonism" and came up short. Warning about skin and seeds being generically toxic kinda buried at the end.
Anyway, I had some recently that showed up at my local co-op. The texture was nice, but the flavor was...fine? Certainly nothing magical.
Nutrition Facts says not to eat them: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/do-not-eat-pawpaws/
The magic is a tropical tasting fruit! I have a tree and it's tough to actually get one of the fruits when they are ripe. This year I got lucky with a few that feel into my fenced garden section and I got them before the critters.
There's a hint of rottenness to the scent -- even vomit to some. Maybe like Durian.
I think Durian smells more like natural gas than vomit, but I know what you mean about the vomit smell. Especially when you have a huge harvest and the fragrance is overwhelming
If this worries you, can try the cultivar Wells, selected by its low level of acetogenins.
Wild paw paws with high levels of acetogenins announce it, with horrible flavor. The domestic fruits are selected against. A correct amount adds a lot of complexity to the flavor, so can be desirable in a fruit that you eat just a month at year. I bet that you never worry about the fact that your potatoes have a little bit of solanin after all.
> I bet that you never worry about the fact that your potatoes have a little bit of solanin after all
In fairness, solanine is purely an acute poison, while annonacin has cumulative effects. Not that the compound itself bioaccumulates but the damage it causes does.
If you already have any parkinsons symptoms whatsoever, pawpaw amounts greater than 0.2 fruits per year have been shown to worsen them.
Good to remind it, thanks.
I'll take advantage of your post to remind that the paw paw belongs to the family Annonaceae.
Is important because there are a lot of delicious tropical fruits and fruit hybrids in the family like Cherimoya, Atemoya (Gefner, Achta), Sugar apple, Anon, Guanabana or Soursop. Annona alone has 170 species so expect a lot of tasty stuff.
If you visit a tropical country you will found delicious recipes, juices and icecreams made of those fruits. Remind that a moderate consumption is key, as all Annonaceae may have Annonacines in different amount. Soursop/Guanabana being one of the worse in that sense.
I can't say definitively about the taste because I've only had Pawpaws a few times [1]. They're like a slightly less ripe banana taste in a less satisfying mango texture and less sour. I'm not a huge fan of the flavor but they are good ecologically, are native, and it's just fun to be able to eat fruit growing on trees.
Has anyone else noticed how good fruit has gotten in the past years? Sumo Citruses are amazing, strawberries have gotten sweeter (it depends which ones but generally). They used to always be white in the middle but now they're often have more red.
I just had some insane blueberries where they were all perfectly sour, firm, and there was only one bad one.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgZkMRfnomI
There was some news about this recently sadly I cannot find it at the moment. I guess there's a scale that is used to measure sugar content; the Brix scale, and fruit is moving up the scale really rapidly over the past decade or so.
Ever had fresh, wild mountain blueberries? Most delightful snack I’ve had after a 6 hour hike, ever. Get to the right height on the mountainside, see a field of soft low bushes, not really think about it much until I sit down and realize the field is ripe with blueberries.. harvest a tub full, wash them in a mountain spring (that’s another delight everyone should experience), and enjoy one of the greatest snacks under a wide blue sky, ever to be had.
I thought I disliked blueberries until I tried wild ones and their relatives, up in the cascades, or out in the boundary waters...
Life changing
Huckleberries are also lifechanging. There are stories that people protect their favorite patches with force of arms.
Funnily enough they aren't really commercially cultivated because they need native habitat, as far as I can tell, but my parents planted a bunch as landscaping and they're happily churning out berries 50 years later.
We made huckleberry jam - strained out the seeds, threw them in the compost heap in the back yard. Next spring: a wild profusion of huckleberry plants. So sometimes it's not hard to grow them.
Read a really interesting writeup on blueberry engineering and economics a while ago. Worth checking out.
https://sftw.substack.com/p/chasing-counter-seasonality
I've only had pawpaws a few times also, and I would describe them as custard, without any strong taint of distinctive flavor.
It's more like creme brulee without the torched crisp top.
Wait till you see what's coming up soon. The commercial nurseries are creating some really insane stonefruit and other things like that, especially Floyd Zaiger, but they haven't become widely planted or popular yet, and stonefruit take several years to get established, so expect another profusion of fruit varieties over the next decade or so.
Flavor King is an older varietal (1991) you might hear about. Apparently they can even cause a theft problem when planted in urban areas along fences, because people will borrow a pluot, try it, and come back with a wheelbarrow they're so tasty.
I have a small group of PawPaw trees in my yard, but I haven't gotten them to fruit in the three years I've lived here.
The big issue is they're pollinated by flies, and it's a bit of a pain putting the labor in to attract the flies and help them out.
I hand pollinate mine with a craft paintbrush from my mini painting set
Someone I know (in a fairly rural area) would grab some roadkill and hang it in the tree. -.-
Thus began the legend of Leatherface
TIL that American pawpaw is different from Australian pawpaws (papaya) (which are tropical).
> A previous version of this article referred to the pawpaw as a tropical fruit. It is in fact a temperate fruit, that belongs to a tropical family.
I'm in Massachusetts and have two of these growing on my property, still waiting on them to produce fruit.
Many strains taste like banana Now & Laters. The PawPaw doesn't preserve well, though.
Can't see that name without thinking of the Jungle Book.
“…or prickly pear!”
I has this a lot when growing up, and it honestly tasted like nothing. Are African pawpaws that different?
Yes! North American pawpaw are totally different from what we refer to as papaya.
In grade school we sang a song “picking up pawpaws, put them in a basket…”
Now I know what they would have tasted like.
I've tried pawpaws and really liked them, if you had given me the flesh in bowl and told me it was custard I wouldn't have been able to say otherwise. It also seems to be quite nutritious[1] with fiber and vitamin c. Honestly, I could do with less passion fruits and more pawpaws at my local market.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/paw-paw-fruit
TIL poop flies can pollinate fruit. ::throws up::
Well, they're pollinating _flowers_. You don't eat those, I'm sure any traces of manure are long gone by the time there are fruit ready to pick.