A DeKalb County foundation planting pawpaw (Asimina triloba), North America's largest native fruit, across schoolyards, parks, and prairie edges. We teach the next generation what it tastes like.
Volunteer planting days put pawpaw seeds and seedlings in the ground with students, neighbors, and the people who will care for them through their first seasons.
Our next event is Saturday, June 13 at 10am in Kingston, Illinois: a volunteer planting day with seeds and seedlings at Michael Haines' property. We'll talk techniques and everyone goes home with free pawpaw seeds. June 13 work day · Kingston, IL; grove maintenance · summer; Pawpaw Festival · September; school visits · year-round.
Event details & RSVPTax-deductible gifts go directly to nursery stock, classroom materials, and the volunteer logistics that get trees in the ground. $25 funds one pawpaw seedling; $100 a mini-grove of four trees; $250 underwrites a planting day.
Make a donationThe Pawpaw Foundation is a DeKalb County nonprofit that plants pawpaw trees and teaches Northern Illinois communities what the tree is, where it grew, and what its fruit tastes like in fall.
We work with schools, community organizations, and landowners across DeKalb County. Young pawpaws go in the ground, get mulched, and get watered through their first summer. Each fall we run the education tent at the Pawpaw Festival in Paw Paw, Illinois, alongside NIU, where neighbors can finally taste the crop their grandparents knew.
Banana, mango, vanilla custard. A fruit Lewis and Clark survived on. A fruit George Washington, by legend, ate chilled by the spoonful.
It rarely reaches grocery stores — too soft to ship far, and quick to bruise once ripe. The few who taste one, foraged from a wet Midwestern woods in fall, rarely understand why it is not better known. That combination of flavor, history, and ecology is why it belongs in Northern Illinois landscapes and conversations.
Trees in the ground
Seeds sprouted
Planting locations
Volunteers engaged