Our place was a mess when my wife and I bought it 20 years ago. It literally had bad mojo/karma, and I think that translated to the plants. The woman we bought it from hadn't had the leaves raked in years, and this was with 31 large trees on a half-acre lot. She'd covered the back yard with invasive ground covers. So we've been trying to chip away at that, including planting native species (including native bleedingheart, which hasn't done so well).
I love pawpaws. They're a fruit native to the mid-Atlantic and much of the midwest. So probably ten years ago, we planted four pawpaw trees. It took about five years for any to bloom. They're pollenated primarily by carrion beetles, so I hand pollenated them. We got about three fruit, four years ago, maybe double that three years ago, and a couple of dozen two years ago. I figured I didn't need to pollenate them by hand any more, but the none last year. So I pollenated by hand, and have upwards of two hundred fruit. Here's a pic from a couple of weeks ago showing the babies. These clumps will turn into about ten individual fruit, although there's a lot of attrition during the summer. We may need to protect them from birds and deer.
