A local park (southern Ontario) has a pawpaw patch with two fruiting trees, and I was hoping to get there at just the right time to pick a few to try pawpaw for the first time and plant the seeds - I figured surely there'd be at least one that was missed by however many other people that know it's here. Last October, they disappeared a few days after I last checked up on them and found they were still rock hard, and the same thing happened this year.

So what's happening to these fruits? Are people picking them while they're underripe? I found no evidence of fruit on the ground, so I doubt animals are getting to them, unless it's getting totally cleaned up off the ground. I read that it doesn't reliably ripen off the tree if picked before it begins to soften, and if that's true, then are people screwing themselves over by picking it this early, or is there some trick to get it to ripen, like the banana-in-a-paper-bag method that works to accelerate ripening of other fruits? Does that work?