Air pruning paw paws

Hey all, I started a little experiment last year germinating some paw paw trees from wild seeds I collected. I learned alot about paw paw life cycle. I planted them in very deep pots to accommodate their large tap roots but unfortunately it was in vain their massive taproots became severely root bound in just a few month and their overall root structure was awful. This year I'm going to try again but I'm going to use this technique.  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BVOKTGv-8PQ  my question is when should I remove the paw paws from the bed. I'm going to start them spring of 2022. I'd like to eventually give them to neighbors to plant as landscape plants. Should I overwinter them in the air pruning bed and pot them up before they break dormancy. Or should I pot them up in the fall and overwinter them in pots?

I can't really help, but I look forward to the responses you get.

I'm experimenting with growing pawpaw from seed way up north out of their range. I let about a hundred seeds germinate in a bag of damp soil until late spring when I planted them out into four 1x2 air-prune beds. It seemed like nothing came up and I thought the whole thing was a loss but then in early October, I was going around the yard, getting things ready for winter, and those boxes each had tons of little trees coming up. So I weeded out the competition, built a sheltered nursery out of hay bales and let the snow cover them. In a few weeks, I'll pull them out and then start watching for new leaves to grow and hope that at least a couple of them survived the winter. I figure I'll plant out anything still alive at the end of summer, but might change that based on what I read here.

i’d let them overwinter in the bed and pot them up in the early spring while they’re still dormant. i actually forgot about a nursery bed of pawpaw seedlings and ended up digging them during their second dormancy. despite just getting to the size where digging them out was starting to be a chore, the vast majority did quite well.

greg mosser wrote:i’d let them overwinter in the bed and pot them up in the early spring while they’re still dormant. i actually forgot about a nursery bed of pawpaw seedlings and ended up digging them during their second dormancy. despite just getting to the size where digging them out was starting to be a chore, the vast majority did quite well.

this is what I would prefer to do my only concern is that I live in Michigan and I'm worried they air space under the bed will make the roots much colder than natural paw paw roots would be if they were planted in the ground. Do you think this is a concern?

i suppose it’s a possibility. do you expect the bed to freeze solid, then?

I'm not sure usually when I overwinter woody perennials in pots I put them on the ground and wrap them in thick opaque white plastic. The do pretty well like that but I do think they get some heat from the ground.

Any updates on how these did in the air prune beds this year?