Diospyros vir. Recommendations from Jerry Lehman

Thanks again for the tips. I’ll keep these in mind when I try it next year.

Very slowly and carefully did whip and tounge. They grew like gangbusters due to the thick scions.

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Thanks for sharing this list.

I would be interested to know what the ripening order is(or just which ones are earliest) , since season length might be the limiting factor in my location.

This season I top worked some rootstock seedlings I had growing inground, waited until half inch of green and a warm stretch predicted for the next few days, whip and tongue or z-graft…all 8 or so took, except for the one I tried to to graft Mango Pawpaw to😅.

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Jesse I think you’re in a similar zone to where I am… Cliff mentioned early golden, Juhl/yates, h118, and Prock all dropping by like mid or late August where he’s at so I would assume we would still see them drop by September’s end. I have one yates that’s about 6 feet tall and a couple of Prock early golden and H118 that are not too far behind up none have fruited yet so all my guesswork is just that … all the same I feel fairly confident that those should be reasonably safe bets

Good grafting @ampersand. I was thinking they were hickory scions for some reason :wink: That would’ve been some serious-chiseling!

@JesseS Jerry said of the bunch that Claypool’s I115 was the earliest. You crack me up! We’ve all been there grafting who knows what to “what!”

Dax

Here’s the biggest with a sharpie for scale

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Yep, that’s a real nice connection. You nailed it.

Dax

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Anyone do a comparison tasting of Yates, Early Golden, Lehman’s Delight (100-42)? If you had to pick just one based on taste alone…

Steve,

It’s going to depend if you want seedless fruit. Early Golden will seed itself and others around. It’s an excellent persimmon but it’s not going in my garden because of the hermaphroditic flowering.

I’ve not tried Yates and all the 100-series are very good. @tonyOmahaz5

Dax

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First persimmons I ever grafted, 20 years ago - before anyone told me they were hard to do (they’re not) were just simple splice/whip grafts. 100% takes…dormant scions on actively-growing in-ground understocks.
I now do a simple bark(veneer) type graft for almost everything I graft.

Biggest thing about persimmon grafting is aftercare - they are very aggressive about pushing growth below the graft… you’ve gotta check 'em every couple of days and rub off any new growth below the graft. If you give 'em a chance, they’ll throw up a shoot so fast it’ll make your head swim and the scion will decline and die off.

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Dax- I’ve heard that pollination sometimes improves the taste of the pollinated/seeded variety. Have you seen this?

Can pollen from an Asian male pollinate an American female? Thanks.

Steve

Supposedly that’s how Rosseyanka came about (male kaki to female american) but from what I’ve read it took a lot of trial and error to make that happen. So I think in a backyard orchard it would be pretty unlikely. The hybrids though, they pollinate both kaki and virginiana easily and are easily pollinated in return.

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My understanding of Asian/American persimmon pollination is that it would require a hybrid of the two to easily pollinate across species. In other words, you would need the male hybrid to pollinate your pure Asian or American cultivars. Or, you would need a female hybrid to be receptive to the pollen from a male of either species.

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Do Asian persimmons have 60 or 90 chromosomes? Does it matter when it comes to hybridization?

90 according to Jerry Lehman. He also told me a if a 90 chromosome hybrid were to pollinate a 60 chromosome American southern persimmon 30 of the hybrid chromosomes would go unpaired. This would lead to the resulting embryos having much more of the hybrid parents genotype.

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I would think it would lead to lethality, as those other 30 chromosomes presumably don’t just code for flavor, etc…

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Good point, it may lead to lethality or sterility. I don’t know if any work has been done in this area involving persimmos. I assume what I’ve been told is merely speculation. I do know of geeps, a sheep/goat hybrid, with drastically different numbers of chromosomes, all sterile.

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A sterile persimmon, guaranteed seedless, would be an interesting marketing idea.

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Thanks for sharing this list.

I have H118 marketed as Prairie Star and think its great. But I’ve only tasted 2 or 3 American persimmons.

It’s supposed to be very early ripening, which is a benefit for my location. Are any of the others as early as it?

Meader (good but small fruit), Prok & Yates are early but H118/Early Jewel/TM “Prairie Star” is the earliest I know of.

Dax

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