Good to know… Thanks @jcguarneri
I have 5 gal of compost tea and micronutrient mix… going to keep dosing it until that is gone.
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I have 2 greenwood side grafts of Dar Sofiyevki that are still green and seem to have taken. They definitely dont want to push though. Its been nearly a month now. Fingers crossed theyll overwinter.
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Hi there @TNHunter, quick question about the persimmon shoots in your field. I’m in NE GA and in the same boat. I have saved about 50 this year and hoping to graft some of them next year. Do you mulch to knock down the sod / grass around the young persimmons? I have noticed that several that are growing in full pasture (fescue) have more evidence of fungal pressure on the leaves. I assume this is because of the humidity and micro-environment with less airflow near the edge of the forest. The ones growing in disturbed areas show no sign of disease leading me to think that perhaps the fescue is trapping some humidity. Some of my mature trees growing in close proximity to other trees have the same leaf spots. This is our first full summer on the property so I don’t know if this is typical or just this year. Thanks for any advice!
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@BigMoonFarmGA … last fall… before my bushhoging in October… i picked out several wild dv out in my field… you know good size good location… and i put down around each one a nice deep layer of partially composted wood chips. I also put in place a cage (cattle panel cage) 50 inch tall and secured that… mostly concerned about buck rubs there.
I did not fertilze or add compost… just a nice deep layer of composting wood chips.
Then this spring after they budded out and started producing small leaves I grafted them.
Had very good success… all but 1 took.
Most of them have put on 6 ft or more growth this year… Kassandra around 8 ft. and a JTO2 graft approaching 10 ft of growth so far… and still going.
These little wild dv in my fields have been getting bushhoged 2x a year for 20+ years. I expect they have much better root systems than a normal seedling… which is probably why i am getting such good growth.
I am a lucky dog… persimmon wise. Wish I had realized this 10 years ago.
Ps… this summer on those succesful grafts… i added to each one… a half wheelbarrow of compost and then covered that with more composted wood chips.
We are having hot and dry right now… but that should be helping them out. They are not looking stressed at all.
Below is a pic of one of my wild dv… out in my field. This sapling was bushhogged last October… and all that growth happened this year. It is right at 5 ft tall now and 3/4 inch diameter at the base.
I will add a cage to it in the next month or so.
I have 4 set apart like that for grafting next spring.
I dont think you could get better rootstock.
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I took a walk down our road today to check on my Zima Khurma graft. Not much change on it.
It is bark graft to a small 2" wild dv in the edge of my woods. 2 scions 4 buds… 4 shoots. Not huge growth… but it did survive multiple rounds of psyllids early on.
ZK and Prok… have developed what looks like terminal buds and have stopped putting out new growth… just sort of keeping what they have for a while now.
JT02, Kassandra, WS8-10, Rich Tooie, Nakittas gift, Corora de rio and my IKKjiro are still putting out some new growth.
It has been hot this week… mid 90s…
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This was also my experience. I ordered four 2’-3’ grafted trees from Edible Landscaping, planting them outdoors in the fall 2020. I protected them from wind and snow by sliding the boxes they shipped in over a bamboo pole. All four started growing well in spring 2021. Then I decided that I needed to move KBS and Smith’s Best a few feet further away from David’s Kandy Korn and Kassandra, so I dug them up in early spring 2022 and moved them when they started waking up. This move set back their growth tremendously! Whereas DKK and Kassandra grew to 6’ this past season, KBS and SB struggled to put on 6-8" of new growth. I trust they will make it through this winter, but in the future I will think twice about moving a small persimmon.
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The advantage of that should not be under stated. I may add this graft to my stable this year.
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I plan to graft kaki on native American rootstock this Spring in a friend’s orchard, not my own, so I want a high chance of success.
Can someone boil down for me whether I need a hybrid interstem or not? I see comments all over the map: yes kaki on american is fine vs no, it’s not , i.e. latent incompatibility.
Does it depend on the particular genetics of the American rootstock? Trying to figure this out; thanks for help.
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No need for any interstem or anything else with kaki on Virginiana. I’ve grafted a lot of kaki, hybrids and improved American types on D. Virginiana and never seen any difference in takes between them. They’ve all done well and I’ve never seen any delayed rejection, etc.
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FWIW, I had no problem grafting Saijo and Sheng to seedling DV rootstock. I think that’s the general pattern. I remember reading, however, that there are a few Kaki varieties with a compatibility problem. I remember Fuyu, but that’s from memory and is unreliable. All I’m saying is that it’s not a sure thing based on what I’ve read in this forum.
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The incompatibility is for most PCNA varieties with Lotus - except Jiro.
DV is never a problem
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That’s good news.
See introduction part of this paper. Pretty much summarized the rootstocks used for commercial persimmon production. People tend to give their own anecdotal evidence to support a specific view.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304423817307744
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Thanks. Great article, even though it focused on cuttings. If I interpret it correctly, it did not say that there is any inherent universal incompatibility between DK and DV, rather that results vary. The implication seems to be that good/poor compatibility is an attribute of the DV seedling that varies within the DV population. Is that right?
<< However, trees grafted on D. virginiana are often not uniform and sometimes exhibit decline symptoms >>
I think the variability of the rootstock and the resulting variance in vigor and production in the resulting grafted trees is a good point, but the main question was if kaki would graft well to DV without a hybrid interstem or other efforts to bridge possible incompatibility.
Just like with pawpaws, I think it would be great to have more consistency in rootstocks, ideally with clonal options, but that doesn’t seem to be coming any time soon. In the meantime we can try to select seed stock based on vigorous or more productive parent trees to give a better chance of good rootstocks. I saved my seeds from Prok last year to grow out for rootstocks since it seems to be a very vigorous grower so hopefully there’ll be similar traits among its seedlings. I remember at least one small nursery saying they preferred to use seeds from a particular tree to grow their seedlings for grafting since they found it more vigorous and Red Fern Farm offers scion wood from a variety they call Wapello that Tom reports yields seedling offspring that create dramatically bigger and more prolific trees when used for rootstock.
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I found a walnut tree growing on the side of the road about 30 years ago that produced very vigorous seedlings for grafting. Most of my walnut trees are on roots grown from that tree. It was removed to widen the road about 15 years ago. Fortunately, I grafted it on a tree at my mother’s house. Point being, rootstock source matters!
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From the evidence given, I don’t think we know whether the variability of the performance of the grafted tree results from (1) variability in the vigor of the rootstock, or (2) variability in the vigor of the scion once it is grafted to that particular rootstock. #1 is about rootstock vigor per se. #2 is about possible suboptimal compatability between the scion and the rootstock. Did I miss some indication that lets us differentiate between these possibilities?
@jrd51 I was not going down that particular rabbit hole. When I said the “main question” I meant the original post by another member about grafting kaki onto existing DV seedlings at his friend’s property. The suggestion to see the article didn’t seem to relate to that situation and was getting off on a tangent, so I was just reiterating I’d seen no compatibility issues.
In regards to the rest of my post, I was just noting the article was interesting by pointing to variability of rootstock and as Fusion pointed out it is important to remember that rootstock choice, when you have any choice, matters. In the absence of clonal options with known characteristics, it may be useful to try to pick seedling stock with known parentage and a history of superior seedling rootstock and hope for the best. The article was interesting, but not actionable to a backyard grower like myself, but the experience and knowledge of someone like Tom at Red Fern is.
As a follow-up to my comments above, I think that it would be interesting to do some testing with @TNHunter 's sister’s tree, the one he’s named Rich Tooie, to see if it could be a source of above-average rootstocks. He showed us great growth from some seedlings of the tree and I believe also had tremendous growth from first-year grafts this season. Now it may be his ability as a grower, but if it is a genetic trait in that tree and the seedlings are consistently extra vigorous, they may be a superior choice for rootstocks, much like Red Fern Farm’s Wapello. He has shared seed with more people this year, so perhaps they’ll report back about how those grow out for them next season.
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What looks like incompatibility between varieties can be viral, not genetic. For example, blackline disease in English walnuts is a condition where the scion is essentially rejected by the rootstock. However, this only occurs when the rootstock is J. nigra, hindsii or Paradox, a hindsii hybrid. Cherry leafroll virus is a pollen-borne virus that causes asymptomatic infections in English walnut. However, North American walnuts are resistant to the virus. They prevent the virus from gaining a foothold by killing any cells that get infected. So when an English walnut scion gets infected by cherry leafroll virus, once the infection reaches the graft union, the black walnut rootstock kills the cells at the interface between the rootstock and scion, resulting in rejection of the scion. In grapes, infection of the scion with grapevine leafroll virus 2 causes overgrowth of the scion at the graft union and sometimes sudden vine collapse.
It seems like this could be the case, at least some of the time, in persimmons as well.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10658-020-02063-0
Some graft-transmissible disorders of possible viral origin have been reported in Japanese persimmon (Imada 2000; Kusano and Shimomura 1994; Scott and Payne 1988; Yanase et al. 1992). From cultivars ‘Hiratanenashi’ and ‘Tonewase’, which showed graft-transmissible fruit apex disorder, reverse-transcription and polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) detected three apscaviroids: Apple fruit crinkle viroid (AFCVd), Citrus viroid VI (CVd-VI, syn. CVd-OS), and Persimmon latent viroid (PLVd, syn. PVd) (Nakaune and Nakano 2008; Owens et al. 2012). Next-generation sequencing (NGS) also detected a putative cytorhabdovirus, Persimmon virus A (PeVA), and a double-stranded RNA virus, Persimmon latent virus (PeLV) (Ito et al. 2013a). NGS also found an apscaviroid, Persimmon viroid 2 (PVd2), and a closterovirus, Persimmon virus B (PeVB) (King et al. 2018), in an American persimmon (Diospyros virginiana L.) showing poor growth on a Japanese persimmon rootstock (Ito et al. 2013b, 2015). A Japanese persimmon that had veinlets necrosis harbored a cryptovirus, Persimmon cryptic virus (PeCV), and PeVA (Morelli et al. 2014, 2015). Thus, four novel viruses and four viroids (two of which were novel) have been identified in persimmons, although their causal association with symptoms has not been assessed.
Given the lack of research in persimmon viruses and the genetic diversity of American persimmon cultivars and rootstocks, none of which are clonally propagated, I think it’s difficult to give a general statement on graft incompatibility between the species.
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Just a fyi on Rich Tooie seeds.
Her tree is located in southern middle TN… which should make it a 60C southern persimmon.
The trees in her yard in full sun location… she told me were there when she bought her home there over 30 years ago. She said and they were about the same size then as they are now.
She may just not have noticed the growth on them.
But that tells me that her trees could be 50-60 years old ???
They are 35 ft tall… in that full sun location with no competition.
But she has another nice old persimmon behind her garage that is in a treeline there with competition from oaks and other trees… and it is a bit taller … probably 45 ft tall with a large spreading top.
That kind of height may be more like a 60C southern persimmon.
Rich Tooie starts ripening a few fruit on the sunny southwest side early September… and continues to ripen fruit untill mid November with the fruit on the northern side ripening last.
The fruit quantity is extreme.
Zoom in on that pic and notice the fruit quantity all the way up to the top branches.
I have been providing seeds to several individuals here over the past few years (300-400).
On cold hardiness… in 1985 we had -17F here in my County… Rich Tooie obviously survived that.
That was by far our coldest temp of my lifetime… i recall a few other -7F, -5F nights.
Anyone that wants to try some Rich Tooie seed… let me know and I will collect more this fall.
Thanks
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