At my previous property I had several varieties of hardy Asian Persimmons and a couple of the hybrid types, and one Amercian type.
One of the Asian persimmon known as “Hokkaido” kept producing all male flowers, so as a fun experiment I took flowers from the male and crossed it with Saijo, Russyanka, Nikita’s Gift, Great Wall, 81-11, and another type. I got seeds in these fruit and saved them, I separated the seedlings of the hybrid types and seedlings of pure kaki types.
This year they’re about 2 feet tall and I’m hoping to plant them. I know that some seedlings may produce all male flowers, and I’m wondering if anyone had experimented with growing asian persimmons from seeds?
I know Cliff England has several growing from seedlings that he had introduced. It is just exciting seeing these mature into fruiting variety.
Check with Wolfskill.
Bass, I have about 30-40 seedling trees that are crowded in 1 Gal pots. I need to find a place to grow them out. Several of them have a seed parent of Nikita’s gift so I guess those are hybrids. I had grafted a plant from USDA Davis labeled Giomba by mistake instead of Giombo, It’s a male and seeded up alot of my Fruit a couple years ago, I moved that tree far away in back pasture, not sure it still surviving.
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Nice idea, i have also one male persimmon tree that this year first bloomed few flowers, with only male flowers so i can try to hand pollinate my female flowers on my other tree and than try to grow seeds.
This year i had one fruit with two seeds, fruit was edible from tree and that was astringent persimmon variety but fruit was early ripe than others and good for eating.
I have one good astringent persimmon unknown variety so i can play with hand pollination next year 
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Bass, would you let these seedlings mature or would you take scionwood and regraft it on some vigorous rootstock?
I will be planting them, i might try a couple on an existing American persimmon trees. It will be interesting.
Bass, did you ever cross any DV variety x Hokkaido?
Hi, I crossed hybrids with hokkaido, I haven’t crossed with pure American.
If you get the urge I recommend trying Prok. As you probably know, it is from George Slate’s breeding program at Cornell U. It is hexaploid per cytometry.
About 15 years ago I planted a couple seeds found in a grocery store Asian persimmon. I unfortunately don’t remember for sure what type it was, but my best guess is Hachiya. I’m in zone 7a (6b on 2012 map, southeast Pennsylvania). I originally planted the seedlings in the ground under a greenhouse, where they grew for about 10 years without fruiting. The greenhouse had to come down after that but I left the trees in place. One started producing about 4 years ago, the other 2 years ago. Both are astringent type and I have yet to see a seed in any of the hundreds of fruits harvested. The fruits do not look like Hachiya, or any other astringent type that I’ve seen pictures of, but they are very good eating fresh after fully ripening, and are excellent dried while still astringent and firm in the Japanese style (“hoshgaki”). One tree produces kind of squat/round fruit about 2" in dia., the other fruits are rounder and 3" dia. Both trees survived a very harsh (for this area) week this past January: average temp for 5 days was 12F, 3-4 nights dropped slightly below zero and on one night the low hit minus 7.8F (backyard weather station). Both trees are on their own roots, i.e., I did not graft them. I’d really like to try grafting some scions from these onto DV rootstock but that’s not something I have any experience with (any suggestions would be appreciated). My goal is to get a few more plants going both as backup trees in case something happens to these, but also to spread around to some friends and family. Also curious if anyone has an idea as to what variety these could be related to.
Since you grew them from seeds then they are new astringent varieties. If they were grocery bought them it is very hard to find out the parents were. I don’t think they came from Hachiya parent because Hachiya is a super large Acorn shape.
Tony