This year is the most beautiful persimmon harvest I have ever seen. All previous years my trees got frozen before the leaves changed color. My Giombo produced about 1/2 of what it did last year but the fruit are much bigger. I think it will be much sweeter than last year. The hoshigaki from it was so freaking sweet. It seems to alternate from heavy to light crop. My Saijo is so freaking good this year. It produced 3x as many than last year. They all are about 16 feet tall. I am thinking about chopping them back to 10 feet. Any tip on pruning to have consistent high quality fruit? Below are what they look like this week.
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I don’t see any reason to prune persimmon other than it being under a power line. They don’t need to be sprayed why prune it?
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They were hard to pick safely above 12’.
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They can over-bear, breaking branches and diminishing fruit quality. It helps to shorted scaffolds to stiffen them and reduce load. Also, shaded branches are aborted by the tree so pruning upper branches can keep lower branches healthy. And as noted above, picking.
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This is Kassandra, planted in 2017. FWIW, I intend to remove some lower branches. I also intend to head the tree to help maintain height below roughly 12-15’. It’s ridiculously productive – I won’t feel deprived if I pick fewer fruits, especially if they are larger.
I also have 3 IKKJ that are similar. I find that Asians and Hybrids are fairly easy to keep manageable size. My one American is tough to control.
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Here’s my Tecumseh tree planted 9 years ago. It would like to be a much larger tree, but the less I have to harvest from a ladder the better. So I prune all the most vigorous upright growth every year to maintain a height of about 12 feet. I think consistent fruiting has more to do with the cultivar and the age of the tree than the pruning. This tree is my most consistent fruiter despite heavy pruning, but my Giombo tree of a comparable age and the same propensity to grow upright has been a biennial bearer for me. I’m hoping my Giombo will grow out of that trait - it gets pruned the same way as my Tecumseh and hasn’t been as consistent in fruiting yet.
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That’s a beauty!
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That’s a beautiful shape. I will train mine to look like this. Thank you for sharing the picture.
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This looks like how mine were 3 years ago.