I’ve been told that when these two varieties crosspolinate you yield a better tasting fruit. Anyone know if this is true or a bunch of horse malarkey?
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Both need to be pollinated to have the best fruit, but it doesn’t matter what variety does the pollinating.
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This year I finally had a chance to see both male and female flowers appearing on the branch of Coffee Cake I grafted years ago. I hand pollinated them since there were not many flowers.
After tasting the pollinated Coffee Cake, I would say that the difference in flavor between pollinated vs unpollinated ones to be day and night. The unpollinated ones that I had tasted in the past were bland even when Jiro from the same tree were wonderful. A pollinated Coffee Cake is even better than a properly ripened Jiro.
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Damn, and I thought this topic was going to provide a really good persimmon coffee cake recipe.
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That makes two of us 
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@DeepBlueDustin I ordered some male Rosseyanka scions from Cliff England to pollinate my Giboshi. I’ve grown Giboshi both unpollinated and pollinated and I notice a big taste improvement when pollinated. I scoured the internet for Gailey scions but apparently it’s a goner. A fabulous male pollinator that I used to own.
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Thanks for all the feedback! I have a coffeecake sandwiched between two chocolates, so I’ll hope for good fruit set. If not I’ll take matters into my own hands like I do with the Pawpaws!
I agree with the others… a pollinated coffee cake is a truly unique and delicious persimmon. Unpollinated it is still good, just nothing special, but has to be treated like a normal astringent persimmon and eaten when very soft, or treated to remove the astringency (i.e. alcohol or CO2 chamber).
If you have the coffee cake between two chocolates, you will absolutely NOT have to do pollinating by hand. They are very effectively wind pollinated. I know there are several people on the forum that actually removed chocolate persimmons from their orchard because ALL of their persimmons ended up getting pollinated, and the seeds become an annoyance.
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Chocolate blooms on a branch grafted last year. I was surprised to see both male and female blooms in the same cluster.
I was expecting something similar to Coffee Cake where male and female blooms appear in different clusters. See picture below of Coffee Cake blooms.
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Ahh so coffeecake does produce male flowers too. Thanks for confirming! Hope you get to try the fruit this year.
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This was the first year that I noticed a decent number of male blooms on my coffee cake.
I also have a California Maru that had an abundance of male flowers this year. Has anyone else with California Maru seen male flowers on it? It hasn’t fruited yet so I’m not 100% sure it’s Maru… when I saw the male flowers I started to think it might be a mislabeled Chocolate!
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Yeah, I’d heard that maybe Coffeecake doesn’t produce male flowers, perhaps it was from a post by Scott years ago.
My Coffeecake, that has only had a few female flowers, and that a couple of years ago, looks to be about to put out a bunch of female - still a little early to tell if they will get to bloom, but they are in clusters of 3.
My small Chocolate, is once again, making nothing but males. It also made a couple of female flowers 2 or 3 years ago.
maru mine was from DW does have many male flowers.
My coffee Cake produced some male flowers, unfortunately I did not photograph them.
Here are some of the fruit.
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Mine has male flowers once again this year. There are only a couple branches of them.
Drew when did your coffee cake leaf out this year? Mine still just has swollen buds. I’m going to do a scratch test when I get home to double check it pulled through. It went through the past two winters fine. My chocolate has been leafed out for about a week now.
Yes, it started budding out 4 weeks ago towards the end of April. All of my persimmons show full leaves now and flower buds. Does your Coffee Cake at least have green buds? All this heat should be pushing it along. Sorry for any typos. I just got done at the optometrist’s and he dilated my pupils!
No greed buds. Looks like almost all of the branches have died back. The trunk scratches green but everything else is dead. This wasn’t the worst winter it has seen. I’m at a loss???
That does sound odd! Did it have a late flush of growth that perhaps did not harden off in time? Persimmons are weird.
It did have a premature leaf drop last fall. It shed all leaves before they got to color which seemed bizarre to me. I just hope it pulls through. I’ve already lost a few pears and an apple to fireblight.