Google scholar returns about 330 results for “persimmon” “Apomixis”:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22persimmon%22+%22Apomixis%22&btnG=
I guess there’s no need to graft that one. What’s the variety. Virginiana or kaki?
Interesting and perhaps unsurprising about the apomixis. What is the variety? Kaki or Virginiana. I’ve often wondered about the genetic pressures that would cause a plant to go apomictic. It’s not much good if your goal is breeding, but it sure makes things easy for growers if the variety is of good quality. Mangos and clementines are both highly apomictic and commercial production globally is based heavily on these varieties, is my understanding.
On another note, I found this correspondence with Jerry Lehman regarding viability of OP crosses whilst digging around on the NAFEX listserv archive of yore. The juicy bits are at the bottom:
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The article I was reading was about D. kaki variety Mopanshi. Cross compatibilities of Oriental persimmon 'Mopanshi' and 'Luotian-tianshi' with 'Zenjimaru' - PubAg
Apomixis is a group of processes in various plant species that result in a viable seed from an unpollinated flower. It is worth a few minutes to study how it occurs and the different mechanisms that can produce the same effect, i.e. a viable seed that has only maternal genetics.
The inference is that apomixis is possible in all persimmon which is why I brought the topic into the discussion.
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How old is your Prok? Mine did not lose astringency the first few years. Now it is excellent and early. I’m in 6a, rural Illinois 30 miles North of St. Louis, Mo.
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Thanks, Bill. I planted the tree in 2015. As I recall, I had crops in 2018-2021. In 2022, I top-worked it so severely that there was no fruit.
I’m grafting my Prok this year too. The weak american persimmon flavor is not appealing either. It’s getting a fresh H-63A makeover.
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@Robert – Sorry this is off topic but a quick response. I agree. Even when the Prok fruit was non-astringent, I found the flavor bland. I don’t really understand why some people love it. Maybe local growing conditions matter a lot. Maybe there is a fake Prok circulating. I bought mine from Starks.
I’m using the Prok tree (inter-stem?) as the base for an experimental franken-tree. Last year I grafted H63A, Barbra’s Blush, and Dollywood (Americans) as well as JT-02 (hybrid) and Miss Kim (Asian). I will add Morris Burton this year.
I have a separate 1 or 2-year old tree for each of those varieties so I may remove / change some varieties as the results come in. I grafted Miss Kim mainly to see whether a high graft on a big tree proved more cold-hardy.
p.s. Just so you know that my problem with Prok is not a problem with persimmons generally, I have Kassandra right next to Prok and it is very tasty. Furthermore, I’d say that my IKKJ non-astringent Kaki fruit have a better flavor when fully ripe. Just yesterday, a friend to whom I had given some IKKJ fruit described his family’s reaction by noting “the WOW factor.” Nobody who has eaten even my best Prok fruit has asked for another.
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Is Prok’s taste considered “weak” by many growers? I just recommended it to a friend after seeing lots of internet descriptions.
@hambone – Opinion seems very divided. I would say that it might be a north/south cold/hot divide but I think there are some northern growers who like it, such as Jesse in ME. I haven’t done a formal tally but I’d estimate that at least 1/3 of the comments I’ve seen (not from nurseries, who are biased) are lukewarm to negative.
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@jrd51 I’m betting it’s mostly the people that favor asian persimmons that like Prok and the American lovers want hardcore American flavor.
On the franken persimmons I have taken a different route. I have been topping the rootstock at a foot or two to create 3-4 “trees”. Then your franken persimmon is more like separate trees. We will see how that works out. I’m building a traditional one as well though.
I grow everything here and I’m really starting to love persimmons even more. You just stab them in the ground and collect fruit.
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It’s definitely a mild American persimmon, and it varies quite a bit from year to year. But some years are better than others. Last year was a bland one for me. Early Golden was great last year though.
Jerry Lehman said that year-in/year-out, Early Golden consistently won tastings in the Claypool orchard
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That’s good to know, thanks. I can always top work friend’s Prok.
Personally, I can’t discern much difference, other than size, between any of the D.virginiana varieties I grow. If ripe, they all taste like a persimmon to me.
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Different people have different taste buds and different taste preferences. I can relate to this from experience with tomatoes where my tastes lean toward balanced tomato flavor with enough sweetness and enough tartness. I’ve tasted persimmons that were much more intense than others growing nearby. I’ve also tasted a few that were sweeter than average. This suggests breeding for improved persimmon flavor is a viable goal. Where things get dicey is considering breeding for large size, not astringent (or easily removed), attractive color and shape, cold tolerant, and good flavor. Some of these can easily be selected while others will take years of work.
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This could be right. I notice that some tasters are driven almost completely by sugar. If you know the Brix, you can predict their opinion. These tasters hate non-astringent Asians, especially when still firm, because they just aren’t very sweet. None of my Prok fruit were sweet.
Acidity can matter too. When acidity rises, it tends to offset some of the perceived sweetness. But my Prok fruit wasn’t acidic.
Other tasters look past sweetness for more subtle flavors, such as caramel, vanilla, etc. Personally I’m not good at noticing much less identifying these flavors. But to my tongue, Prok had some of these subtleties but not much. A fully ripe, slightly dried PCNA kaki is way better. Kassandra had strong flavor without being especially sweet. But probably a seeded PVNA would take this prize.
I might have been able to make an unbiased judgment if I could get the astringency to leave.
There is a regular Prok and an improved Prok. The improved Prok is a sport of the original Prok, the former was originally sold by Stark and is suppose to be more productive. So yeah, there are two, but the fruit as far as I can tell should be identical. Cliff should have the whole story if you are interested in the precise history.
People like Prok and Yates because they are large. Despite several people occasionally claiming they have found 3 inch diameter fruit D. virg, those people have never supplied proof (pictures with a measuring tool). Prok and Yates are consistently considered the largest of the D. virg cultivars.
Let me tell you, after collecting golf ball or gum ball sized D. virg on a 25 foot tree, fruit size starts to get REALLY important when you start thinking about new plantings. 
I think this is the only way to get tree form hybrids. Nearly all of the hybrids I have seen basically want to form shrub like growth form (granted you can kind of force tree form through pruning), which is kind of nice for picking, but if you want a landscape tree, you need to graft higher up.
Same. I can’t taste the difference between most of them. That said, there are always a few that seem to linger in my mind. John Rick, for one, is particularly tasty. It reminds me of Nikita’s Gift. Very strong red blush. (Note, there is a fake/false John Rick floating around, which was sold by several nurseries. The real one as rediscovered from an older planting relatively recently.)
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I wonder which ‘John Rick’ version I received in 1996 or thereabouts, came from Raintree I believe? Killed by a woodchuck years ago
I’m really not quite sure when the fake one started floating around or how. I haven’t really inquired further to see if there is a backstory (I’m sure there is). I want to say late mid 90s or mid 2000s, is when the wrong one started to pop up. Usually it takes like ~5 years to go from someone collecting/receiving a scion to grow a tree big enough to start grafting their own scion to sell grafted trees. Which means, there’s a really large window in which this could have occurred. John Rick was one of the weird examples where we had the wrong persimmon probably floating around for 10 years before someone realized something was wrong (5 years from original collection, then another 5 to grow it out for fruit). Then another couple of years to confirm, a few more years to go back and hunt down correct one, and then a few more years to sell the correct one. So probably at least a 20 year window, from someone collecting wrong one, to the same person selling the right one. Obviously, it’s not like they can contact everyone who they sold to, or those further on who were sold to, so the wrong one is still out there.
I do know that some people still have the fake John Rick and keep sharing it or propagating it. At this point, the only way to be 100% sure is to get it from one of the INFGA members or NaFex who really know their persimmon stuff. At one point, even Lehman and Cliff both had the wrong John Rick.
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