I can see now that it would be wise to store a few sticks of scionwood for rare varieties before the worst cold of winter.
I have 7 or 8 persimmon seedlings from a tree at the edge of my yard. I’ll pot them up tomorrow in 5 gallon containers. With a bit of luck, they will be large enough to graft by late fall.
Hopefully they are seedlings and not suckers. Suckers involve a lot more digging.
They are growing in a container from seed I planted several months ago. I will move them from one pot to a pot for each seedling.
With all that room to grow they probably will.
As data on cold tolerance, this is an update on the status of (1) my young (3rd leaf) JT-02, which I grafted to seedling rootstock; and (2) some nearby branches of JT-02, which I grafted to Prok at roughly the same time 2 years ago. As noted above, the young tree suffered cold damage this past winter, with significant die-back of branches. It is growing, however, from the central leader and from the lower few inches of some branches. Meanwhile, the branches growing on Prok showed no damage whatsoever. Growth is rampant; I can already see emerging blossoms.
Now you can train the little JT-02 the way you wanted. All my JT-02 survived the -14F for 2 nights this past winter.
Tony
Yeah, I kinda liked the old structure. I’ll try to re-create it just a few inches lower. 
My second leaf JT-02 survived our last winter unscathed. Every single bud has broken and produced a small cluster of leaves. My third leaf Prok faired similarly well, and it has a lot of flower buds!
That’s great!
My four Americans are fine. My hybrid Kassandra is fine. The three Kakis that I covered are fine. All of the grafts on Prok (JT-02, Miss Kim, plus 3 Americans) are fine. My only damage was (1) branches on the young JT-02, and (2) the three IKKJ trees, which seem dead. 
How cold did it get there?
Hi Tony,
It’s interesting you mention using pots to speed up persimmon maturity and ripening. Several people I know here use the same strategy to cause figs to ripen earlier that a normal in ground fig. One friend @ram uses a slightly modified practice of letting the tree fill the pot, then cutting the bottom out of the pot and allowing roots to go into the ground. We have mild winters here so the fig trees tolerate the cold but the elevated pot keeps the roots warmer during growing months. Do you suppose persimmon trees would also?
Dennis
Kent, wa
It got to -8F on Feb 4th (per accuweather, as my cheap thermometer reads down to 0F only). My covered kakis came out unscathed too.
How do you cover them? They’re fairly small, I gather.
I grafted JT-02 and 100-46 in the yard last year. It got down to -8F. Both survived with no dieback. A seedling still hasn’t leafed out while everything else has had leaves for a month. I still need to check out NB-02 and a number of American varieties at another property. I grafted Kassandra last week, so time will tell on that.
Yes, they are small, about 4-5’ high. I don’t think I will be able to cover them next winter.
Does anyone know of any reliable data on which hybrids can be pollinated by Virginiana? Is it directly related to the percentage of Virginiana in the parentage? I’m grafting in Bozhy Dar into one of my trees as a pollinator and it would be great if I could tell if other trees were pollinated by that or not without bagging blossoms, etc.
Unfortunately, there must be wild Virginiana close enough to provide pollen to my plants since my 100-46 last year were fully seeded even though I had no plants will male flowers myself. So if other hybrids like JT-02 can be pollinated by those, I would never know if Bozhy was the pollinator or the local wilds.
Thoughts?
I thought pollination concerns were/are pretty passé now. Isn’t it the case that all nearly all persimmons make parthenocarpic fruit absent a pollizer. And wouldn’t compatibility be a non-issue, provided flowering times overlap. The pollen would only need to cause fruit set, not produce viable seed. Perhaps you’re speaking more from a breeding perspective? From the sound of things, F-2’s and more advanced crosses seem viable across the board.
My Kasandra tree produces mostly flat seeds that do not look viable. There are many male persimmon trees around. All my American persimmons are seeded.
Might you be in tetraploid territory by chance? I see that you’re in zone 7. You may already be aware, but to clarify: 60 chromosome males, which are typical of the southeast, would not be able to produce viable seed when pollinating a hybrid as all kaki hybrids (like kaki itself) have 90 chromosomes (hexaploid). I understand there are areas where the ranges of 60 and 90 chromosome “races” (for lack of a better term) coexist and commingle, but my understanding is that 60 chromosome types predominate below about the Mason-Dixon Line, with 90 chromosome types occupying the northern and western ranges.
As an aside, it’s amazing the variation in size and shape of persimmon seed. My big Mohler tree seldom produces seeded fruit, but I found one that had a few seeds in a batch of whole frozen fruits I harvested last season. The seeds were TINY and oddly shaped. For a second I thought they might not be viable, but upon closer inspection they’re plump and ready to sprout. They weren’t THAT much bigger than the “blanks” you sometimes find in parthenocarpic fruit.
I;m in Z 6a. Illinois north of St. Louis. MO. Definitely 90 chromosome territory. Kasandra seeds look like blanks.
Good info. Thanks
