Hi everyone! I have an American persimmon tree in my yard (5b USDA) that was sold to me as a Meader 5 years ago, and I’ve learned 3 years ago that it’s just a male so my thought was since it’s so big already, I could graft a bunch of different American persimmon grafts onto the tree at once and it can be a multi-graft tree! So I grafted about 18 grafts (3 different American persimmon cultivars) onto it last year during the spring by doing bark grafts on the ends of existing branches. From those, 15 of them took (ie leafed out that spring).
Fast forward to this spring and I noticed only maybe 7 or so lasted, the rest died off (they broke by simply touching them and didn’t form a graft with the tree). The remaining 7 I did a scratch test and they were still green so I left them be. I noticed they weren’t leafing out though while the other branches were (except for ONE graft, unfortunately at the very very top of the tree). So a couple of weeks ago I took off any leaves/buds on the branches with the remaining grafts so it could focus on growing via the grafts, but they still haven’t leafed out! You can see that in the pic on the barren branches below lol.
Upon reading further, it looks like persimmons don’t like multiple grafts. However, you’re also not supposed to remove more than 30% of the canopy, which is why I did the multi-graft approach I did (do 30% of the tree per year). So now what should I do with this tree? Give up and just plant a female in its stead? Or top work the entire tree? When would I do that? Any advice would be great!
(Pic is taken at 3 PM; the tree gets light in the mornings until about noon, and then gets light again around 5 PM onwards, so about half of the day. Tree is about 12-15’ tall and was about 8’ tall back in 2021 when I planted it.)
