Male Chocolate Persimmon flowers.
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Its loaded. I have 4 or 5 male flowers on mine. Are there any female flowers?
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I’m still not 100% certain that I understand how persimmons work. Based on @murky ’ s question and my limited understanding, can trees produce both male and female flowers? I have a tree which only produced male flowers for the last 2 years (the only years it has been flowering). Does that mean I should go ahead and remove or top work it or is there still some possibility that it will eventually produce some female flowers and fruit? Thanks!
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Usually persimmons are either male or female, but there are a few varieties which produce both types of flowers. The safe way to bet is that you have a male, and should top-work it.
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Thanks, Tim. I really didn’t have much hope for it because it is actually just a tree that I let grow from rootstock of a former tree. In other words, I bought a persimmon (don’t even know what it was- it was one of the first fruit trees I ever bought) and the grafted-on tree died from the graft union up. I just left the still alive rootstock in ground and let it grow because I didn’t need the space so why not. It turned into a very nice LOOKING tree but only has the small male flowers since it started blooming 2 years ago.
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Sounds like a good grafting candidate for next spring.
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I agree…but I have a really hard time grafting persimmons! This year I had one that took and grew for weeks and put on several inches of growth (way beyond just energy stored in the scion) and suddenly died for no reason. Several others didn’t take at all. I’m really embarrassed to say this, but I did 7 persimmon grafts this year and as it looks now I got 2 takes. That’s less than 30% success. Oh well.
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I think persimmons are hard for everyone, so nothing to be embarrassed about. Congrats on your two takes. Which ones made it?
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I don’t know. This pictures were taken at Flower World nursery. I didn’t plant any Chocolate Persimmon because of lack of information how they perform in Pacific Northwest. Besides than that my Saijo Persimmons do good so far and I see only female flowers on them for this year.
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Do not topwork it if you want Chocolate persimmons, or if you would like it to pollenize another pollenation variant nonastringent persimmon such as Coffeecake.
A persimmon tree sold for its fruit must have female flowers. Essentially any Japanese persimmon with a name, was named for the fruit.
Chocolate is one of the few that is supposed to be a good source for male flowers as well.
I think Scott has another post on this forum describing how his Chocolate produced only male flowers for a number of years, I’m not sure how that played out. (edit: funny, that post from Scott is in this very thread. I just went back and re-read).
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Thanks for saying that, because I really was frustrated at my low success rate with persimmons. The 2 that made it were a chocolate grafted onto an unknown root stock (which coincidentally I ended up with because the hachiya that was originally grafted to this rootstock got frozen to death so I kept the rootstock just as I did with the previously described tree, but fortunately I got it topworked this year). My other take was a saijo that I grafted onto a persimmon I bought locally that just said “American Persimmon”. I got it cheap with the idea I’d rework it. If the Saijo graft that took hangs in there, this one will be a nice Saijo persimmon tree.
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If you’ve gotten even one persimmon graft to take before you’re 100 years old, you’re doing well.
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hahaha. That one made me laugh out loud! You guys are making me feel so much better. I guess I’ve been paying to much attention to the experts around here who just talk about and show photos of their persimmon grafts as if they are almost as easy as my experience with poms.
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Anyone else seeing a high level of aphid activity on their persimmons? Mine (fuyu and chocolate) seem to be aphid magnets and require constant leaf cleaning.
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Can Asian persimmons (like Chocolate) be pollinated by American persimmons? I know it was very difficult to successfully hybridize them.
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I think the two successful 50/50 hybrids (Rosseyanka and JT-02) were both bred using pollen from an Asian persimmon with a female American flower.
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