I was walking around today and found my first seemingly ripe persimmon of the year. It reminded me to inquire about everyone else’s trees. How are all y’all’s trees doing? Anything interesting or promising going on with persimmons this year?
Many of my trees are fruiting for the first time this year including my first grafts I made in 2019.
Here’s the ripe Prok I found on the ground. It’s still firm, so I put it on the counter by some bananas to speed things along. This will be the first fruit from the tree I planted in 2018. It might’ve fruited much earlier but had some weather accidents in years past that zapped the new growth.
All my persimmons are young, but I should get my first taste of Chocolate and Coffecake persimmons.
My Saijo died. Maybe inspired by my multiple Izu deaths over the years. Finally convinced to follow suit.
Critters have been snatching my H-63a. I’ve never tasted an American persimmon before, so I picked this last one to continue ripening inside. Photos do not do it’s color and glow justice.
Just message me this winter if you want some Saijo scions. It’s a very tasty variety, likely my favorite PCA I’ve tasted.
Great to see you’re starting to harvest American persimmons there. The critters have been ravenous this year, but have mostly been leaving my persimmons alone. This is likely due to astringency in the unripe fruit.
Having never had an American, I’m not at all sure what stage they lose astringency. Could be these critters are more skilled at this than me.
I’m not sure what went wrong with the Saijo. I planted 3 to a hole, Saijo, Rosseyanka, and CA Maru. Rosseyanka and CA Maru are doing great! Could have been overly competitive.
My persimmon tree had a ton of fruit. Two weeks ago, a third of the tree broke off due to the weight I suppose. It also looked like there may have been some rot where it broke off as some of the wood was black. I have seen so many pictures of persimmon trees laden with fruit that I thought they could just handle it. Now, some of the fruit seems to be rotting and dropping, but there are still plenty of fruit if they make it to the end. One of the fruit was pretty orange, so I tried it. It was not great but okay, but also, had seeds. I’m still learning all these persimmon rules, so hopefully they are still good.
Question, do you know if I can graft onto a root sucker that came up about 6 feet from the tree? If so, I may ask for a Saijo scion this winter. The sucker is in the perfect spot if this works.
Yes you can graft to a root sucker. Is it from the original Saijo, or something else? You might try grafting Saijo to a different tree, maybe directly to your Chocolate or Coffeecake. It could have a compatibility issue with the particular seedling rootstock it was on. Or that seedling may just not be well suited there.
I’ve had success grafting several persimmon varieties, after learning some of the quirks of grafting persimmon. Saijo gave me more trouble than others early on, but that may have been coincidence, or bad choices at the time.
Hey, thanks for a response. The sucker is from the tree that was suppose to be Saijo, but isn’t. That tree has Chocolate and Coffeecake grafted onto it, the previous Saijo graft didn’t take. I’m not sure the variety of what tree Raintree gave me, I’ll try and get a picture of them, but they look pretty generic. I do have unknown variety, Chocolate and Coffeecake fruit on the tree.
Keep PA in mind if you plan on moving in the future! We can grow some pretty good figs in the ground too. I think I have 8 nonastringent trees in the ground now.
My trees have been dropping 1 or 2 daily. Maybe there is too much crop for them to carry with the given fertilizer and lack of rain.
I hope Rojo Brillante ripens by Nov 1 here. We normally get a hard frost around that time. If not then it will get plucked out, and one of my many potted trees can take its place. I had to frantically pick all my persimmons at that time last year. They don’t taste good in my opinion if they get frozen. I had to soft ripen everything inside which worked out well for most varieties.
I have two rootstocks growing in pots for three years now. If you can spare a few pieces, I’ll take them. Let me know if you are looking for anything. Thanks
My tree is doing great but dropping full size unripe fruit like crazy for the past month. Its really a shame because I knew persimmons dropped additional fruit in late summer but this is way more than I expected. Of the fruit that held on after the initial drop there’s only ~40% remaining, and about one fruit is still dropped per day.
Its on its third year so its still young and I know persimmons are know for this but its very painful to see when you only have one tree.
Wow! Those look great, Jim! Those round ones are probably all Coffeecake. Chocolate should be conical. Please refer to my picture of my Chocolates in the original post. That’s amazing you already have orange kaki in PA. I bet those earliest to ripen are pollinated. That seemed to be the trend for my Coffeecakes last year.
Great looking persimmons, Tony. I have 2 Tam Kam trees fruiting now. I might have more though because some other differently labeled trees have fruit and foliage that look very similar.
I like that thought! But I wonder if I can grow a better persimmon than carbon dioxide-treated Sharoni? If not, I will continue to get the Sharonis as they are the best tasting non-astringent that I have eaten.
