I have a chocolate persimmon near my Giboshi, mostly planted as a pollen source since I haven’t heard the highest praise for chocolate compared to other PVNA types.
It was a tiny tree this spring, but flowered quite a bit and set some fruit, which I pulled off to get it to focus on growing. It grew fairly strongly and around June it had another growth spurt, flowered again and by early July set about a half dozen new fruit. I removed all except one which I left just to see what would happen. I was pretty sure that fruit really didn’t have enough of a season left to mature, so I was quite surprised when I noticed it had gotten about half-yellow by the weekend before Thanksgiving. The tree had lost all its leaves and I didn’t expect it to ripen much more on the tree, so I picked it. Inside it slowly got a little yellower but still had a fair amount of green near the stem side, so I put it in a bag with a banana for 3 days and it got mostly yellow/orange but still had a little greenish blush at the top. The greenish doesn’t really show in the picture.
Thinking something forming so late and picked early probably wouldn’t be any good, I decided to cut it open today since I was losing patience. Quite interestingly it was mostly seeded (4 seeds and one unfilled seed), but none of the flesh showed any brown.
I always thought brown was the sign that astringency had gone away in a PVNA fruit. So it was with the expectation of a mouthful of astringency that I bit into it. Surprisingly it was crisp and fairly sweet, like a regular non-astringent type, but with a little bit more “something” to the taste. It wasn’t as good as the pollinated Giboshi I had early in the season, and not as good as a well-ripened Nishimura Wase, but for a small fruit, forming a month after my other fruit had set and not fully ripening on the tree, I was actually very pleased. It had a nice crispy texture and probably would have been even better if I had given it more time to ripen. There was just a bit of astringency at the very top near the stem where it still had some greenish color on the outside skin, but otherwise was non-astringent throughout.
I cut open a few of the seeds to see if they looked complete inside and were fully formed and they appeared to be.
