Persimmons 2023

That’s a really lovely tree - foliage and fruit together are beautiful. Does it taste just like most other astringent types and do you notice any difference in the taste between the big ones and the small ones?

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Yes, this tree reliably goes dormant earlier than my others. It had brilliant scarlet fall colors every year for the past 3 years while a lot of others get ratty and defoliate or frost defoliates them before their leaves can change color.

The small ones taste pretty much the same as the large ones. I normally remove all the perfect flowers because the larger female fruit are easier to eat. I kept one to show this tree’s peculiarity. It’s one that also doesn’t turn watery when ripe, and loses astringency with ease. It’s main purpose in my yard is providing pollen, but the fruit are good quality.

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I wish I could grow Rojo Brillante in ground. It has large, beautiful fruit. The fall color leaves are yellow/orange, very pretty, too.


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My modest Kasandra sample. They all fit into my little persimmon tea bowl. Not too bad considering I thought the tree had died.


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Are you Kassandra about the size of Prok? They look a bit bigger, which would be nice.

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Most of my Prok were actually larger. It might have the benefit of producing more fruit though as @jrd51 ’s impressive tree showed us last year.

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The NG are clones. But you have a valid point about the daikon!.

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Are the perfect flowers smaller than the female?

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The bowl and the persimmons are very beautiful.

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Yes!

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Thank you :slight_smile:

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So D. kaki, D. virginiana (and hybrids of the two)
are similar to figs in that they are midway between monoecious and dioecious, have cultivars with and without persistence, but differ by having grouchy bark and roots?

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My Kassandra fruit are relatively small. I haven’t checked carefully, but I’d guess that they weigh about the same as medium-sized DV fruits such as H63A and Barbra’s Blush. They could certainly be smaller than large DV fruits. The shape is different, as you can see.

It’s true that Kassandra was extremely productive last year, producing >1200 fruits. While that would probably exceed the production of my DV trees, I wouldn’t recommend permitting that kind of harvest. This year all the former fruiting branches were dead and there had been little growth of new fruiting wood last year, so the crop is much smaller – maybe 100-200. I’d recommend using a combination of pruning and thinning to keep the harvest moderate. That’d probably enhance size and flavor too.

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This happens with a lot of kaki too. My Saijo fruiting branches that are thin typically die. Even if they survive, the same branches will typically not produce fruit bearing 2ndary growth the next year but perhaps the year after. I typically will prune off the fruit bearing branches while picking fruit because of this. The little wood nubs are useful for attaching the fruit to strings to air dry. I also hand thin fruit off most of my trees after petal fall.

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Someone on a Facebook group posted a report of a kaki seedling that has only perfect and female flowers. I’m sure some trees must have only perfect and male flowers. Persimmons sure are interesting.

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Interesting. My Chocolate bloomed again in September and had a bunch of what I considered female flowers because I could see the ovary, but they are smaller than expected. They have small fruits forming that will freeze out in the coming weeks.

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I had to pick all my persimmons with the impending freeze tomorrow. Who would’ve thought I had around 80 fruit left on this Nishimura Wase. I’ve already eaten and given away around 60 fruit so far. This tree is the winner for productivity this year.



More photo dumping to come.

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That’s a lots of persimmons Andrew, congrats!

I only got about three from my Nishimura Wase grafted branch on my Jiro.

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That’s great! Dump away with the photos. I love seeing the pictures of everyone’s persimmon harvest. The one problem is I keep thinking I need to check my trees, even though I know full well they didn’t set any fruit.

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Red sepals on Nikita’s gift. The photos unfortunately don’t show how red the fruit actually gets.

Are there any other persimmons that have this characteristic?

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