Here’s a shot of JT-02 grafted on Prok. This graft is 2 years old. Last year it flowered but dropped the fruit. That seems to have happened this year with Miss Kim.
For comparison, here’s a representative American also on Prok. This is Dollywood, just 1 year old (grafted May 22).
And Kassandra on it’s own tree.
I agree, early golden is going to be hard to beat when it comes to flavor - in my opinion it wins hands down to most of the newer named cultivars. Yates is also very good. Both of these ripen early in my zone 7b NC climate.
Your Prok is amazing. Whatever your growing conditions are, I need that here for my relatively stingy tree.
My friend gave me Yates yesterday. It was the first Yates for this year. Frequent rain helped with fruit size, larger than normal. The taste is still intensely sweet and the texture is gooey.
Some of my neighbors do not like the intense flavor of Yates. They prefer a milder taste of my Prok.
Here are my Prok. A bit larger and with some tapered end. It tasted mild, an opposite end taste-wise to ripe Yates. No trace of stringent when fully ripened. Ripened Prok has a prettier look than ripened Yates (wrinkly soft) but that’s about it for Prok.
What did you end up preferring for flavor — Yates, Prok, NG? I can probably only plant one…
I only tasted NG for two years. The tree dropped so many fruit (sometimes, all of hundreds of fruitlets). The fruit tasted fine but ripened late in mid Nov.
Yates is perfumey sweet. I call it intensely sweet. Some like it, others are turned off by it.
Prok was very mild, too mild to my taste.
NG (8 years old) died with no clear reason this spring. I gave Prok (in pot) away. My friend has a Yates so I don’t have to grow it.
If I were to choose among the three, NG would be my choice as it had the most balanced taste. All had soft texture. Yates is the most gooey.
You may want to read up on hybrids. There are several promising ones. @SMC_zone6 grows a bunch. If you plant a persimmon in NH, I would choose American. If you plant it in Boston (warmer), I would go with a hybrid.
What was your low temp during that cold snap in early Feb? We had -7 F, which is the lowest temp in the 11 years we’ve been here. It nearly killed three IKKJs that had survived with little damage since 2015.
Thanks. I’ve never had a persimmon! And I think we are out of season now for Americans so I don’t know when I could. I was looking at self-pollinating ones for NH, so probably American, and Prok seemed safer? On the taste side. But I’m still in the early days of research here (spent the morning studying @disc4tw’s spreadsheet of everything he’s started).
You don’t need a pollinator and probably don’t want one, unless you like spitting seeds.
Some persimmons varieties hold fruit better if seeded, but most do fine without.
Some Asian varieties taste better and lose astringency sooner if seeded. But most don’t benefit. If you have an Asian variety in mind, ask.
Prok is not the best available American. Opinions vary, but I would go with H63A or Barbra’s Blush. These are great tasting and early ripening.
That spreadsheet has many updates needed, both eliminations and additions, but it’s a great place to start researching.
My coldest temp in Feb was -7F. We had colder than that in previous years. However, the years that it was colder, we also had cold winters.
This past winder was mild (compared to average years). We had mild Dec and mild Jan which was a bad sign as trees were not fully asleep. When temp dropped drastically in early Feb, it caused more damage to fruit trees. Any temperature that fluctuate wildly in a short period of time causes more damage to fruit trees than just plain cold.
Here are my friend’s Yates. The pic was taken last week. It has ripened from mid Oct until now. Still over 50 fruit left on the tree.
For Yates, if they are soft on the tree, they still carry astringency. We need to wait until they drop to the ground to lose astringency. Sometimes, those dropped fruit got dirty. My friend made the use of bird netting creatively this year.
I have a friend who lives in a slightly colder micro climate that got substantial winter damage on Nikita’s gift. In zone 9A!
I suspect it can be hurt by rapidly changing temperatures – early fall frost or late spring frost.
Thanks!
Cliff has a list of American and hybrids that supposedly go to zone 5b.
I guess the qualities I’d be looking for are: self-fertile, relatively low maintenance (i.e. not trees that bear so heavily they need to be propped, or netted to catch fruit), easy to pick and eat (less astringent?), and a good taste that is broadly liked.
that Feb cold snap went from ~50 F down to -18 F and then back up to 50 F here, all in about 72 hrs. My persimmons got knocked for a loop.
I have read many excerpts saying that American persimmon trees grow to 80 feet high, be careful. I think that might just be back East with the heat and humidity all day and all night for many months. My Garrettson is 12 feet tall after 14 years. I think Szukis is naturally a small tree, but it tops out at 10 feet. I think here in the PNW with the cool nights, even in summer, the trees don’t grow that tall.
John S
PDX OR
If anything, Id think theyd grow taller out your way. Everything else does. Hemlocks in the east top out at 140 ft or so. You guys have 200 ft + hemlocks. The best growing conditions in the east for most trees are found in the valleys of thr Smokey Mts. Vigorous persimmons are probably a combination of genetics and growing conditions. Those huge ones are found in the fertile terraces just above floodplains.Grown from seed (never transplanted), not grafted, and with puny or no fruit (male) would all make a significant difference too.
That’s in the woods with tall competition. In full sun they turn into big wide monsters in the 15-30 foot tall range.
