Persimmon ripening calendar ?

Hi,

is anyone has designed a fruiting calendar for persimmon (american or/and asian) to extend the fruiting season the most possible ?


The goal is to produce fruit as a fodder for human and poultry


Another question, cause here in France we have no expertise in Kaki. How good/bad are american persimmon when they drop (e.g. all half eaten by bird, too ripe and badly dammaged by drop, etc?) and when it tends to drop (a lot in winter ?)

In  Lee Reich book, he tells about the variety Mohler that drops when ripe, so i assume it drop just when ripe, because all fruit eventually drop, doesn't it ?

Thanks for any info !

I think 'Izu' is among the earliest ripening Asian persimmons, about a month before most others.

One of the posters on Gardenweb says his 'NC-10' American persimmon is always the first among his to ripen, and he's got quite a few.

Alex

Thanks for the answer,

Yes Izu seems early ripening, but poor yields (Lee Reich)
Ichikei Jiro ripes as early as Izu as i read (Fuyu - 3 weeks)

In books Mohler and NC-10 are said with a long ripening season, but i don't know how many weeks it correspond too (and also for the regular fruiting season - we have very little persimmon in France, and none in me region ...)

Epic spam there. 

Anyway, persimmons are enjoyable at a very wide range of ripeness.  Some you can eat when they are quite hard with a tinge of green on the outer skin, though they won't be real sweet.  But we like them heading towards the overripe juicy, gelatinous tomato end of the spectrum.  In other words, they are good until the fruit flies take over.

They do ripen off the tree.

They are also very nice dried. 

My only experience is with the American perssimon and I live in South Central Mississippi. I have been keeping a calendar of when our native trees and some exotic species produce their crops for a few years now.

In 2011, I ate my first persimmon on August 20th which may prove to be anomalous as we had an exceptionally early spring this year. In 2010, the first ones ripened on September 21st. 

And as for how long the crop endures, I am still eating them daily from some trees my father planted in his yard. As a guesstimate, they look to have dropped 80+% of their crop when I noticed them earlier today.

Concerning ripeness, I have always gone by how soft they are. My general rule for selecting a ripe fruit is to find one that is soft to the touch, has no areas of dessication and almost uniformly golden-yellowish-orangishish . . . Well, persimmon colored.

if you want to extend the season of them for humans, make hoshigaki. its japanese dried persimmon. you pick them when they just turn orange but are still nasty to eat. peel them, hang them, massage them once a week. over time the sugars in the fruit seep out and coat it like snow. VERY tasty. they last months on end in a airtight jar.

for animals i leave them on the tree, and when they drop the animals eat it. or a seedling will grow.

Check this calendar out from Dave Wilson......(ripening times are based in Fresno, CA I believe)

http://www.davewilson.com/homegrown/promotion/chart/harvest_dates2010.pdf

Thanks for replies, it helps,

@George Collins : So you said the ripenng period of a single american persimmon if a month ?

@hubert cumberdale : Yup, its on the list. I bought the Hatchya cultivar which is good for drying

Have you an idea of the period of dropping, does fruit hang on trees and drop till january of february ?

I also considering freezing them for human and animals consumptions, to extend persimmon until spring

@jovialgent: Thanks ! Its the kind of info i'm after I should find the same for american persimmon

I'll take note of when the last persimmon drops from our trees and let you know but I doubt very many will persist much into November.

And yes, 6+ weeks is easily how long it takes for the entirety if their crop to ripen.

If this year is indicative of how things normally are, if we start the clock at the date I ate the first fruit from the earliest bearing tree I know of (in my neighbors yard) and stop it when I eat me last one, the time period over which some fruit is ready to eat is 9+ weeks.

I have an American persimmon (Diospyros Virginiana) in front of my house. I live in zone 7b-8a in North Georgia, USA.


"How good/bad are american persimmon when they drop (e.g. all half eaten by bird, too ripe and badly dammaged by drop, etc?) and when it tends to drop (a lot in winter ?"

American persimmons are considered "ripe" when they fall.
Any that are still on the tree are likely to still be astringent.
I've eaten hundreds of persimmons picked up off the ground, but only one pulled directly off the tree (it felt like it was about to fall off)

American folklore says that you must wait till after the first frost to help soften and convert the astringency into sweetness. I have found that if they have fallen off the tree, then 90% of the time they are fully ripe, frost or not.  Soft= ripe.

Generally their condition is decent after falling- maybe a few bird pecks / ant chew holes (But that's ok, because they leave plenty for me!)
Only the extremely ripe ones are very damaged by the drop.

each year ripening varies a little, but generally mine ripen between mid September and mid October. Other trees I have found in the area seem to ripen at the same time as my tree.

Sometimes a few fruit will hand on the tree until late November, even December there might be a few lonely fruit way up the bare tree.

permaguy wrote:
Thanks for replies, it helps,

@hubert cumberdale : Yup, its on the list. I bought the Hatchya cultivar which is good for drying

Have you an idea of the period of dropping, does fruit hang on trees and drop till january of february ?

I also considering freezing them for human and animals consumptions, to extend persimmon until spring

the fruit usually drops from November to late January. it depends on how much gets harvested though. we really like persimmions.

for human consumption if you dont want to dry them, you can let them ripen fully( until jelly like) then scoop out and freeze in small blocks. thaw and use as you would fresh. they last months and months in the freezer.

for animals i leave em on the tree, when they drop the animals get fed. usually theres lots of green around at that time so the diet isnt all persimmon.

I checked on the two trees in my fathers yard today. Each started out with hundreds of fruits but both are now almost completely barren of fruit. The exceedingly few which remain are at very advanced stages of ripeness.  So ripe in fact that they have lost much of the flavor I had been enjoying so frequently over the past few weeks and their skins have desiccated.

On my own personal calendar of seasonal developments, I think I'll mark today as the end of the season for persimmons.

Had a conversation with my Japanese M.I.L. about persimmons.  Apparently, there are two methods of dealing with astringent persimmons.  1 is to peel them, string them up and hang them, massaging them a bit each day to speed up the drying process.  The other one involves shochu liqour - a type of hard alcohol, sometimes made from sweet potatoes, that tastes reminiscent of vodka, though not as strong.  I couldn't understand exactly what the method was, I think she said something about spraying the persimmons with shochu. 

Thanks Georges,

i was hoping that american persimmons will be more late reapening :/

If you want a persimmon that produces for poultry you might consider trying Lotus Persimmon (Diospyros lotus). They are often used as a rootstock for other persimmons. However, we are in an area that is extremely marginal for persimmons and the lotus persimmon we have crops every year like clockwork. The persimmons aren't much for human food, but I bet chickens would love them. I believe Lotus Persimmon is also self-fertile. Seasonwise, the lotus persimmon seems to be earlier than all the others we've tried.

In terms of human food, I think your freezing idea is great. They can either be frozen whole or made into persimmon pulp and frozen (which may be a perfect solution for damaged fruits). As I understand there is even a market for persimmon pulp here in the US.

Dave

the persimmons around here are starting to turn orange from green. we have a had a few frosts and they wont be done for a few weeks easily. seems to be a very good year for some trees, which make the tree look 50%+ orange.

Thanks for the tip about D. Lotus. I plan to include at least some to produce seeds to grow rootstock for american and oriental persimmon (no taproot). Didn't know about the earlier ripening, though.

The seed listing I have for D. lotus says that they are hardy to zone 5.

It also says that if you dry them, they taste a lot like dates.

i've been noticing lately  some persimmons that are supposedly hardy to zone 4/5 where I live, I doubt it..but one question...I have never eaten a persimmon, what do they taste like??? are they worth growing?

I just had my first taste of persimmon last night (Hachiya). What a delightful fruit! I live in the Seattle area and was hoping someone would have advice on which variety does well in the PNW? Which have the best flavor for this area? I have heard that the tastiest is the Jiro (Fuyu) from Japan, but seeing as Seattle is lucky to even have a summer sometimes, that a Jiro wouldn't be ideal. Would love some input, thanks!

I have heard of persimmons growing to zone 5, not much on the web about zone 4.

As for the taste, the closest thing a ripe persimmon tastes like is HONEY. Yup, honey. Sweet is the predominant flavor. There can also be an elusive, subtle cinnamon-like flavor. Dried persimmon tastes vaguely similar to dried dates. I really love these fruits.

As for Japanese cultivars in PNW, I wonder. They do grow in northern Japan, which has cold, wet winters - actually wet most of the year. Though Japan does tend towards hot summers. There is a cultivar named hokkaido, which I guess comes from hokkaido, farthest prefecture to the north, pretty cold climate.

In the Seattle area (zone Eight), winter cold is not our problem. Our problem is lack of summer warmth. As an example, for any luck with tomatoes, we need to select early varieties in order to accumulate enough warm hours to assure ripening before our version of summer ends. Last year, my maple leaves turned color before my tomatoes did!

Here is a nice site dedicated to persimmon info that I always see in the NAFEX publication:
http://www.persimmonpudding.com/harvest.html

thanks for the info on persimmons, honey and cinnamon, wow sounds great, guess that will be on my wish list for 2012

John Polk wrote:The seed listing I have for D. lotus says that they are hardy to zone 5.

It also says that if you dry them, they taste a lot like dates.

I've dried them...I've got to say that's an optimistic outlook on the quality of D. lotus.



Dave

Jodi Shaw wrote:I live in the Seattle area and was hoping someone would have advice on which variety does well in the PNW? Which have the best flavor for this area? I have heard that the tastiest is the Jiro (Fuyu) from Japan, but seeing as Seattle is lucky to even have a summer sometimes, that a Jiro wouldn't be ideal. Would love some input, thanks!

There are very few varieties for the PNW due to lack of heat (as mentioned above). First, plan on planting them in a hot spot that gets full sun. The most promising varieties of Asian persimmon for the PNW are:

Izu
Early Jiro
Coffee Cake (Nishimura Wase)
Chocolate (Tsurunoko)
Saijo

The best performing American persimmon I've seen is Meader.

I'm not sure which ones are the best tasting (some will be astringent types that need to ripen to the point of gelatinous-ness before being edible), but you can look them up. I believe you can purchase most of these from Burnt Ridge Nursery (http://burntridgenursery.com). Order a copy of their 2012 catalog when it comes out.

Good luck!

Dave

Not Comprehensive, but the best I've found so far. http://www.nuttrees.net/index.html

I don't understand why one would plant a fruit tree that doesn't taste good to people.  It seems that you could have the best of both worlds and plant a persimmon that both poultry and people enjoy, even if it means ripening a little later...

Dave Boehnlein wrote:If you want a persimmon that produces for poultry you might consider trying Lotus Persimmon (Diospyros lotus). They are often used as a rootstock for other persimmons. However, we are in an area that is extremely marginal for persimmons and the lotus persimmon we have crops every year like clockwork. The persimmons aren't much for human food, but I bet chickens would love them. I believe Lotus Persimmon is also self-fertile. Seasonwise, the lotus persimmon seems to be earlier than all the others we've tried.

In terms of human food, I think your freezing idea is great. They can either be frozen whole or made into persimmon pulp and frozen (which may be a perfect solution for damaged fruits). As I understand there is even a market for persimmon pulp here in the US.

Dave