In the 1915 USDA
native persimmon bulletin I
made into an ebook, there's a couple of paragraphs on how to propagate
Diospyros virginiana by
root cuttings. I've never seen this information anywhere else or heard of anybody who has tried it, so naturally, I want to!
Here's that the bulletin says:
Propagation of the Persimmon: Cuttage: Root Cuttings
The roots of persimmon trees sprout readily when the top is removed or when the main stem meets with serious injury. [This] offers an explanation for the occurrence of the large clumps of similar trees that are to be found in many abandoned fields. At some time the original tree was cut off near the surface of the ground and the roots sent up sprouts which, being undisturbed, developed into trees bearing similar fruit.
Roots the size of a lead pencil or larger can be used in propagating the persimmon. They should be cut into pieces 6 or 8 inches long, the ends sealed with grafting wax, hot beeswax, or pitch, in order to prevent the decay that develops rapidly in the soft, spongy wood, and the cuttings should then be buried over winter in sand or in a nursery row. They will grow readily the following spring, provided the moisture supply is plentiful until they become well established.
Now, it just so happens that I have a peculiar cluster of huge old persimmon
trees at the back corner of our property. They are astride or very near the property line and leaning over a huge pile of dead trees (possibly not ours) intergrown with thorny
smilax greenbriar and privet.
The persimmons on these trees are substantially larger than every other wild persimmon in these parts, almost the size of a small tangerine or satsuma mandarin orange. They are also softer, sweeter, and more yellow-orange in color, with an excellent flavor.
Because these trees are so tall and these larger persimmons so soft and fragile, virtually all the ripe persimmons
*splash* when they hit the ground after falling fifteen, twenty, or thirty feet. Or they fall into the brush pile and are not reachable. A few
land in the deep grass of an adjacent natural gas pipeline right-of-way, where they sometimes escape injury but are very hard to find. There's only one small fruiting branch that grows low
enough for me to reach the fruit while it's still on the tree.
So these trees are natural candidates for propagation. Obviously I would love to clone them and grow smaller trees that I could keep pruned for easy harvest. I
should coppice one of them so that (if it survives) there would be scion
wood low enough on the tree for me to harvest for grafting, but I have not done that yet.
I've been meaning to get out there all winter to dig some
roots to try the 1915 USDA root cutting method. Finally today I got to it.
Today I learned that large old persimmon trees are very protective of their roots, which dive deep immediately. I took a mattock, a hatchet, and a hand trowel. I should have taken a shovel, because I'm going to need a serious excavation to get small roots from these trees.
Today's test excavation resulted in a semicircular hole a couple of feet from the tree, about six feet long, fourteen inches wide, and about twelve inches deep. I didn't take a picture because (a) I forgot and (b) I don't want to give some real forest expert ammunition to natter at me about how I have killed these trees. I was as careful as I could be, but I'm accepting of the possible consequences of my roots disturbance. There are half a dozen other trees in this cluster, deeper in the woods, that produce little fruit due to light competition but appear to have the same awesome-fruit genetics judging by the fruit they do produce. So these individual trees are not unduly precious.
The trouble was, I basically found only two roots, both of which were as thick as the trunks of the trees and were plunging deep into the soil at a 45-degree angle. One of them had a little stub the thickness of my thumb, about six or seven inches long, terminating in a broken and blackened end near the soil surface. I'm not sure what happened, but the stub has feeder roots, whatever damage occurred did not kill the root from rot as my USDA manual predicted, and so I decided to take it. (I'll go back another day with better tools for excavating more deeply in the quest for more small roots.)
Here's the one root I did find:
And here it is after I air-dried it and waxed the fresh-cut end:
Given the time of year, I went ahead and planted the whole root in a nursery
bucket, bedded well in some yummy home-made potting soil I manufactured last week. That's another story, but I came home pretty smug that day after finding a mixture of rotting wood, leaf mold, rodent
poop, and fine soil in the hollow of a rotten oak stump. It went through my little scrap-wood-and-hardware-cloth hand screen like butter:
All in all:
I'm disappointed that I only found one plantable persimmon root fragment today with the limited amount of digging I was willing and prepared to do. However, on the bright side (a) I learned something useful about the root patterns of mature persimmon trees, and (b) the one root fragment I did find looks very vital and ready to grow like mad. Obviously I will update this
thread as the season progresses, especially if I get new sprouts from this root cutting, or get back out to the woods and successfully dig some more.
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