Very interesting. I starting picking from my spot out by Lake Texoma this weekend. I hope to get enough for a 30 gallon batch of wine and perhaps some preserves (I call it sludge). I will have to test this on some of the ones that are out there ant not ripe!

I heard that you could put the in the freezer and they would ripen, but I haven't tried it. I wish someone would stick one in the freezer overnight and tell me if it works. I don't have persimmons, but I am curious.

I usually freeze my fruit before fermenting, but for persimmons, i usually wait until they drop, and then pick the ones that are very soft and then freeze em. I will try the bag in the fridge this week....

An apple will help ripen any fruit. It is a trick my mom taught me :)

Persimmon wine? hmmm, sounds, interesting!

Here is a link that might be useful: Ethylene

My only experience with growing and harvestug persimmons is with the small native persimmons, which is what I assume we're talking about here, as opposed to the oriental persimmon trees sold at garden centers. The native persimmons are late to ripen and usually stay on the trees here deeply into October and even into November. About half the time, they freeze before they start dropping from the tree, but freezing doesn't necessarily hurt their flavor. In fact, it seems to improve it. If you harvest them before they are truly ripe, their flavor is so astringent that you can't eat them. The freeze seems to cut their astringency, but I don't know if the freezing process helps them ripen or if it is just that they ripen so late that they usually are going to be hit by freezing temperatures around the time they're finally ripe anyway.

We have a grove of native persimmons down by the big pond (maybe I should l say by the big bare spot of ground where the long-dry big pond used to be), but I have to fight the deer, raccoons and coyotes for every single fruit, and usually they win, because they will eat the persimmons long before they're close to being ripe. Coyotes, in particular, will eat them in the hot summer months while they are green and essentially inedible, at least to human taste buds. You know when the coyotes start eating them because the animals leave a trail of scat filled with immature persimmon seeds. I usually start seeing that in mid-summer.

Busy1, I wonder if it affects the flavor in a negative way if you put them in a bag with an apple? You know, they "ripen" commericially-grown tomatoes artificially with ethylene gas, and I don't consider conventionally-grown grocery store tomatoes to be worth eating. If the grocery store tomatoes were worth eating, I wouldn't go to all the trouble to grow my own.

Carol, For a long time, I thought the native persimmons "had to" have exposure to freezing temperatures to make them palatable, but then we had that year (maybe 2004?) when the first freeze didn't hit until mid-December and the persimmons were ripe before the freeze came and obviously they ripened without the assistance of freezing temperatures. So, I think that somehow the cold affects how astringent they taste, but I don't know if the freezing temperature actually makes them ripen. It might be a more complex process where they're already actually more or less ripe (in terms of their sweetness compounds being developed) before freezing temperatures arrive, but they need the freezing temperatures somehow to make the astringency level drop so that a human can enjoy their sweetness.

kfrinkle, The first female persimmon tree I found on our property was about 60' tall and on the very edge of the deep woods, so I couldn't even harvest any of the persimmons until they fell from the tree all on their own .It was several years later before I found more female trees in a grove on the backside of the big pond, and we only found them because we cleared out a bunch of cedars and winged elms and suddenly discovered that buried in all that brush was a whole little grove of female persimmon trees. I was excited to find them because we only had male persimmon trees down by the road, so of course they never produced fruit.

I haven't even checked the trees in our grove to see if the fruit is getting ripe. As hungry as the wildlife was in August, it wouldn't surprise me if the fruit is all gone already.

For anyone who's never harvested the smaller (as in smaller-fruited than the Oriental varieties at the grocery store) native persimmons, you don't pick them when they're orange. You wait until they've progressed a bit past the orange color to an amber to brownish color. Or, after frost, you may find them an ever darker color. When they are still firm and orange, they aren't ripe yet. You have to wait until they start to look a little like they are overripe (a stage known as bletting) and then they will be close to the sweet flavor they're known for. They'll look like they've been left too long on the tree and they show that by starting to soften, to have the skin pucker up a bit and to turn from the brighter orange to a shade of amber. When people tell me they hate the fruit of the native persimmon trees, I instantly know they likely picked them when they still were firm and orange and very astringent. Unfortunately, when they reach the right stage, they are about to start fermenting, so you almost have to check the fruit and pick them daily to catch them at the perfect stage for eating. Otherwise, they will be fermenting.....from not-yet-ripe to too-ripe-and-fermenting is a really fast progression for this fruit.

Persimmon pudding, by the way, is the food of kings. It is a great way to use them in a way where their softened texture doesn't bother you and make you think that you waited too late to use them.

You can pick them and store then in a freezer until you want to use them, even leaving them in the fridge for months, and their flavor only improves.

We haven't had freezing temperatures at our house yet, but we've been down to 34 days with patchy frost several times, so the persimmons (if the wildlife have left any for us)) should be just about right. I've had so many recent snake encounters that I am not venturing very far from the house at all these days. I'm waiting for the cold to get all the snakes to settle down for the winter. At our house, this has been the year of the timber rattler, and not in a good way.

Dawn

Yes, it was 2004 that our first freeze came the day after Thanksgiving. I remember because we had gone to Florida the first two weeks of Nov and it hadn't frozen yet, but we expected it to while we were gone. So no, persimmons don't have to freeze to be sweet. They just have such a long ripening time that it usually does freeze before they get ripe. But as with other fruit trees, not all persimmon trees ripen their fruit at the same time, even the native trees in the same area. The tree next to my driveway has already dropped almost all its fruit, starting 3 weeks ago and they were wonderfully sweet when they fell. (This is a tall tree with none of the limbs within reach of even a stepladder.) A half mile west of here there are a couple trees next to the county road with much more fruit and it is all still rock hard. (These shorter trees have limbs so weighted down with fruit that it is in reach of the ground.) There is a lot of variability with the native fruit both in size and in number of seeds per fruit.