American persimmon
Diospyros virginiana
also called common persimmon, eastern persimmon
The native persimmon of fencerows from Connecticut to Texas: small orange fruit that hang past leaf-fall like ornaments, custard-sweet once truly ripe and famously punishing one day before that.
- Type
- Fruit · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Flower color
- Orange
- Sunlight
- Full sun
- Watering
- Low once established
- Soil
- Any; old fields, clay banks and fencerows suit it
- Feeding
- Gentle all-organic
- USDA zones
- 4b–9b
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Plant out
- 14 days before the last spring frost
- First harvest
- 250 days after the last spring frost
- Harvest ends
- 45 days after the first fall frost
- Plant spacing
- 23 ft
- In-row spacing
- 19 ft 8 in
- Between rows
- 29 ft 6 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody, with a taproot it keeps
- Working depth
- 24 in–5 ft
- Can reach
- 10 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 39–66 ft across, about 1.5–2.5× the width of the plant
It anchors downwards as well as sideways, which is what lets it stand in a gale and what makes it hate being moved. Plant it small: past a few years in the ground a taprooted tree transplants badly, and often not at all.
A black, brittle taproot that goes down before the top does anything at all, which is why a persimmon is planted as a small tree or not at all: a two-year-old in a pot has already been ruined.
The habit is American persimmon’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- When
- October into December, taking only what is soft, wrinkled and ready to fall.
- What to look for
- Deep orange with a bloom, jelly-soft, often already on the ground. Firm and pretty means punishingly astringent; the frost-and-wrinkle stage is the eating stage.
- How to harvest
- Spread a tarp and shake gently, or gather windfalls daily. Press the pulp through a colander to shed skins and the big seeds; the classic use is persimmon pudding, an Indiana institution.
- How often
- Every day or two through the drop, in a polite race with the possums.
- Storing the crop
- Pulp freezes beautifully and holds a year, which is how a three-week glut becomes a winter of puddings. Firm fruit ripens on the counter like a pear, slowly and honestly.
- Generally trouble-free No notable pest or disease problems when grown in the right conditions — one of the easy ones.
An unripe one is the most astringent thing in American botany, which is the whole folklore of the fruit; dead-ripe, soft and wrinkled (ideally after frost), it is wild custard. Possums, raccoons, foxes and deer plan their autumn around it.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com