Planting persimmons in the powerline pasture
I
wrote in July that I
was going to repot our seedling American persimmons this winter, let
them grow another year, graft Asian persimmon tops to them the
following year, and finally plant them out the year after that.
However, I got to thinking that my original method would be a lot of
time in a pot and multiple transplantings for a species that
has personal space issues surrounding its roots, so I decided to change
gears.
Another factor to consider is
winter hardiness. I want to graft Asian
persimmons onto my
American persimmon rootstocks because many varieties of the former are
naturally dwarfing (so they can go under the powerline) and since I've
heard the flavor can be better than wild persimmons. But Asian
persimmons are only moderately winter hardy here in zone six.
Many people push the envelope by letting the American persimmon
rootstock grow four feet tall before grafting on the Asian persimmon,
figuring that the coldest air will be right near the ground where the
hardier native persimmon can handle it, and I plan to follow suit.
Which is all a long way
of explaining why I planted ten little persimmon seedlings into various
chicken
pastures over the last few weeks. I'm glad I did --- the
persimmons had developed a remarkable amount of root growth during
their first growing season, with many roots already running around the
bottoms of the pots. If I try this again, I should probably plant
one seed per container into small but deep pots, but hopefully my
seedlings will forgive me for the one root-mangling episode.
Now I just need to give
the seedlings a little love as they overcome the trauma of
transplanting, and wait for them to get tall enough to graft on Asian
persimmon scionwood. We're highly unlikely to see any fruits
before 2018 (with 2021 more likely), but the sooner we start, the
sooner we eat.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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