Persimmon - Fruits of the Gods

My beloved Fuyu Persimmon tree continues to reward me with delicious fruits despite my neglect. I cannot say that I have always attended to it well but this year, life has truly overwhelm me. Caring for two houses and gardens, an hour and half apart plus the stress of a teenage son applying to college.......

Before the Fuyu started taking color, the only time I paid attention to the tree this year was to take pictures of the Persimmon flowers for Autumn Belle- a promise I made when I was harvesting last years crop. It was the ruckus of wild chirping and flapping of wings that emanating  from the vicinity of the Fuyu Persimmon tree that woke me up from my stupor. Those birds were fighting each other to get at the fruits! I do not know what angered me more, the delicious ripe persimmon eaten by the birds or the beautiful green unripe persimmon needlessly pecked by the birds? Every gardener with a persimmon tree knows you have to share some fruits with the birds, the keyword here is SOME.

Believe it or not, the picture above is of a single Fuyu persimmon. The birds literally ripped apart the fruit, devoured the flesh and let the skin hanging on the tree.

I am a procrastinator and a lazy one at that! I have long since abandon my Malaysia ways of wrapping my fruit with newspaper or magazine pages, for the convenience of brown paper lunch bags. That way, I just have to staple the top close. Even better, if the ripe fruit should drop, it falls into the brown bag. Genius, right? That my friend, is progress. I procrastinate in 2 steps. Step 1- procrastinate in buying the bags, Step 2- procrastinate in bagging fruit after bags are bought. Actually make it 3 steps - I come home from work, drink a cuppa of coffee, wander round the garden, then realize that I better get to it before all of daylight is gone. Invariably, I end up at dusk with way too many fruits not bagged. Okay, I confess they are still not bag to this day. To my defense many of them are too high for me to get to. My husband is the person designate to harvest those fruits.

The branches are heavy with fruits that are beginning to swell up in size. At this stage they are the color of Granny Smith apple.

The fruits turn from green to yellow as it ripens. The sepals of the persimmon flower is still attach at the blossom end of the fruit.

The fruits do not ripen at the same time, even on the same branch. 

Persimmon turning a tempting orange- signaling it is time to wrap up the fruits.

Too many fruits on the branch due to neglect in thinning out the fruit. Fruits will be bigger if thin out earlier in the season. At this stage, some of the fruits are already ripening. I decided to leave them as is, plucking the fruits as soon as ripe so that the remaining fruit may have some chance to get bigger. Since the fruits are so close together, I remove all the leaves between fruits and try to bag a number of fruits per bag.

Only a faction of the fruits have been wrapped. It is a tedious job as leaves have to be removed and branches shortened to the fruit spur. That way, the whole fruit can be enclose in the paper bag. This year, I neglect to trim the tree to a more manageable height in early spring before the tree budded. As a result, I have fruits at the top of the tree which are too high for me to reach and wrap.

It is already dusk and getting hard to see. As you can see, there is still lots of fruits to wrap. I have to tell myself, it does not matter if I wrap a fruit at the top of the tree or at the bottom of the tree. It is the number of fruits I wrap; kind of like it does not matter if you get a simple or difficult question right in a test. It is still one point per right answer. 

I know Mom, the persimmon never ripen when you are here but they love the cold as much as you hate the cold.