It is really going to take a long time for me to tell how Nikita's gift will work out. I had hoped to bark graft some larger native trees with NG scions, but it did not work out. The scions go moldy and none grew. I think this must be from the Kaki heritage because I stored them the same way as I store American persimmon scions and have never had a problem. The other possibility was that they were infected with the mold spores at the source.
So, I took a different route. I grew out persimmon seeds in rootmakers. In the second season, I woke them up early and got my source to send more NG scions. (
http://www.habitat-talk.com/index.p...d-persimmon-transferred-from-qdma-forum.5565/) I bench grafted them as soon as they arrived while they were very fresh.
I eventually planted these trees in the field. This thread has a picture of one today:
http://www.habitat-talk.com/index.php?threads/persimmon-question.11460/ It was one that I tubed. Those that I did not tube grew much more bush like. In both cases, deer can still reach the persimmons in the trees. The problem is that deer can really destroy small trees to get the persimmons. So far, I've been lucky with NG but I've had a couple other small trees hit pretty hard.
Now that I have a local source for scions, I hope to try grafting some native trees too high for deer to reach. If I happen to see one on the ground at some point, I'll know they fall. If I don't see one on the ground and they just disappear, I won't know if they fell and were eaten or if they were eaten off the tree.
I walked by that tree shown in the picture on the thread I just referenced last week. They were still hard as a rock, so I'm sure they are not ripe yet and since they are astringent, nothing has touched them yet.
Thanks,
Jack