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Post by coppice on Nov 1, 2016 13:23:22 GMT -5
If American persimmon is gendered (and it is), how many should I grow to ensure I get a crop?
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Post by Laura_in_FL on Nov 4, 2016 13:01:38 GMT -5
As best I can tell from reading around, you only need 1 male and 1 female to get a crop on the female. Also, one male can pollinate a few females if you have good bee activity.
The problem is that if you're growing from seed I don't think you can determine sex until the tree is old enough to bloom. That's several years at least (one source I read said that seedling trees can take as many as 20 years to bear). Since the wait is so long, and the sex ratio is totally up to chance, I'd grow as many trees as possible - several at least - to have a good chance of getting at least one of each sex. It would stink to spend years waiting for them to bloom and then have them be all male or all female!
One vendor sells grafted American persimmon females. That tells me that you can you can use grafting to effectively convert young trees to the desired sex.
From what I read, grafted female trees bear far earlier (within about three years of planting) than seedling trees. So, it might be worth looking for scion wood from trees of known sex and grafting onto your seedlings rather than waiting and hoping. Also, knowing the sex of the trees when young would let you position the trees with the males spaced out evenly among the females to allow for optimal pollination.
One thing that I didn't see suggested, but I wonder about, is whether you could graft male and female scions onto the same tree and get a crop from only one tree? Obviously, only the female section of the tree would bear, but if space is an issue and you were okay with getting a smaller crop, it might be worth it. I don't know whether one sex would out-compete the other though. I would guess that the male would tend to out-compete the female, since the male doesn't have to expend energy on developing fruit.
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Post by coppice on Nov 7, 2016 3:32:53 GMT -5
I have been advising new growers of the problems determining gender, and to grow four or more trees. But I don't know that, that will bring them home.
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