I bought a hachiya persimmon tree last year. I spent years looking for one but every nursery just wanted to carry fuyu. Fuyu persimmons are great until you have a ripe hachiya. It’s like orange, pudding-consistency sugar in a spoon. If you are patient enough to wait for one….it is a treasure. To eat it early, even by a day, is to get a mouthful of chalk that sticks to everything and will not go away no matter how much water you drink. So you see, only to those who are patient and know what to look for are hachiya persimmons enjoyable. To all those who are impatient or dont know to wait, they appear inedible and terrible. So, people buy the fuyu, dont have to wait, and get mildly sweet apple consistency persimmons. Some people, however, have tasted that spoonful of orange sugar and end up chasing another until they find a nursery willing to buy one. Last year i found a nursery willing to buy a hachiya and i planted it. This year it put out 4 flowers which turned into 4 healthy looking green persimmons. Each time we had a storm, one fell off the tree. First i had 4, then 3, then 2, and finally 1 persimmon. We were supposed to have 6 straight days of rain related to a tropical storm in the gulf. I decided the last remaining persimmon had to come off. Not only was i worried about it falling off the tree in the storm, grasshoppers had started to chew on it and made a big black spot on the end. It had started to turn orange. I researched and realized i could finish ripening it on the counter in a paper bag of bananas. I picked it and brought it inside the house before the rain started. I immediately put it in a bag with bananas but after two days i took it out because the black spot where it had been bug eaten had started to mold.
I set it on the cardboard on top of the dog crates and let it finish ripening there.
Once it was thoroughly smooshy all throughout i decided it was ripe and safe to eat.
I washed it and opened it to reveal that the black spot did not go all the way through. It was a surface blemish. There was a beautiful chunky mass of persimmon pulp on the inside, just like the ones that arrived in the misfits box last year. I had grown a persimmon on my own tree on my property.
It was a beautiful sight. If it flowered this year and i kept it alive through the winter, it would likely flower again next year.
I took a spoon and loaded some of the orange pudding-like sugar onto it. It did not disappoint. I cleaned every last morsel of the pulp from the skin with that plastic spoon. It was good to the last bit. I still cannot believe i grew a hachiya persimmon on my property. It feels like a dream. It was a dream for many years, and now with this one fruit, its real.
