When to Pick Persimmons: Astringent and Non-Astringent Fruit

First, settle which kind you have

Astringent fruit is packed with soluble tannin. Bite it while it is firm and your mouth goes chalky and dry within a second, and it stays that way for a quarter of an hour. Nothing is wrong with the fruit; it is simply not ready. It becomes sweet and rich only when the flesh collapses to the consistency of jam inside a thin skin, or after you have treated or dried it. Non-astringent fruit converts its tannin on the tree and is eaten hard and crunchy, sliced like an apple, skin and all.

If you do not know which you have, find out with one fruit rather than by guessing. Pick a single fruit at full color and bite it. If it is pleasant and crisp, you have a non-astringent tree and can pick the rest firm. If your mouth dries out, you have an astringent tree, and the whole crop needs either time or treatment. Write the answer in your records; it never changes and it decides everything you do at harvest from now on.

One caution on non-astringent types: in a cool or short autumn they do not always finish the job, and fruit that is normally crisp-sweet can come off the tree still mildly astringent. If that happens, treat it exactly like astringent fruit and let it soften. It is a season effect, not a mislabelled tree.

Reading the tree

Color is the first signal for both types. The fruit turns from green through yellow to deep orange or orange-red, and the color change runs from the blossom end back toward the calyx. Fruit is not ready until the color is even all over, including the shoulders under the leaves.

The leaves are the second signal, and it is a good one. Persimmon leaves color and drop before the fruit is finished, so a tree hung with orange fruit on bare branches is normal and not a sign of trouble. Once the leaves have gone, the fruit is no longer gaining much, and it is exposed to birds.

For non-astringent fruit, hanging time is everything: the longer it stays on the tree in warm autumn sun, the more completely the tannin converts and the sweeter it gets. Leave it as long as the weather and the birds allow. For astringent fruit, there is nothing to gain by leaving it hard on the tree beyond full color, because you will be ripening it indoors anyway, and every extra week is another week for wind, birds and a limb break.

A hard freeze on the tree damages non-astringent fruit and turns the flesh to mush after thawing. Pick before a hard frost is forecast. A light frost on astringent fruit is harmless and often helpful.

Picking without damaging the fruit or the tree

Persimmons do not pull off cleanly. The stalk is woody and firmly attached, and tugging either tears out a plug of flesh, which then rots, or snaps the brittle shoot the fruit was hanging on. Always cut.

1. Cut, never pull Use pruners or shears and cut the stalk, leaving the fruit attached to its calyx, the four-lobed leafy cap. The calyx must stay on; fruit that loses its calyx rots from that point within days.
2. Trim the stalk flush Go back over the picked fruit and snip each stalk right down against the calyx. A projecting stalk punctures the neighboring fruit in the box, and a single puncture spoils a soft persimmon completely.
3. Handle as if it were an egg Even hard fruit bruises invisibly and the bruise turns into a soft brown patch a week later. Lay fruit into a shallow tray in a single layer rather than dropping it into a bucket.
4. Do not climb the tree The wood is brittle enough that limbs which look sound will break under your weight. Use a picking pole or a ladder set against something solid, not against the tree.
5. Sort as you pick Keep marked, split or bird-pecked fruit separate and use it first. One rotting fruit in a tray of ripening persimmons spreads through the whole tray.
6. Take the whole crop in one or two passes Unlike some fruit, persimmons do not need repeated selective picking. Once the color is even across the tree, clear it. Leaving stragglers just feeds the birds.

Making astringent fruit edible

There are two routes. You can let the fruit soften naturally, which takes one to three weeks indoors at room temperature and gives you fruit that must be eaten with a spoon. Or you can remove the astringency deliberately while the fruit is still firm, which is faster and gives you fruit you can slice.

Softening is simply patience. Set the fruit out in a single layer, calyx down, somewhere at room temperature and out of the sun, and check every few days. It is ready when the skin has gone slightly translucent and the whole fruit feels like a water balloon. Anything still firm anywhere inside will still be astringent in that spot.

Speeding it up relies on ethylene, the gas ripening fruit gives off. Put the persimmons in a closed paper bag or a lidded box with a ripe apple or a banana and the softening time roughly halves. Check daily once you do this, because fruit goes from firm to collapsing in a day or two at the end.

Deliberate treatment, which growers have used for centuries, uses alcohol or carbon dioxide to convert the tannin without softening the flesh. The simplest home version is to wipe the calyx of each fruit with a strong spirit, seal the fruit in an airtight container, and leave it somewhere warm, around 68F (20C), for five to seven days. The fruit comes out still firm and no longer astringent. Freezing solid and thawing also destroys the astringency, but it wrecks the texture, so use that only for fruit destined for cooking.

Drying and storing

Drying is the traditional answer to a large astringent crop and it works because the tannin becomes insoluble as the fruit loses water. Choose firm, unblemished fruit picked with a short piece of stalk still attached. Peel it thinly, leaving the calyx, hang it by the stalk somewhere cool, dry and breezy but out of rain and direct sun, and keep the pieces from touching. After a couple of weeks, when a skin has formed, massage each fruit gently every few days to break up the interior and draw sugar to the surface. In three to six weeks they are leathery outside, soft inside, and often dusted with a natural white sugar bloom.

For fresh storage, firm non-astringent fruit keeps for one to two months at around 34F to 40F (1-4C), and holds much better if each fruit is bagged so it does not lose moisture. Soft ripe fruit keeps only a few days and is best frozen whole, then thawed just enough to scoop out the pulp.

Record the date of your first pick, the total weight or a rough count, and how long a batch took to lose its astringency by whichever method you used. Persimmon ripening times vary a great deal with the season and with how mature the fruit was when picked, so your own numbers from last year are far more useful than any general figure. Note too whether the crop was heavy or light, because that tells you which half of the alternate-bearing cycle you are in and what to expect next year.