Persimmons
How to harvest and prepare another bountiful "free for the eating" crop: Persimmons. Croley shares in this article how to preserve the pulp into "persimmon leather".
From mid-September, through Christmas and into the new
year, tons and tons of a particularly delicate and
delicious wild fruit go to waste—as far as humans are
concerned —over a tremendous area of rural America.
From the fence rows of Appalachia to the Ozarks, all
through the southern Gulf states and even into the milder,
fruit-growing regions of Michigan and the Great Lakes
country the woods and roadsides, abandoned fields and
eroded wastelands now covered with second-growth brush are
dotted and lined with . . . wild persimmons in full fruit.
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A persimmon tree burdened with ripe fruit is really
something to see! Every branch and twig and stem may be
crowded with the luscious golden globes of goodness. Not a
yellow-gold, but more of a flushed apricot with pinkish
overtones.
It's strange that most of this bounty is never harvested
because everyone likes juicy, aromatic, dead-ripe
persimmons cooled by morning dew and bursting with sweet
flavor. And why shouldn't a persimmon be good? The pulp
contains as much as 34 percent fruit sugar, making it
perhaps the sweetest of all nature's gifts.
It is this very sweetness, however, that limits the use of
the fresh fruit because each luscious morsel is like a rich
bonbon and only two or three persimmons are enough to cloy
the appetite.
There's another reason so few persimmons are gathered: The
fruit is edible—and only edible—when
it's reached a stage of full ripeness so fragile that it
almost melts in the hand and a fall from the tree to hard
ground can make it splatter. Really ripe persimmons are
about as delicate and difficult to handle as a soap bubble.
If you cheat and pick one even a little bit firm and
unready, it'll be as bitter as gall and cause your lips to
pucker into a twenty-four hour kiss.
What to do? What to do?
Most of us are content to eat one or two ripe persimmons
during a fall walk through the woods and let the birds and
beasts harvest the rest. And they do harvest! Everything
that creeps, crawls, walks or flies loves ripe persimmons
and will gorge on them at the slightest opportunity.
Persimmons mature at just the right time for wild creatures
that are storing body fat against the cold and famine of
winter. Racoons, `possums, squirrels, deer, rabbits,
groundhogs, chipmunks, mice and shrews all share the feast.
Robins, mockingbirds, thrushes, crows and other birds peck
the golden fruit before it falls to the ground. Flies and
gnats swarm around crushed persimmons while lizards and
strange creepy-crawlies from under leaves and fallen logs
rush to join the banquet.
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