When to Pick Persimmons and How to Preserve Them

Victor A. Crowley explains how to tell if persimmons are ripe, the best time to pick persimmons, and ways to preserve this unique fruit.

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by Unsplash/Lorenzo Ranuzzi

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.

When are Persimmons Ripe?

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.

  • Updated on Jan 7, 2022
  • Originally Published on Sep 1, 1970
Tagged with: fruit, fruit leather, persimmon, preserve, ripe
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