Unfortunately we don't have wild persimmons growing around us. Rhode Island is in their range, but they are very rare in the wild. I have dozens of seedling trees already started, the oldest were planted 5-6 years ago and are about 10-12 ft. tall so I anticipate they will flower soon! I'm hoping there are some stand-out females that I can take scion from. Good point about the root system favoring the existing tree over the grafted branch! I'll probably start some extra seedlings to use as root stock as well as cutting down a lot of the males to graft onto. What was your opinion of Nikita's Gift? I was considering adding one because it has some great hype, but haven't pulled the trigger on it, so to speak.
Back when I was doing a lot of work with trees for deer habitat, my strategy was to use persimmons to feed deer. One reason I chose them as one of my primary feeding trees is because they are zero maintenance. Feeding deer, as opposed to just attracting them to a particular location at a particular time of year, requires volume. Since persimmons were native to my area and I had many growing on our pine farm, they were a great choice. I traded scions with lots of other folks around the country back then. My objective was to put persimmons on the ground across many months. Folks would let me know when their persimmons were dropping from particular trees. Most of the traded scions were from later dropping trees, Nov-Feb. I could easily buy scions from commercial varieties that drop in the early season, Sep-Oct. One great source for persimmon seeds and scions was Cliff England from England's orchard. He knows persimmons very well.
American persimmons, unlike Lotus or Kaki, are all astringent protecting them from predation from climbing animals until they are ripe. They also fall from the tree when ripe giving deer a fair chance of getting them before they are eaten by other animals. So, Nikita's Gift was an experiment for me.
Persimmons, unlike apples, don't have many protected variety names. So when two folks refer to a persimmon by a name, they may or may not be referring to the same tree. This may be what accounts for the differing reports I got about Nikita's Gift. Everyone reported that they are astringent, but some reported they fall from the tree when ripe and others reported that they didn't.
I got a bunch of seeds from Cliff England one year. He had just finished planting for the year and sent me many more seeds than I ordered. I started those seeds in mesh flats in promix. This was in late spring so I did it outdoors. As soon as a seed germinated and began to lift from the promix, I immediately extracted it from the flat and put it in a Rootmaker 18, or my DIY version which I made from shelving material. (This is all documented on the other Habit forum before they kicked me off. I believe they kept all my old threads, so you will find a lot on those threads). At any rate, I over wintered some of these seedlings and used them for rootstock on which to graft the Nikita's Gift scions. I got those scions from a guy on the Growing Fruit forum.
I found something unusual with Nikita's Gift. For some reason, these trees took on more of a bush form than a tall growing tree form like most of my persimmons. They fruited very early in their lives when these trees/bushes were only a few feet tall. The persimmons were large and more Kaki looking than Virginiana looking. I still don't know if they fall from the tree, because the trees/bushes are all still short enough that deer and other animals can reach them. My guess is that they don't. I picked a few that were ripe and the stem is very thick and not brittle, at least when they first ripen. I'm not sure if that will change as they age on the tree because they never do; they are eaten first.
So for now, they are contributing. I'm not sure if fewer larger persimmons are any better than more smaller persimmons for deer. For the long run, the jury is still out.
Chestnuts have worked out well for me as well. Another experimental tree that worked out very well for me is Tigertooth Jujube.
