We are fortunate to live in an area with lots of persimmon trees.  In the past, we’ve never owned any, so we’ve always had to go on walks and harvest ones from other people’s trees with their permission.  Harvesting persimmons is super easy because all you do is pick them up off the ground after they fall off the tree.  They are sweeter after frost, but ripe ones are good before frost as well.

Jim can be a bit particular about the food he eats. The first time Farmer Frazier offered him a persimmon, Jim was a bit grossed out because Farmer Frazier picked up a mushy, nasty looking one. Jim wanted to be polite, so he picked up a pretty one, brushed it off well, and ate it before Farmer Frazier could fully warn him.

You see, there’s a funny thing about persimmons. The good tasting ones are the really gross-looking, mushy ones.  If you get one that fell too soon and actually eat it, the astringency (from the tannins) makes your mouth pucker.  This makes a very big impression and nobody (even Jim) tends to eat a “pretty” persimmon more than once.

At our new house, we are blessed to have several mature persimmon trees!  Every day I send the children out to go harvest the ones that have fallen.  We’re in a battle to see who gets them first – us or the local deer who also love to eat persimmons.

Hewitt is a great persimmon picker-upper.

And Indigo picks her share as well.

Once we have the persimmons in the house, Greyden takes over to get the persimmon pulp that we use in baking. First he rinses them off, then he sets them in a strainer with a bowl underneath and starts mashing them.

The seeds are fairly large, so he just has to keep mashing til he can get all the pulp through.

Then we can freeze the pulp or use it directly in baking (like persimmon bars) or making persimmon goat milk ice cream.

The seeds themselves are pretty interesting. Farmer Frazier taught us that if you break the seed in half, there is a symbol inside. There can be 3 types of symbols. It will either look (sorta) like a spoon, a knife, or a fork (actually, the children think it looks more like a spork). But the cool thing is that whichever symbol it is, every single persimmon that year, independent of tree, will have the same symbol.

I don’t know if it’s true, but the children have cracked open lots of persimmon seeds, and so far they’ve never found a contradictory seed.

This year we are having a spoon year!