Lucky!! Enjoy! They cost around a dollar each in Ontario these days.
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Lucky, indeed! The large ones with perfect, unblemished skins are around „120 (1.10 CAD) in the major supermarket chains in Tokushima. But nearly every home with a garden in this city has a persimmon tree and many homeowners sell them to local green grocers who sell them to those people who donât have such trees. I can usually find them for about „50 (0.46 CAD) at those types of places.
Unfortunately, these days, persimmons are generally thought of as an âold personâs foodâ and are falling out of favor with the younger generations. Even I didnât like them until I became middle aged (I just turned 60 less than 2 weeks ago).
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You type like a youngster! 
I figured you were younger than me, as in under 50 
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Holy carp! We must be very lucky! One of Mrs. ricepadâs friends has a fuyu tree and gifted her with a basket of about 40 persimmons. She (Mrs. ricepad) also has another acquaintance with a very large tree in their yard who told us about a month ago to come and pick as many as we want, because they donât eat many, and most of them go to waste. Their dog picks and eats as many as she can reach (itâs really funny and cute to see her select, harvest, and eat them), but anything higher than about 4 feet off the ground is fair game to friends and family.
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Will you dry all of them? I have that dilemma almost every year!
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Nope. We eat them fresh. Weâve had them for about a week, and weâre down to fewer than a dozen. Spawn2 took some when they came home last weekend, too. Weâll start to dry the hachiyas from our tree in the next few days I think.
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Thanks! I tend to hang out with a younger crowd and I think that helps me seem and even sometimes appear to be younger to others. But I certainly feel 60 and I can tend to blather on about what aspects of society need to be changed. Thankfully itnot like âwhen I was a kid we walked 6 miles to school in the snow uphillâŠboth ways!â, but more like Andy Rooney of â60 Minutesâ used to do. Some might label me as a crochety and curmudgeonly old man, but I do my best not to think of myself in that way.
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Yes, very lucky indeed! As a child, my family and I would sometimes visit friends in Clovis, CA (near Fresno) for Thanksgiving and they had a persimmon tree in their yard. They didnât know how to eat persimmons and would just let the fruit fall on the ground and rot. None of us in my family knew what persimmons were either so we couldnât help out. If I knew what I know now, I surely would have taken some of the fruit off of their hands!
However, I donât know/remember if the persimmons were fuyu or hachiya, thoughâŠif they were the latter, I probably wouldnât have taken too many as Iâm not so much of a fan of those.
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Itâs that season here in California, when the persimmons hang on the tree after the leaves have fallen. Itâs sort of ghostly, for lack of a better word, especially when it is overcast or foggy.
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I was just in Clovis a couple of weeks ago, visiting a dear friend! She doesnât have a persimmon tree, thoughâŠ
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We can see our tree directly out of our kitchen window. After the leaves have fallen, the tree looks like itâs been decorated for Christmas with nothing but huge orange ornaments!
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Itâs the same here in JapanâŠminus the fog. I like the look of persimmons hanging on the leafless treesâŠkind of like an autumn version of a Christmas tree! And in back and front yards as well as on balconies, you can see people hanging peeled hachiya persimmons out to make homemade âhoshigakiâ (dried persimmons) like this! Thatâs really the only way I like to eat hachiyas! (photo âborrowedâ from the net.)
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You may have already said, but where is that?
Most of trees I see seem to are abandoned, which adds to the spooky factor.
Sort of like this (also borrowed).
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Iâm currently boarding at a friendâs house in Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku. Sights like this of persimmons hanging on leafless trees with blue skies in the background are quite common and a perk of the season (of which there are manyâŠautumn is my favorite season!)
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Does it snow there? Iâve seen some pretty pictures with persimmons and snow, but I donât know if persimmons grow where it snows.
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It snows nearly every year, but usually doesnât accumulate or if it does, itâs not enough to be a nuisance. However, on 12/23/2022, it snowed the most it had in 100 years. Hereâs a photo from the ânet taken on that day in central Tokushima city.
I think most persimmons have usually fallen off the trees by the time snow begins to fall.
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Weâre between Stockton and Lodi. We have strung hachiyas to make hoshigaki, but not only is it a PITA, but sometimes the ants find their way up the supports and down the strings. Iâve tried hanging them in the bathroom over the tub, in the garage, from poles tied to the pool fence, and under the eaves (the traditional look), but those ants are tenacious!
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I loved having breakfast at Michael David Farm CafĂ© a few times when we have visited our friend in Stockton. Thatâs pretty close to you, right?
The Hachiya variety were $2.50 CAD each at my indie grocery store in Toronto today.
I lucked out last week with the price of my basket.
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Very, but I have never been. The winery is actually called Michael David, not Michael & Davidâs. The only time I had planned to go to their restaurant was on the morning of the pheasant season opener about 20 years ago, when my group agreed to meet there before dawn, have a big breakfast, then hit the fields. It turned out that at 4am (or whatever our meeting time was), the cafe was still closed. I think we ended up at some chain, like Dennyâs. ISTR that the cafe was called âPhillipâs Farmsâ, and was before they started their tasting room.
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