15 Years Ago Today: “I don’t believe that x” ≠ “I believe that not-x”

By Moristotle

[Originally published on December 4, 2006.]

Last night I sliced open that one Fuyu persimmon from this year’s harvest [on Ironwood Place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina], preparing twenty or thirty thin slices for our dessert. (There was only the one fruit because, after last year’s Fuyu harvest of over 300, I apparently pruned the tree more severely than I should have. I won’t go into the theory of persimmon cultivation; anyway, my imperfect practice of it tends to disqualify me from stating it.)

By simple domestic beauty...

...dazzled

By Moristotle

Last evening, as I was bringing in the bird feeders (to protect the seeds and thistle from overnight deterioration from moisture), the waning light was just sufficient to dazzle me with the beauty of our back yard. Thanks to my almost always-handy smartphone for its adequate camera:

Persimmon tree very pretty

When I was just about fifty, my wife she said to me, “Come here and take a lesson from the lovely persimmon tree. ’Simmon tree very pretty, but the ’simmon branch get heavy and sometime need support, so the fruit of the poor ’simmon can ripen, and be sweet enough to eat.”
    With apologizes to Peter, Paul, & Mary and their “Lemon Tree,” I'm a happier man and wiser now that I propped a limb of our Fuyu persimmon tree with a wooden pole on Saturday and installed some bungees from three rebar posts around its trunk.
    As I reported on July 4 (“Green persimmons”), I’ve already removed over 80 young persimmons (about half), but the increasing weight of the remaining fruit is taxing our tree's uneven branching, with six to eight weeks still to go to full maturity.

Persimmon art

The image to the right caresses my eye so seductively, it's currently the wallpaper on my Motorola Droid. And a neat thing about it is that I created the effect entirely on the Droid itself (from the original photograph shown in the July 4 post, "Green persimmons").
    Below are four more effects. They resulted from irreproducibly playing around, so I can't specify a recipe or formula.

Green persimmons

2012 is the fifth season for our first persimmon tree in Mebane (a Fuyu), and it looks as though we could enjoy a harvest of dozens of fruits in October.
   We planted the tree in August 2008, a month after moving from Chapel Hill. It sported six or seven small green persimmons from the nursery, and we enjoyed them big, bright orange, and delicious that October (a few weeks earlier than we were accustomed to enjoying our Fuyu and Hachiya persimmons in Chapel Hill.

    The following year (2009) we were disappointed to have no harvest at all, but in 2010 we had a crop of about twenty. The photo to the right is borrowed from "And sometimes we just need to stop," in which I reported that

For dinner, I put slices on our Romaine salad, along with slices of tomato, cucumber, and radish, and some walnuts and almonds. Though not terribly sweet, persimmon slices seem quite sweet on a salad.

    Early next year (2011) the tree looked sick, or maybe it was suffering from the colder winter. We feared we might lose it. Again, there was no harvest. An every-other-year thing?

A persimmon tree clings to its fruit tenaciously;
you have to clip them off
(photo taken with Droid)

When I estimated this morning how many juvenile persimmons were on the tree, I was surprised that the number might exceed a hundred and sixty. Not even knowing yet that there were that many—and seeing how their weight seemed to be dragging the tree to one side—I decided to thin them out and trim a few branches from that side.
   Anyway, the persimmons would need more room to grow, and some would be destined to lose the competition for space. It would be a shame for the tree to have put energy into fruits that would ultimately be lost.

Our Fuyu persimmon tree after thinning the fruit and lightly pruning
(photograph taken next day with Nikon Coolpix P300)

I sliced two fruits and arranged the four halves
with five uncut fruits for a little "art"
(photo taken with Droid)