I have only eaten the native Texas persimmon. I love them but hate the fact that they turn your fingers, lips, teeth, tongue and everything else the juice touches, brown. Looks like Levi Garrett gone wrong. How do the cultivated varieties compare? Do they taste as good or similar? Are they as messy? Do they even have anything in common? Also Texas persimmon wine and jelly are delicious but very messy.

Not to high jack the thread but I just checked a small grove of wild Texas persimmon on my place and can’t find the first persimmon or even a bud. Is this happening to other parts of the country? Was thinking maybe due to the drought?

I have some but not as many as prior years.

We have quite a crop of persimmon this year. Didn't have much of anything in 2020 and 2021

To the OP, I have eaten the Fuyu cultivated type and they are larger and really juicy and sweet.
As for Texas persimmons we have a lot of them where I hunt. The have about half as many fruits as normal due to the drought. The sloughs where they grow usually have water in them year round and this year they went dry. I hope they ripen late so we will still have some for opening day of bow season.

Cultivated, Japanese persimmons are larger, and not as tasty, as the wild persimmon. I will never forget my Dad coming to a complete stop on a quail hunt one time here in SE Texas, when he happened on a wild persimmon tree loaded with fruit. For a moment my brother in law and I didn't think we were going to be able to get him to continue the hunt. But we were and he did. He had a Japanese persimmon tree in his yard, but man, that man loved wild persimmons. Thanks for this thread, it really brings back some memories.

Persimmons...uggh. When I built a house in Tulsa I thought I'd love the lot we selected, nice corner lot had 20 or more mature trees must of all been 30-40 feet tall...they were tall suckers. What I didn't know until that first year after we moved in, they were all persimmon trees. They were too dang tall to pick of course so that meant every year my yard was carpeted in ripe persimmons when they fell and walking on persimmons is no fun! And good gosh the leaves plugged up my gutters - and Lordy did the web worms love those trees...uggh.

When we moved back to Texas I picked a house with exactly one dang Oak tree...that was it.

Earl

Gillespie country has fruit right now