I have Coffeecake, as well as Fuyu and Giant Fuyu. It has both male and female flowers, and the boys and girls look very different. The fruit has about 4 to 7 seeds, presumably because they get pollinized. I have never seen bees, but I might have seen the tiny flies, so I think they might be dong it, or maybe it is the wind, although the flowers all hang upside down, so I kinda doubt it. I will say Coffeecake is a flowering fiend, in several years it put out flowers all over again in July or August, despite the fact it already had a bunch of large fruits growing. If you want to see pictures it is flowering now, I can shoot a few and e-mail them to you (I find the web picture pages too annoying to post them in my posts here) Carla in Sac

I bought one at an arboretum.....had no clue as to the sex of the tree. It started producing fruit about five years after I planted it. Sometimes female trees will produce fruit (small and seedless) without a pollinator. If you are in the range where persimmon is indigenous, you may get lucky and have a pollinator close enough in the wild. Occasionally a female tree will have a few male blossoms. Alls I can say for sure is that I have a solitary American persimmon and she bears fruit. No, until the tree blooms, you can't tell. It was irresponsible for the nursery not to have informed you the need for planting a male and a female, just like it's irresponsible for them to sell a holly or gingko unsexed. Of course you'd like fruit, just like a person who buys a holly wants berries, or a person who plants a gingko doesn't want stinky fruits.

I've seen some older virginiana growing on virginiana rootstock both in dense plantings and in wide open spaces and most were in the 20 - 30 foot range. These were all in the Northeast and perhaps under different conditions in different locations they would grow taller. In any case they can be pruned to a shorter height if desired. I've grafted virginiana to both kaki and lotus and they grow and fruit well on each. I would expect that a kaki rootstock would have some dwarfing effect on the tree, but with the risk of various problems down the road, I don't think it would be wise to recommend kaki over virginiana rootstock for this application. I believe texana has the same number of chromosomes as the southern virginianas, but I haven't heard of any hybrids between the two. Prok and Yates have an additional set of chromosomes, so they would be incompatible. These varieties don't appear to require any specific trigger to induce fruiting, so I would doubt that having no local wild virginiana would pose a cropping problem.

Tony, thank you for the advice! I've read many of your posts on this forum, and your experience and talent are amazing! I have been browsing catalogs. Starks has Yates and Prok, and Burnt Ridge has some too. I might have room for one. They start very small. i sent Burnt Ridge an email about their scion. I have a feeling that will bear, before the small freestanding trees will bear. I grafted pollenizing varieties of plums onto self sterile ones, for better fruit production. I've thought about growing those seeds. So I could see that working like you describe for the Ukranian varieties. Seems like a clever method! Thank you again for the reply! Daniel