My experience with stone fruit seeds is that a dry seed is a dead seed. Your best bet is to either eat the fruit then plant right away, or eat the fruit then place them in your fridge in a baggie with slightly moist peat moss or potting soil when they have had enough chill they will start growing in your fridge so you should check them every few days after about 3 months in the fridge.I usually put seeds up around mid September and by Christmas the apricots start then shortly after plums and peaches. The germination rate is very high using the quick plant or quick fridge method where I have had zero germination with dried seeds after only having them dried a few weeks on my counter.And never allow them to freeze hard as that will kill them as well. I experimented one year and put about 40 to 50 plum, cherry,and peach in several large above ground planters. It was a very cold winter and went down to -20F with no snow cover....in the spring none of them germinated but several that were planted in the soil next to the planters still came up even though there was no snow on the ground. Glenn

The phenomenon that you are witnessing is very real and can be an important determinant in the cold hardiness of grafted Asian persimmon trees. I have reada couple of anecdotal accounts of this and see it in my orchard on a yearly basis - some American persimmon trees break dormancy several weeks later than others and do this consistently from year to year. I have a tree from EL that consistently shows some frost damage on the leaves after budbreak during a normal year; this year the tree leafed out earlier than the others and is now toast after a 25F exposure. Most of the other trees I grafted myself onto rootstock that I know to be late in breaking dormancy and none of these show any foliage damage. The latest breaking American persimmons have in my experience been from the Morris Burton lineage and these are just now showing the earliest signs of breaking bud.

Hi Linda, Below is a nice link that should help you some. You'll want a very fast draining mix that doesn't stay real wet. To get seedlings like these would be a somewhat complicated process for a newbie. I would get the propagation and growing technique down first before experimenting. Both of the plants in the photos are almost a year old and have been pruned at least 4 times. A plant left to grow unhindered would be at least 10 inches tall or more by now. I'm not really interested in big and leggy. I want short, fat, compact, well branched and beautiful. randy Here is a link that might be useful: Seed Info

BArb - I keep mine in thick ziplock baggies in a barely -barely moist sphagnum moss hanging near the lights. They wake up when they decide to and I think light is important. I see them sending shoots and pot them. Some of them wake up in a month, some in a year, some never. The recommendation was - to leave a piece of a stem sticking with a last node - so you have an extra growth point. I believe it is important for the minis. Sinningia leuchotricha is jinxed for me - never wakes up from a tuber... irina