Well, winter has hit fast and hard in Michigan. I picked my last tomatos off the vines on November first -- at that time, we had had only one frosty night about a week earlier, but I covered the last tomato vines with a tarp for the night.

It has become progressively colder, and we had hard rain the day before Thanksgiving which turned into two inches of snow overnight. Since then, we've had some up and down, but not enough to melt the snow in the shady spots, and we've had a couple of inches of new, slushy snow. Next week is supposed to take a major downward turn in temperatures.

My "Meader" American Persimmon is loaded with a lot of nice, ripe fruits, from nickle to half-dollar sized, some seedless, most with some seeds due to presence of male pollinator trees in my yard. They are semi-frozen now, and make great fruit popsicles to eat right off of the tree. Both the dog and I enjoy going by the tree on our walks and having a snack. Alas, I don't really pick too many of them because they don't keep too long once picked for use as a fresh fruit -- they start to mold after a few days on the counter, and last about a week in the fridge, and are very fragile. I did make a persimmon pudding on Thanksgiving which was very good, but I have found that persimmon is pretty interchangeable in cooking with pumpkin, winter squash, or sweet potatos when making things like pies, cookies, puddings, or sweet breads. Also, most of the crop is too high in the air to pick, and the tree is too fragile, with branches breaking easily, to pull them down and pick like one would with an apple or pear tree.

So, most of my crop goes unused, until the birds and animals eat them later in the winter. Never the less, it's still a nice tree to have, very attractive and interesting. I also buy a lot of fuyus to eat fresh from the produce market this time of year. If I could grow those here, I guarantee that I would pick them.