Firstly: I will be at the NNGA meeting in Syracuse in July!

Summer is off to a roaring start this year, if you hadn’t noticed. bAcK iN mYYY dAyyy, May used to be a month to allow one’s body to begin to reacclimate to the idea of heat. This month of May has just been Hot. I assume June will be similar.

The persimmon trees I have easy access to at work are not old enough to produce fruit this year, not by a long shot. But it behooves me, as a breeder, to begin collecting data on persimmons so that in a few years when my trees are producing fruit I will have something meaningful to compare them to. So my job for the spring was to find someone within a semi-reasonable driving distance who had grafted cultivars AND was willing to let me tramp about in their orchard, and I succeeded in that! And now my job this summer is to tramp about said persimmons, taking notes on when they bloom, when their fruits mature, how much the fruits weigh, et cetera. They are right on the cusp of bloom right now, and the fruit will ripen starting around early September.