Native persimmons can be found in the southeast, from east Texas to Florida, and as far north as Kansas through Pennsylvania. They are prolific trees, but the fruit are full of seeds, making their use a bit tricky. Also, the fruit ripen at different times.

For anyone who hasn’t eaten an unripe persimmon, the experience is very unpleasant. I have a friend who remains convinced she is allergic to persimmons based on her experience eating a raw one. The underripe fruit contain a high degree of tannins, which makes the fruit pulp stick to your tongue and the roof of your mouth, causing the eater to suffer with a horrible taste shellacked the inside of his/her mouth until it can be scraped off.

But wait! I have a solution! Some people say that if you wait to harvest persimmons until after a frost, they will all be ripe. This does increase your chance of finding ripe fruit, but it doesn’t guarantee success. The best cure for eating an underripe persimmon is to quickly follow with a ripe persimmon. Something about that ripe persimmon perfectly counters the astringency of an underripe one. Similarly, if you have a harvest of persimmons that are mostly ripe, a few underripe fruits in the mix won’t affect the pulp of a mixed batch.

And so, we have found that if you take a bunch of (what you hope are all ripe) persimmons, and put them in a mesh bag and squeeze, two things happen:

• You push seed-free pulp through the bag
• You counter-act the tannins in any underripe fruit, making a perfectly edible end product!

This is terrifically messy, and the whole process will go a lot more smoothly with a second pair of hands, but we easily freeze a dozen pint containers each fall for use in quick breads and more.

A note on harvesting: too early and you risk too many un-ripe fruits. Harvest too late and the racoons will have beat you to the trees. We go out in the woods after a few frosts, and look for fallen fruit, sampling what we find. If the time is right, then the ripe fruit will shower down when the trees are shaken, leaving the unripe undesirables still attached to the trees. It’s fun, and tree-climbing is sure to keep you young.