Persimmon trees are abundant along rural roadsides and in woody areas of the county. You can gather all the persimmons you want along the road banks and in the wild. There is little competition. In the fall of the year, after a frost has fallen, persimmons become sugar sweet and delicious. Grocery stores sell them but there are cultivated ones, and they are usually from the orient. They are not as delicious as the native wild persimmon. And, at about a buck a pop, not nearly as affordable.

Our persimmons provide food for all sorts of wildlife. Opossums think they are in heaven when they come across a good persimmon tree. So do raccoons and foxes. If you ever doubt that, take a look at scat (animal droppings) in the wild in late fall and notice the persimmon seeds contained in them. People once ate opossum and raccoon whenever they had a chance. No longer. In fact, most people sort of “look down their noses” at opossum eaters, and don’t consider raccoon or opossum to be food. That means more animal competition for persimmons.

When a persimmon is good and ripe, it is very soft and mushy. That’s when it’s sweet. I understand that they make an excellent beer, but I never tasted any of that. I will tell you, however, what it is like if you try to eat a persimmon when it is not ripe. At the first bite you will notice that it isn’t very sweet. Then a strange feeling takes over your mouth, and it begins turning “inside out”. It is a pretty awful feeling, and you will immediately vow never to eat another persimmon. Then someone with you (probably the same person who tricked you into trying the green persimmon in the first place) assures you that you aren’t dying, and that the best remedy is to eat a fully ripe one. So you try an orange colored mushy ripe one, and you are hooked and start looking around for more ripe ones.

If you pick them from the tree there is a good chance they are not ripe. The ripe ones have fallen to the ground, or will readily fall if the tree is shaken a bit. Enough about persimmons. If you aren’t familiar with them, try them his fall.

Maypops are a variety of the family of passion flowers. They also grow along road banks wherever natural growth hasn’t been replaced by lawns. They grow on a low lying vine and the blossoms are indescribably beautiful. They are very intricate in design. When the fruit of this small vine forms they are hen egg in size and shape, and are dark green. As children we picked them to throw, hoping to pop one on the head of a playmate. Later in life we learned to enjoy food so we let them ripen on the vine. When ripe they turn tan and then sort of collapse. They aren’t pretty at this point, and in fact, look rotten. But if you pick up one of the ripe fruit and tear it open, you will find some colorful lavender seeds with a sort of gelatinous flesh surrounding them. The fruit is extremely fragrant when ripe. Sucking the flesh off of the seed is the way to eat them. Try out a maypop this fall. You’ll be glad you tried it.

What, you may ask, is a chinquapin? You aren’t apt to see chinquapins any more. It is a member of the American chestnut family and has almost become extinct due to the invasion of the chestnut blight. It has a leaf like a chestnut leaf, and the nut grows in a spiny burr. The burr is compartmentalized like a chestnut with two to four compartments, each containing a small chestnut about the size of a water oak acorn. It looks like a miniature chestnut, and the flavor is similar.

There is a serious effort to bring back the American chestnut in a genetically modified version which is immune to the blight. A blight resistant cultivar can be bought in Ty Ty, Georgia at Ty Ty Plant Nursery. I bought some online but deer love them and will travel many miles to eat a
young chinquapin plant. They got mine.

Why don’t you give it a shot? You might be able to harvest chinquapin nuts in a few years if you stand guard over the young plants.