 So, the idea here with this project is that at least in Missouri, there are a lot of persimmons seedlings on whether it's farms or just property of any sort, in fence rows or in corners of big fields or in drainage areas, they tend to be naturally planted by livestock, I mean certainly by livestock, by wildlife. And so, the other thought was if you could graft those to improve varieties, you could create some value because while these native persimmons tend to be well adapted to Missouri, they tend to produce very small fruit, very seedy fruit, whereas the improved in varieties have much larger fruit and fewer seeds. Due to work on pecans and other species, we know that bark grafts probably should work on large seedlings, like two to four inch seedlings, but I couldn't find any work directly on persimmons. And then the other thesis, the other concept is that if you do that, you have an already established tree, it may be a 10 year tree, that now you put a desirable top growth on and you get much faster growth than you do when you start with a very small seedling. Next slide, next slide please, okay, thanks. So the objective of this project was to demonstrate bark grafting, and again the idea of bark grafting is you instead of cutting directly into, you still have to cut a tree off, let's say a two inch tree, you've got to cut it off completely, but then you graft in the bark and you don't have to make this serious cut right into the middle of the exposed tissue. And that should reduce the damage to the initial tree or to the seedling you're using. And so the idea was to demonstrate you could actually do bark grafting, that I would document the survival and growth measurements and do a preliminary economic analysis on grafted seedlings already on your property versus going and purchasing new trees. By the way, I think both of those are important ways to produce persimmons. So it's not one or the other, it's just to confirm that you could use existing seedlings on your property and graft them and make them work. And then share findings with other growers, which I think is what we're doing today. Next slide please. Okay, I'm not going to spend time on this for lots of reasons, but the bark technique I use is called an arrowhead. It's very much used on pecans, and I think in my experience has been it works fine on persimmons. Next slide please. These are some pictures of what bark grafting, especially their arrowhead style is about. I doubt that you can see the references I put on these slides, but we can provide references to if you want to actually look into this technique. Next slide. When you do the grafting, this is what it looks like after you have grafted, because this is about a two, two-and-a-half inch tree that I've cut off maybe two-and-a-half feet above the ground. You can see that there's no limbs, I've left no vegetative growth at all on this one. Sometimes I do. You, I'll go get into this more later, but you make sure you cover the exposed area up with aluminum foil and plastic, and that's the scion sticking up. This is like an hour after I did it. Next slide please. If everything works well in about a month or less, you're going to have, depending on how many buds you left on there, they're going to start to leaf out, and that's what's happening here. Sometimes a lot of people when you use a bark grafting technique will put two scions on each side, and I do that sometimes when you use a very large. This is about a five-inch tree, very big, and because I thought the success would be low because you're exposing so much tree tissue, I wouldn't have put one on each side. In this particular case, both of them sprouted, and that tree actually has done very well. Okay, next slide. So let me just stop here in the presentation. These were my thoughts after, so you do most of the grafting in May. So in June or July, I sat down and said, what did I learn so far? Well, the first thing I would suggest is because you're doing bark grafting, I would suggest you, if you're going to do this, that you get a bark lifter or a grafting knife with a built-in bark lifter in it. Because it's really important to be able to pry the bark away from the tree itself without tearing it, and that bark lifter really, really helps. I bought mine on Amazon for $7.50, not a big investment. In my case, because I'm not 25 years old, I found my back having trouble with bending over so much. A stool or chair makes a big difference. When you're doing bark grafting, as with any grafting, but especially with bark grafting, it's really important that you shape the scion to fit in the place you're putting it in the seedling. And if you're not real good with a pocket knife or a sharp knife, you might want to just practice on some twigs and some other non-important tree limbs to get comfortable with that. When you're all done with bark grafting on large diameter trees, one to four inches, it's really important that you cover up the exposed tissues for the first month or so. And I would suggest aluminum foil first, and then a plastic bag over the top of it. Some people use wax or grafting compound, and I've done that too. Everything you can do to keep that scion and the rootstock from drying out. And depending on your age or your genetics, tendonitis can happen in your wrist. It happened to me. Next one, please. Okay. So, again, this is just a picture to illustrate what I thought would be the case, which is when you graft a really vigorous, very small scion onto a tree that's already established. This is about an inch and a half tree here. And if you make a good connection, you are going to get terrific growth that first year. Way more growth than you would get on a one inch scion. And this is just a picture to demonstrate that. And that is not, I didn't pick out the best tree. I had many, many that had that much growth. I'm sorry to kind of go fast here, but I just want to make sure we stay on time. So I can tell you that bark grafting does work on persimmons. And this is just another example. And I love this picture because on that right, you can see, keep in mind that all I did was stick a little pencil or smaller size scion on in a little slit I made on each side of that two and a half inch tree. And this is probably taken in September. And that's how well they all fused together and became a pretty sturdy tree. So I can tell you the bark grafting works. Now I've got a bunch of data to prove it. But this slide, it just shows you what I want you to understand from this slide is that I did, I did this grafting in three different locations. Two on my Camden County farm and one on my Montau County farm. So I'm not saying this is research, but I did get a lot of, I didn't just graft a couple trees in my backyard. You'll see in a minute the number that I've done and how I split it up between sizes. The next slide has the summary, which is a better slide to talk from. OK, so this is the summary. So I broke broke up my work into four groups, those those seedlings that are less than an inch in diameter at about two and a half feet tall. Those that are one to two inches in diameter, those are two to three inches, those three to four and over four. So actually five groups. And what I learned is and you can see the number of trees that I grafted that year that in 2020, it was a busy spring for me. Covid had set in, so I had a lot of time and that worked out pretty well. You can see that it from one inch to three inches, the success rate is over 80%. So that means that eight out of 10 times in September of that year. The the graph that I made had a very. Healthy top growth and then the bigger ratings I took from one to five. You'll see they're similar. You could you could argue that the they're even a little bit stronger with with the larger seedlings and then the the amount of growth makes total sense and it demonstrates that the bigger the seedling is, the more growth you're going to get and then any over four inches, the percentage drops significantly. And I would not wreck. Well, I would only recommend those if you if you don't have any other choice or if you just want to experiment. But it does drop because you're just cutting a very large tree and leaving exposed to the elements. Next slide, please. OK, again, can't cover this in great detail, but I also use many, many different varieties. So I don't think I have enough data to say, you know, for instance, if you see early jewel, you see I got 100 percent success rate, but I only tried six and you say Lena and I had a relatively low one. Now I've done Lena three years in a row and I will tell you that for whatever reason, I don't have as much success grafting Lena as I do some of the others like I 94 or early golden. But these are for those of you who are familiar with persimmons, you will recognize these varieties for those of you who aren't. And, you know, there's not enough time to go into these. But the first several you see there are American persimmon, American improved persimmons. And then the last three are Asians. Itchy and Saio are 100 percent Asian. And then the one below that is a is a hybrid. And there are a bunch of hybrids already out there, half American and half Asian. And I'll talk a little bit about those at the end. Next slide, please. OK, again, just a very rough comparison and it makes sense. If you happen to have a three inch persimmon tree in a corner of your property, let's say you had 50 of them and you wanted to graft them and have fruit in the two or three years, you can. It's going to, you know, the scion probably won't cost you much. If anything, the the maintenance costs, what I mean by that is, you know, mulching it or keeping the weak and weak control there so that it doesn't get choked out or maybe protecting it from from wildlife. You might have eight dollars in in cost if you don't if you don't charge too much for labor. If you purchase a tree, it's going to cost at least 30 bucks, could cost as much as 80 bucks, depending on the size and the kind of seedling you're buying. Then you've got to plant it and then there's cost to maintain it. And so you're talking about, you know, eight dollars versus fifty dollars. Don't believe the absolute numbers here. That's just to give you an idea. Yes, you can save money by grafting trees. What is the disadvantage? Those trees aren't always going to be exactly where you want them. And so both of these ideas or approaches make sense if you're interested in producing persimmons. OK, this is again, this is a tree that I use bark grafting on in 2018. This picture was taken in September of 20. I think this is a Elmo variety. It's an American. I hope you can see the fruit on there and the color and the size. I'm going to show you some more pictures too. But just an example of how quickly you can get fruit. Now, I don't want to mislead you. This was this was the exception. In other words, it was two years. I had a few that did this. Most take three to four years to have after you grafted to have very much production. OK, conclusions. You absolutely can use the bark technique and grab and cut off a very, you know, pretty big native seedling if you have it on your property and you can have a successful grafted persimmon tree. One to three inches is probably the sweet spot that I would recommend. So if you've got seedlings in that range, I think you can go right to it if you want to. My thought was that the extensive root system would would result in quicker growth or faster and better growth and early fruit production. And I believe that's true. There may be economic benefits. Again, I'm using this approach as opposed to purchasing trees. You're not misunderstanding me. I am not against purchasing improved varieties from from nurseries. But there's a place for both approaches. And there's a whole bunch of work on persimmon production that I'm interested in, like pruning, fertilization, varieties. So someone mentioned that persimmon would be important for you in the future. I'm good for that. I hope that's the case. If so, we still need a lot more, a lot more research and and more people trying it to understand better. OK, just some real quick pictures of some of the fruit that I've all this fruit you're going to see here was raised on my farm. Some of it is from those same trees I did in 20. Most of them are not. Most of them were trees I either bought or I grafted in 16, 17 or 18. On the left, you've got I-94, which is one of my favorite American varieties. It's red, it's large, it's tasty. Elmo is more orange right next to it. I like this picture on the right because it shows. You know, the real reason to use improved variety. So most native persimmons are going to be about the size of what you see there on the top left hand corner. And then celebrity is an example of a much bigger American variety. And then the two below it are Asian American hybrids, which are even a little bit bigger and sometimes don't have seeds. Next picture, please. This picture didn't. I like this picture because this is in the seat of my gator. And I just stopped at the tree and picked up these I-94s right off the ground. And I really like the contrast on the black seats, but it kind of got distorted a little bit. But the point is there's American persimmons you can use. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. Or you can also use Asians, either straight Asians or I would I would recommend Asian hybrids, which are, again, half Asian and half American. There's some examples of Nikita's gift is a gorgeous, large, red one. Zima Karma is about the same size, but but more orange. Rosayanka is maybe the most popular one around its orange, very productive. And that's an American celebrity, just to give an example. And there's some Zima Kermans. Again, all these are off my place. All these pictures were taken this fall. You know, again, we don't have time to go into the applications of persimmons, but we like to eat them fresh if we can. And I like to line the grandkids up and give them one and they eat them. And then we have a spitting contest. That may not be popular with everybody, but I kind of enjoy that part of it. But you can eat them fresh or you can dry them with the dehumidifier. You can make there's all kinds of baked goods you can make out of them. You can make smoothies. So there's a lot of applications. You can make wine from persimmon. OK, so I know I rushed, but I wanted to make sure I didn't use up any more time than I was allotted. And and maybe Tom, if there is time, we can we can handle questions. Yeah, I think we've got just a few minutes for questions if people have them. Anybody have questions here or in the chat? If you've got some out there, you can put them in the chat. You got one here. So you're using commercial rootstocks that you're finding, or what's the source of your your rootstock? Raccoons, poxons, deer. Yeah, in my case, everything is already. And that's really the point of this is that you've got animals who are moving around already established already. Genetics that like where you are, like I'm in Central Missouri, but wherever you are, if you've got persimmons growing naturally, these are these are rootstocks that like your soil and like your area. So no, there's nothing. These are all it all been planted by wildlife. I'm assuming using or putting down seeds from trees, nearby trees that have already been adapted to your property.