North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Jwlehman@aol.com]

Hello all,

It is highly unlikely that there is any connection between Fireblight and Persimmon Wilt. Fireblight is a fungus, Erwinia Amylovora and Persimmon wilt, Cephalosporium diospyri. The spraying of agri-mycin and captan and the symptoms stopping is likely coincidental. 


The cause of Kaki Sudden Death (KSD) is as some else wrote still unknown. My personal belief is the shepherd hooking is more a symptom of dying kaki regardless of the cause. I've also head reports that KSD was stopped by spraying Micronutrients and the symptoms appeared. I suspect that too was coincidental. Manganese poisoning is still unproven but possible as well as winter cold damage. I've also seen reports of KSD on kaki seedlings.  Which would tend to reduce the virginiana understock involvement, but not eliminate it's contributing to a cause or causes. 

Kelly Jackson from Mississippi planted 550 grafted kaki trees to establish a commercial kaki orchard some years back. She lives near Memphis, TN just south of the Mississippi border. I asked her about Fireblight in her area, here was her response:

>>I know nothing about any [Fire] blight in my area to corollate.
Few of my 550 Jiro and Ichi Kei Kai Jiro persimmon trees are still alive.
The only way one of my  trees lives "with"  their virus is to send up root stock.
(Three of the trees that you grafted still live, but they are not Jiro Persimmon trees.)
 
It is still my opinion that my orchard does not have American Kaki wilt disease.
It has Sudden Kaki Death syndrome, which is totally fatal once the tree is infected. Some trees just "last" longer than others before total death of the graft.
Sudden Kaki Death syndrome is not fatal to the root stock if it is an American cultivar.<<

The grafts which I made which she writes about was Jiro wood which I personally cut from the UC Davis orchard where KSD never has been a problem. That scion wood should have been clean of whatever causes it, if a disease. I grafted some of them on American persimmon seedlings located near her dying orchard that have never been grafted before, they should have been clean of disease brought on with contaminated scion wood. They should have lived a few years, but didn't. Most started showing typical KSD symptoms the following spring. 

Sorry to be of no help.

Jerry