If you have a university contact with inter-library loan privileges and a Russian speaking friend (they're all in Russian) that owes you a favor, you might be able to find more about how they did it in one of the references below. No doubt, the journal titles are a bit mangled from the cyrillic translation, but a good ILL colleague could probably still hunt them down for you.
Massover, B. L. (1972). "The Problem of Breeding Winter-Hardy Forms of Persimmon." Doki. Akad. Fanhoi RSS Tocikiston56.
Pasenkov, A. K. (1975). "New Varieties and Forms of Oriental Persimmon Obtained by Intraspecific Hybridization." Doki. Sov. Uchenykh k XIX Mezhdunarod. Kongr. po Sadovodstvu Varshava203.
Kazas, A. N. (1986). "Use of the Interspecific Hybrid Rossiyanka in Breeding Persimmon." Bulletin of Gosudarstvennogo Nikitskogo Botanicheskogo Sada51.
Omarov, M. (1994). "Diospyros Virginiana." Sadovodstvo i Vinogradarstvo3: 17-18.
Kazas, A. and E. Lobov (1996). "Persimmons in the Southern Ukraine." Sadovodstvo i Vinogradarstvo2: 18-19.
Krivjencov, V. and A. Kazas "Biochemical Characteristics of Fruits of Hybrid Diospyros Virginiana L. x Diospyros Kaki L. and His Parental Forms." Buljeten Gosudarstvenogo Nikitskogo Botaniceskogo Sada49.
- john
Message: 5 Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:44:40 EST From: Jwlehman@aol.com Subject: Re: [NAFEX] hybridizing persimmons To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
In a message dated 12/12/2007 7:46:26 PM Eastern Standard Time, lonrom@hevanet.com writes:
> "Mentoring" usually meant grafting the male parent on the female tree, or > vice versa.
Hi Lon,
Yes, I've seen that definition more than the following once. (Method A)
I've also read mentoring is taking dead pollen of the female species and mixing it with live pollen from the other species then mix and apply both to the female flower. The dead pollen has chemical or mechanical properties that tricks the stigma's rejection mechanisms. Thus allowing the approach live sperm to develop the pollen tube and sperm to pass to the egg. (Method B)