Though Japanese Persimmon Trees, including the Fuyu Persimmon Tree are known and often classified as being slow growing trees, with the proper companion plants and plenty of nutrition, you can support and encourage your Fuyu Persimmon to grow at a much more accelerated rate.

With all these things in line, a fuyu persimmon tree can actually grow up to 3 feet during the growth season. To help grow your fruit tree, you should mulch it deeply with compost, chipped trees and leaves, or worm castings depending on what you have available to you. I recommend the worm castings as they are organic, resistant to breaking down and will improve the texture of the soil that the persimmon tree is growing into in a more long-lasting way than traditional compost.

Check out this article for more on Fuyu Persimmon Tree companion plants:

The Best Companion Plants for the Fuyu Persimmon Tree in Your Permaculture Food Forest

Fuyu Persimmon Trees do not need a lot of water to settle into their new plantings well, but may drown or suffocate if planted into heavy soils that do not drain well. Therefore, it is a good idea to not only plant your Fuyu Persimmon Tree while it is dormant, giving it the ability to root into the surrounding soil before the growth season (spring) happens, but it will also cause the tree to be less stressed during this settling in period.

The Fuyu Persimmon Tree will benefit from being planted high, in a heavy soil, and at the same level it was previously planted, if the soil is sandy or otherwise well-draining. This will allow the Fuyu Persimmon Tree’s roots to have plenty of air, while also keeping the roots from drying out.

This hilling of the tree can be done by placing your new fruit tree in the spot where you want to do this no-dig method, lifting it so that the roots just barely touch the ground, and then piling compost or worm castings around the roots until you create a small “hill”.

This also the best time to go ahead and add companion plants to help solidify your little persimmon hill and keep the soil from blowing or washing away during a heavy rain. Mulch your persimmon hill well and water it in to help settle your tree. You’ll want to mulch in a way that covers the entire hill, as you are aiming to keep the endpoints of the roots moist while they make their way into the soil.

The compost, worm castings, coffee grounds, and other amendments will help prepare the way for the new roots of your fruit tree, while the companion plants will join in this effort by creating a web of roots that go over and beneath the soil.

Besides using the compost, mulch, or worm castings, you can further support the nutritional needs of your fruit tree by adding your daily coffee grounds or tea leaves, burying fish or bones beneath the mulch around the tree, and composting in place.

Here’s a list of other things that make great, free ways to fertilize your Fuyu Persimmon tree so that you too can get 3 feet of tree growth this season:

Zero Waste Methods for Improving Soil Fertility In Your Garden For Free

How To Use Fish Aquarium Water As Organic Plant Fertilizer

How Fish & Duck Ponds Improve Soil Fertility in the Edible Landscape

Since originally writing this post, I have also been hard at work vigorously fertilizing my fruit tree with duck pond water. This works because of the natural reality that ducks cannot control when they create waste, and so, the duck pond, being a place where they spend a lot of time, bathing, eating, and playing, becomes a ready source of water for “fertigation”, or fertilizing while watering plants.

This method of organic fertigation of plants is commonly called “quackaponics” and the Fuyu Persimmon tree has been responding fabulously to it, among the other fruit trees currently growing in the edible landscape.

In order to increase your efforts even more, you can even plant your fruit tree in a way that it can grow its roots directly into your duck or fish pond, where it will be able to constantly have access to the rich nutrients floating around in the water column and help keep the water cleaner and more balanced for the ducks and fish.

Although the fuyu persimmon tree can tolerate full sun in places where the sunlight is not too intense (i.e. places with relatively mild summers), if growing the persimmon tree in a grow zone with hot summers, you should provide the fuyu persimmon tree with some soft shade during the most intense parts of the day.

You can do this by growing the Fuyu Persimmon Tree close to another, taller tree so that that taller tree will provide some shade or by planting bamboo or sugar cane around your Fuyu Persimmon Tree to have a softer, more flexible shade, that is equally easy to trim as your fruit tree grows and needs more or less shade.

For more ideas on how to grow trees in your edible landscape, check out this article:

7 Excuses to Splurge On Japanese Maples For Your Edible Landscape Design

Fuyu Persimmon Tree flowers are actually green (leaves) with little yellow-ish centers. For many people, this makes them hard to notice when the Fuyu Persimmon Tree is actually flowering, especially because of how the large, dark green leaves obscure many of the persimmon flowers during the flowering season (which is usually summer for the Fuyu Persimmon tree).

As the persimmon flowers become pollinated and set fruit, the little flower petals will shrivel up and shed on their own. I let them be as they will add to the mulch material already breaking down on the ground. It also seems that my Indian Runner Ducks find these dried flowers to be excellent snacks so that gives them something to forage on too.