The persimmon is a type of fruit with a taste that is similar to the plum. They’re red-brown or orange, and are extremely healthy for you. They also have one uncommon factor about them that no other fruit possesses, which is that their seeds can forecast the weather for the approaching winter season! Just like the groundhog predicting how many weeks there are left of winter, there is the persimmon seed to predict how harsh the winter will be.
The persimmon seed, cut in half, will reveal a white structure that will either show you the shapes of a spoon, knife, or fork. Each of these pictures mean a different weather forecast for the winter to come. The spoon is the most common found in the seeds, then the knife, and lastly the fork is the least common found.
Before you go out and cut open the first persimmon fruit you see, there are a few things you need to know. For the best results, you need to find a ripe persimmon fruit. To tell that they’re ripe, they’ll be soft and have wrinkles. To find the ‘picture’ of the eating utensils, you’ll have to cut open the fruit and extract the seed. After getting the seed out of the fruit, you’ll need to cut the seed directly in half so you will be able to correctly predict what figure it shows. Each utensil represents a different type of winter that is coming. Here are the three different pictures, and what they mean for our Missouri winters.
Spoo
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The spoon is what we use to scoop out our food, right? So naturally, the spoon is supposed to resemble a shovel. Whenever you cut the fruit’s seed in half, look for a round circle with a line splitting off of it and down. This is what the spoon seed will look like. The spoon in the middle of the seed predicts that this winter will consist of heavy, wet snow fall and cold winter days ahead. This usually means a couple of heavy snow falls throughout the entire winter with more than 3 inches of snow. So, if it shows a spoon, you may want to stock up on some shovels.
Knife
When the persimmon seed is cut in half, the seed will just be a straight line with nothing else branching off of it. This is the knife. If the fruit shows a knife, it means that the winter will be icy. It shows the knife because, as the tale goes, you’ll have to cut through the ice or have ‘cutting’ icy winds throughout all of winter. The knife is less likely to appear than the spoon, but more likely to appear than the fork picture. The knife is seen as the worst picture of the three that you could come across because it predicts the worst type of winter coming: heavy snow fall, icy, and extremely cold.
Fork
Although it is the least likely of the three to be seen, for most people it is the one they hope to find when they cut open the persimmon seed. Revealing a straight line with three ‘prongs’ coming from it is what forms the fork picture. The fork and spoon are sometimes hard to distinguish, so look closely to find these prong like shapes. When a fork is found in the seed, this means it will be a mild weathered, light powdery snow kind of winter. This means a winter filled with little snowfall and warmer temperatures than usual!
Although it is just another tall tale, the predictions from these seeds have been known to be unquestionably close to the winter’s that have passed. The persimmon tree is in all regions of Missouri, besides the northwestern counties. So, next time you see a persimmon fruit, pick a ripe one and see if you can predict the weather for this winter!
