Tonight I want to talk about one of the winter "predictors"... the persimmon seed. Persimmon seeds have been used to forecast how cold and snowy the upcoming winter will be for a long time! Many people would put the persimmon seeds and the woolly worms at the top of the winter weather forecasting folklore. In fact, the Farmer's Almanac even makes a statement about the forecasting power of the Persimmon seed...

Unripe persimmon & fresh green leaves at Chiang Mai, Thailand
southtownboy

"According to old-timers, persimmon seeds can be used to predict the severity of winter weather. When cut into two pieces, the persimmon seed will display one of three symbols. A knife shape will indicate a cold icy winter (where wind will cut through you like a knife). A fork shape indicates a mild winter. A spoon shape stands for a shovel to dig out the snow."

Persimmon Seeds From This Year...

Over the last couple weeks, we've started getting pictures of the persimmon seeds from this year. This picture was sent by Ashley Swink on September 16th and you can clearly see a majority of them are indeed spoons. There's even a couple knives mixed in there...

So what does that say about our winter? The spoon shape indicates a snowy winter and the knife implies cold, icy conditions. For what it is worth, we saw mainly spoons (and some knives) when cutting open persimmon seeds last year. We only ended up with 11.2" of snow which is a touch below the yearly average in Louisville. The most important message is the one below...

My Thoughts On These Weather Folklore...

As with all folklore, people will have different opinions. I think this is one of those situations where you can probably bend the folklore to meet the actual winter conditions, so I have to say I am not a big believer. Regardless, some love weather folklore so I thought it was worth a discussion tonight.