Species
Native fruits
These three do the jobs nut trees cannot. They feed later in the season, they feed livestock, and two of them produce fruit you will actually want to eat.
American persimmon
Soft mast that hangs on the tree and drops late, filling the gap between the last nut and deep winter. That timing is exactly why persimmon belongs in a hunting plan.
For your own table, wait for frost. Before it, a persimmon will turn your mouth inside out. After it, the fruit is genuinely sweet and works fresh, dried or baked.
Worth knowing: persimmons are usually either male or female, so you need more than one tree and only the females fruit. Plant a group, not a specimen.
Seedlings cannot be sexed until they flower, which is why we recommend buying four or more to get good odds of ending up with both sexes. If you want certainty instead of odds, a named grafted cultivar of known sex is available — but only through a custom installation, as older two to four year old stock, and normally as part of a larger planting plan rather than a standalone tree.
Pawpaw
The largest fruit native to North America, and it tastes like nothing else that grows in Iowa — a custard texture somewhere between banana and mango.
Pawpaw is also the answer for shaded ground. Young trees actually want shade, and a mature patch will produce in the understory where most fruit would fail outright.
Worth knowing: pawpaws need cross pollination from a second, unrelated tree. A single pawpaw is a landscaping plant, not a fruit tree.
Thornless fruiting honey locust
The most underrated tree we grow, and the one that does the most work per acre. We grow the two proven fruiting selections, Ashworth and Hershey, both thornless so you can work around them and around livestock safely.
Why they matter for pasture
- They grow very fast, so you are feeding animals years sooner than with any nut tree.
- They are the most calorie-dense producer per tree size of anything in our lineup.
- The canopy is open and lets partial light through, so pasture grass keeps growing underneath instead of being shaded out. That is what makes real silvopasture work.
- Livestock eat the pods directly — roughly 25 to 31 percent sugar by weight, plus usable protein.
Why they matter for wildlife
Honey locust is the latest-dropping food source on the property. Pods keep animals fed well after the crops are combined and every nut on the ground has been cleaned up. If your food plot runs dry in late season, this is the fix.
Plant both selections. Ashworth and Hershey pollinate each other and planting the pair spreads your risk if one underperforms on your ground.
Building a late-season food plan?
Persimmon and honey locust are how you keep animals fed after the nuts are gone. Tell us your ground and we will lay it out.