In 2019 I bought three seedlings in small plugs of soil from an online nursery, Mossy Oak Nativ Nurseries, and planted them around January. I bought three to have a reasonable chance of having at least one male and one female (75% chance) so I could get some fruit. By mid-March two of them had leafed out very nicely.
On June 22nd I planted a fourth, much bigger Common Persimmon that I found at Buchanan's Native Plants in Houston (3 gallons). Below is a picture of the Persimmon grove at the back of the yard.
None of the Persimmons did particularly well during the scorching month of August 2019 and most of the leaves fell off. In mid-March 2020, two of the small Persimmons had leafed out, but the bigger one looked very dead.
In early April 2020, the three small Persimmons had leafed out, two of them already luxuriantly.
The bigger Persimmon that I purchased in 2019 from Buchanan's nursery produced a few long, thick, dull green sprouts clustered in one spot on the otherwise dead-looking sapling. These sprouts had tiny sickly leaves that didn't even look like Persimmon leaves as they were much (at least 10X) smaller, yellowish, glossy, and covered in black blotches. I removed this freak of nature.
By mid June the leaves of the three remaining Persimmons started getting curled and twisted near the ends of the twigs. Unfurling the leaves I discovered they were filled with aphids or some kind of scale insect - these were being tended by large scuttling red ants - the youngest leaves were totally deformed and rolled into cylinders. I sprayed with insecticidal soap which perhaps did the trick as a few normal looking leaves started to emerge at the ends of the twigs (July 11th 2020).