Honey Jar and Sugar Cane Jujubes just became available!

OK Katy, now you are just “gas lighting” us and showing off! hahaha. Of course, I’d be doing the same thing every day if I could and we are here to see each other’s success, but your that just isn’t right. haha When you get to be a multibillion dollar jujube conglomerate, I hope you remember us little people who cheered you on! :slight_smile:

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:joy::joy::joy:

I would never forget my friends and family… we are actually in laws if our trees are sisters, no?

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hahaha. I love that. LOVE that!!! And I bet you get lots of “likes” on that! Also, using that logic, we really are one big family here on GF aren’t we?

Once your giant jujube fortune and estate are established, I’ll be that relative who appears out of the woodwork and suddenly claims that for some reason you owe me about half of your business. haha

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When do their roots grow? I bought a bare root Honey Jar, and wasn’t able to plant it for some time, so I put it in a pot.

Finally, I went to plant it out, the leaves had already started growing, maybe 1/2" long. While transplanting, I pretty much bare-rooted it, as the potting soil was loos and there was absolutely no new root growth yet.

So unless mine is behaving unusually, it seems like they leaf out before the roots start growing.

Some of my seedlings will have really good roots and the top not get very big. Then some of the larger ones I will think will need repotting and the root ball is much smaller than I would think it should be. So I kinda think jujus are weird! I have moved some small trees after about 3 months of being planted out and there was a lot of variance in what root they had put on. One seemed to have no increase in root mass. One sent down a tap root and nothing else and one just had an increase in a root ball of fine roots. They all grew like crazy this spring.

Katy

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i have never seen juju seedlings blooming on first year(perhaps due to our dry climate and my ‘tough love’ approach). Still-- your seedling is exceptionally precocious!

i am with you on that, especially regarding a temperate fruit tree that can be fruitful for many centuries. The closest ultra-precocious fruit trees i have experience with were all tropicals(which have the unfair advantage of growing year-round, whereas jujus are subject to dormancy periods for several months). Sugar apples and muntingia’s are two could remember having the ability to bear fruit in just a year’s growth. The big difference is that both seem to decline after a couple of decades, while a seed-grown jujube tree may not even have reached full-production mode at 300 yrs old… Although many tropicals live for centuries(certain citrus, mangoes, jackfruit, breadfruit, sapodillas, etc), many happen to have painstakingly looooong gestation periods when grown from seed.

they will leaf out before roots grow. And more often than not, if the bare root you received didn’t have many fine root hairs, it will struggle once it gets really hot in your location(a problem for me here in the desert).

juju budwood that i have left outdoors( in humid ziploc bags) will leaf out and callous at the bases even though unable to produce roots, and then summarily die due to inability to produce roots.

i hope your tree manages to grow some roots.

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@jujubemulberry so what do you think about these thorns on a Honey Jar seedling?!?!

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Was that a hj pit i sent you?
Most jujus start out with varying degrees of spiny-ness, but generally speaking seedlings tend to be thorny relative to size and number of stems, and the thorny habit wanes as the tree gets taller. Moreover, while we know ‘mom’ is hj, it would be impossible to tell the ‘dad’, but from what could see, it might be li pollen due to the stance and size of thorns, and of course, due to the fact that the predominant biomass of li trees we have increases the chances of being pollinated by li.

one of our seedlings we surmise to have been from a sihong pip, and with sherwood as ‘dad’ due to the fusion of taste, texture, density and shape of fruits, primarily because all of the open-pollinated sherwood pits we’ve cracked(grown here in nv and cali) were empty. Thus assuming that the seedling must have been from a sihong mom. These are mere hypotheses of course, since it is possible that seedling from cultivar X can actually present with characteristics of cultivar Y, even though the the dad is cultivar W, if mendelian recessive traits are unmasked–say, if both X and W have some cultivar Y recessive genes in them.

in effect, with jujus, we are clearly still at this stage where maury show paternity suits are costly. If not mistaken, the scientific community has unraveled the genome of just one variety ‘junzao’.

a less-expensive and fairly reliable means of pre-determining parentage would be to prevent ‘extramarital affairs’ – achieved by bagging flowering branches(of two different cultivars) using n-95 filters and collecting seed from subsequent fruits.

say, a contorted branch with li branch. Seeds from subsequent contorted fruits would likely have been produced with li pollen.

from our bagging tests and observation of a lone old contorted tree in a co-op orchard, the cultivar will bear fruits int the absence of foreign pollen, but will have empty pits. It will produce pits with viable seeds when open-pollinated.

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Yes. This was a HJ pit that I got from you and the fruit had been harvested from it. They were labeled as HJ and you also sent some rootstock pits that I removed the fruit from. So, basically because it came from your “orchard” it could be any combination with the amount of “free sex”, or should I say “tree sex” going on. I have several HJ seedlings from that lot. This one had the same amount of “stickiness” as most of them do until recently when it put on new upright growth that is covered in these slanty swords. I was wondering if the type of thorns it’s showing could be any indication of paternal parentage—-will just have to wait and see what the fruit is like.

Katy

expect no less, as las vegans are stuck in the 60’s with groovy “flower power”. Jujus from out of state evidently enjoyed getting shagged by the locals, as the winter d below shows :grin:

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Wow nice!!! What do you think about the fruits? Winter D? I’ve got a lot of fruit drop on my trees here. HJ has got a pretty good crop and Chico is loaded. Li is kinda disappointing since it bore no fruit last year and only scattered fruit this year. I’m thinking about throwing some azomite around since I’m sure our soil has much less minerals than yours. @Livinginawe said his got better after he used it. Perhaps it might spice up the sex life here!! And we’ve had horrible weather. It went from one step above icy to blow torch here in one week’s time!

Love seeing that little tree with all that fruit!!

Katy

Here is photo of Honey Jar seedling from 1/2017 with fruit. …well two anyway!! :joy::joy:

Katy

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none have ripened yet. OGW says it is an early variety, and it seems like it is. Have to say-- data regarding this cultivar has been elusive and dubious. I also forgot to water it a couple of times, but seems like it is holding on to the fruits even with sunburnt, dehydrated foliage, which is a common occurrence with recent transplants. This tree has not seen anything like the glare of the desert sun, plus the bone-dry air. I have reduced its direct exposure and being more diligent with watering.

with young specimens recently obtained, especially from areas with short growing seasons, the lack of sunlight seems to be main cause of fruit drop. I seriously doubt our recently winter d, massandra and autumn b would be as productive as they are now had i not moved them around almost every day to get direct sun.

azomite sounds good and harmless. You gotta do what you gotta do to ‘set the mood’

li is supposedly one of the more cosmopolitan bearers, so perhaps it is just a soil issue.

the seed was sown 1/2017, so it is barely 1 and a half years of age. An ultra-precocious one, no doubt! Hopefully the fruit is good/unique.

being from honey jar seed, i dub it “Katy’s Honey” :wink:

am still waiting for any of our hj seedlings to deserve being christened “Vegas Honey”

A Honey Jar graft done this winter has become the latest addition to the family. Seeing how prolific it is so early, I have high hopes for Honey Jar…Sex life starts early for jujubes!

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Very nice! I really like HJ. I didn’t plan to…I thought it was too small but after tasting it I was hooked. And it is very precocious and productive. I had about 13 on my tree last year and I rationed eating them!!!

Did you report that you had used some azomite around your trees? If so how much and is it too late in the year to apply it?

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Yes…I put about five pounds around each jujube. But I don’t know if it is the azomite that is the secret or just more nutrients in general.

This is from the Western Australia Jujube Growers Association:
"From the sight of the first bud burst we begin fertilising with something like Seasol (a seaweed liquid furtiliser) or NPK or many of us use horse or chicken manure depending on the soil type, the more gravel soil likes the chicken manure where the more sandy or soil with some clay in it, the horse manure is the best. Our Li were about the size of mandarins this year which was great.

We water our trees from bud burst by reticulation every second day, increasing the time of watering every month by another 15 minutes until January then we water every day and quite large quantities, this we do in the evening as the plant likes to dry out during the day"

I don’t know about Texas soil, but the sandy soil here in Florida doesn’t hold much nutrients and there isn’t even any nutrients down deep, like there are in western US soils, so we have to provide what they want. Florida’s “Just Fruits and Exotics” also says to give jujubes one pound of 12-12-12 fertilizer (with micro-nutrients) per year of tree age…and repeat three times a year. I know it sounds contrary to all other fruit tree protocol…since adding a lot of fertilizer to peach, persimmon, and most fruit trees at fruit set is sure to cause significant fruit drop (I had forgotten to fertilize a persimmon tree this spring that sits toward the back of my property, so I gave it some about two weeks ago…Yesterday I noticed the ground covered in hundreds of persimmons and only two left in the tree).

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I fertilized mine last year and had some vigorous growth but not a lot of fruit production. So I haven’t done anything this year. I have a clay loam soil but I figure all the soil here is low in minerals. I also have access to horse manure. I didn’t know that about persimmons. Good to know!

hope yours and everyone else’s hj’s get loaded with fruits for centuries! Below is an upright trunk which was ~12 feet tall(before fruiting) that drooped to knee level due to the heavy load. Only reason it has sprung up a bit is because the birds already raided it, as shown by half-eaten jujus.
as for size of fruits, you’d see here that hj will produce bigger fruits as the tree ages. And when i said ‘big’, i meant 1" diameter at a minimum, which is considerably larger than those of younger hj’s.

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