Jujube fruit set if you don't have hot dry summers

awesome pics and provenance!
quite amazing that li is just as fruitful in moist and humid regions as they are in desert conditions. And i agree, jujus fruits improve in taste as the trees get bigger. Radically better on a year-to-year basis, sometimes.

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Thats “music to my eyes” :smile:

While Greensboro is not Maryland it means I can do better. My trees are 12 years old but I think they lacked sun where I had them. I already have one new jujube in a sunny spot and hope to get several more going for next year.

My take on most reliable varieties at this point is Li, Redlands, So, and Honey Jar are all pretty good of the fresh-eating ones.

Great paper. I might try them next summer.

was wondering if you have pictures of your sherwood tree and/or sherwood fruits. Please pardon my curiosity and just ignore this request if you’re not up to it, it is just that quite intrigued sherwood is productive over there, and with fruits less appealing than li’s.

I thought I had taken pictures, and I tried to find them yesterday, but apparently I never did. My Sherwood was terribly unproductive until this year, but it was covered in fruit this year. My Lang, for comparison, which was planted about the same time, started giving modest crops three or four years ago, and it has cropped pretty consistently, but it hasn’t ever been covered in fruit like the Sherwood this year. The Lang is sometimes really good for fresh eating, by the way. It seems to vary pretty randomly, even with fruit picked at the same time, but I definitely enjoy Lang as a fresh eating type. It’s very different from Li (which seems similar in type to my one taste of Sugarcane), but I’ve definitely enjoyed it and would want to include it in a mix of fresh eating types. Even the best Sherwood I had – at the very end of the season they did sweeten up a little better – isn’t something I’d ever want if I could choose a Li instead.

Nice to see all these Jujube photos.
I’ve moved and left my multi grafted Jujube. I took cuttings in attempt to regraft the varieties I got but the scions weren’t in good condition, I pruned them in dead of winter and didn’t survive.
At my new place I planted 3 trees so far, Coco, Shanxi Li, Silverhill (which I plan to change over to something better) I did plant one by my dad’s place and his was loaded.
So Jujube is worth growing in cold climate, considering you have long enough season to ripen the crop and hot summers will certainly help.
Looking for some scions of other varieties if anyone has to trade?

that you actually have lang–it just made me even more curious, and i apologize in advance…

am beginning to suspect the vendor may have mislabeled lang as sherwood and vice-versa. Considering the discrepancy in taste(sherwoods are supposedly much better tasting than lang), and considering that both are nearly thornless, and that sherwood will bear a good amount of pear-shaped fruits per crop, which is the standard shape of lang. Sherwoods are quite unique–they come in many shapes, and will bear slender fruits just as will also bear pear-shaped ones.
of course this is all hypothetical, as there’s a higher probability your sherwoods and langs are true-to-label but simply half-way in readiness/maturity of producing their best fruits, which explains the taste-discrepancy.

I have noticed in this forum, the trees that seem to produce well grow in areas with alkaline soils. My soil is neutral to acidic, with only Silverhill producing a sizable crop. This fall, I have limed some of my other varieties, and will be adding wood ashes (for the potassium), to see if low fruit set has any relationship to soil pH.

Let us know how it turns out. This jujube report

http://aces.nmsu.edu/pubs/_h/H-330/welcome.html

states that it doesn’t effect fruit set, but thats just one opinion.

QUESTION: I noticed this year that my Li, Ant Admirer, Ga-866, and Sugar Cane all flowered very sparingly, and hence, set very few fruit. On the other hand, my Silverhill produced an abundance of blooms AND FRUIT, and is still producing blooms two weeks after the others have stopped. My question is this: In areas that those varieties produce amply fruit, do they ALSO produce ample blooms? Is there a linear relationship between the number of blooms and the number of fruit? Also, the Silverhill flowers glisten with nectar; I didn’t see much nectar on the others.

It’s been my experience more blooms usually means more fruit; but sometimes lots of blooms mean no fruit. My Winter Delight and Shihong and Li are covered with flowers, I normally get lots of fruit. My Tigertooth, probably the same as your Silverhill, has the most flowers of all and usually provides the most fruit, albeit mediocre. My GA866 has almost no flowers and in 7 years I’ve gotten 1 fruit. Otoh my Sugarcane normally flowers a lot but doesn’t produce a lot.

There was a poster in Oklahoma 7-8 years ago that claimed he got no fruit from his 2-3 trees until he added ashes and they then bore profusely. Timing? Or a mineral deficiency?

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Thanks for the response. I tried a good dose of ashes on one of my Li jujubes this winter…I don’t see a difference. I even tried Tanglefoot on one of my trees to stop ants from drinking all the nectar (some authorities say they can be detrimental to pollination). Nada. I will keep trying; maybe more ashes and lots of compost???

not sure if you’ve posted amount of direct sunlight your trees receive, and amount of rain/waterlogging of roots.
i strongly feel the former is directly proportional to production, while the latter is somewhat the inverse.

in our collection, sherwood blooms a lot, but has marginal production. The rest(except for ga-866 which does not flower much) are very productive after a dense bloom.

You said “The rest(except for ga-866 which does not flower much) are very productive after a dense bloom”: I assume you have Li…That is interesting. Could you post a photo of your Li, if it is still in bloom? Most of my jujubes receive nearly full sun all day. And Gainesville is usually very dry in the spring. To stress the trees further, I am planning to put out a couple large tarps next spring to direct any rain away from the plants. We will figure this out!

we have 30+ varieties, and they are generally more fruitful whenever they bloom profusely.
will send pix of our li later today.[quote=“Livinginawe, post:232, topic:515”]
To stress the trees further, I am planning to put out a couple large tarps next spring to direct any rain away from the plants. We will figure this out!
[/quote]

it is very difficult to get some cacti to flower-- and much less get them to bear fruit-- in the humid and rainy tropics, but they will grow like weeds there, unless you grow them in a sunny greenhouse where you could control the moisture, stimulating fruiting instead of vegetative growth. I could assume the same with jujubes. The full sun and the water starvation inherent to where we’re at seems to stimulate them to fruiting overdrive.

btw, will be including the few spinosa jujube seeds we still have with the mulb leaves sending you. You could try germinating them in big pots, and just graft them over with scions from your trees next year.

in pots, they wont have access to the ‘unlimited’ supply of ground water, and you can let the soil dry out before watering.

forgot to ask–do your trees have suckers? If they do, are the suckers fruitful?

“30+ varieties”…That’s impressive! That would be a better test to grow them in pots (other than using tarps, since they have taproots that can reach to China). I have lots of suckers, but I have never let them get large enough to fruit (so I don’t know if they would). You mentioned a possible nutrient factor…I just noticed that a small (6 foot) Li jujube that is planted next to my wife’s rose garden (very wet, rich soil) has quite a few fruit on it, so nutrients could play a major role.



The Li photo is from two weeks ago, and it quit flowering a week ago…The Silverhill photo was taken today…It is loaded with fruit, but keeps on flowering!

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was going to tell you, the winter delight budwood have grown the longest thorns have seen on a jujube. If juju branches were used to produce that infamous crown of thorns, it may have been a winter delight…
the spines of jin and norris look quite tame in comparison, lol

your li will be pushing new growth quite soon if it has been lagging in fruit production, and i anticipate it bearing more flowers and could just catch up in actual production with your silverhill-- since silverhill takes forever to ripen.
below are pics of ours

li #1

honey jar

sugarcane, a bit delayed but usually just as early as honey jar and contorted

contorted

gi-1183, another poor producer, you could tell that branches are sparsely blooming, and the couple of fruits are no longer surrounded by flowers, or other fruits, which have all dropped off, as opposed to the other varieties above

ukrainian ‘coconut’, another relativrely poor producer, but probably just too young( apart from being damaged recently by stray cats)

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Amazing photos! I am so jealous. Yeah, judging by the size of some fruit on your trees, your Jujubes are continuing to flower over a very long period. Right now I am leaning toward nutrition as a driving force. I have leaf analysis data on my Li ( in my former life I ran an ICP-MS), but I have nothing to compare it to. By standard measures it was low in copper and magnesium…which I supplemented. I just can’t totally buy into the claim that they need a dry climate, as I have read about poor fruit set in dry areas, and good fruit set in some wet areas. I know this is out there, but maybe they need a certain nutrient unknown to conventional wisdom, that is water soluble and leaches out of wet climate soils. Though, I will dig up one or two of my small jujubes and put them in large pots using my soil to try your experiment with controlling water. And if that is all it is, dry roots, I can except that and go on…but my wish is that more people can enjoy this awesome fruit.

How old are your trees? If they are less than 5 years old it could be they are too young to read so much into the data.

On my mostly non-fruiting jujubes I have noticed both low flowering on some varieties, and flowering but not setting on others.

This spring I put jujubes in three new spots in my yard, all in nearly all-day sun.

Re: nutrition, I have always fertilized my jujubes with plant-tone, a slow release fertilizer with all the micronutrients. But I never used a whole lot of it, one cup per plant. Maybe I will up the dosage on them.