My jujube are just finishing blooming and I don’t think I have any fruit set. We have been very hot and dry, temps averaging around 100 with no rain in the past several weeks. Our corn is basically dead and the cotton is close to it. I hope we never have as hot and dry year as this again. My jujube sit side by side to each other to the prevailing wind so wind pollination would be difficult for me, maybe stacked in line with the wind would be better, if wind is a pollinator. Sun, humidity and lack of heat have not been an issue for me this year, I also had lots of insects on the flowers. We tend to have acidic soil do you think that could cause low fruit set? The trees seem to be happy and are growing like crazy.
some of my trees are a little lazy too, bearing bumper crops by june last year, but little fruit at the same month this year. They seem to alternate their productivity levels, possibly also influenced by the mild winters/low chill hours. What i noticed is that laggard fruiting of jujus in spring will automatically be made up for in summer of the same year, since they will bear flowers and fruits on the same year’s new growth.
Only honey jar, contorted, sugarcane, norris, and chang seem unaffected by variables and will be extremely productive no matter what.
btw, juju’s are supposedly fine with acid soils just as well with alkaline ones, at least from online accounts i have come across.
I hadn’t heard of Chang or Norris before. After doing some research, both look like interesting varieties. The Norris is from the TVA planting (R3T1, Row 3, Tree 1). I’ve just grafted two others (R4T3 and R1T4) from the planting, but it sounds like the selected cultivars are well adapted…
Chang seems to have an interesting shape as well as self-pollination. The Papaya Tree Nursery description of it seems a bit over the top (3" long, very sweet and crispy, best quality jujube), but it did make me want it 
‘chang’ is supposedly the same as ‘jin’, which adds to the confusion.
chang tastes a little better than norris when fresh. But imo, both are much better tasting when dried as dates, as many other varieties are much better when fresh
btw, i’ve also seen that papaya tree nursery webpage, and they sure did an awesome job pruning their trees into stands of faux italian cypress!
good thing about juju trees is that fruiting is hardly affected with such radical pruning, regardless of time of year they are pruned
have also been braiding some branches of the contorted variety, since they grow in spirals.
something ‘animated’ to look at, when cabin fever hits me hard come winter, lol
figured i posted some pics of my jujus: the perpetually fruitful ones, and the on-and-off moody ones:
three year old li, not as fruitful as same month last year.
3 yr old contorted, very reliable
3 yr old honey jar, consistently fruitful despite having been partially destroyed by cats. These tend to be bent down by the load of fruits, so if one is grafting, it would be best to graft them onto the highest rungs of the juju tree being used as rootstock.
3 yr old shanxi li, still a runt, obtained from Mr Meyer as a secondary shoot graft. Fruitful last year, but currently lagging. Silver lining is that the graft sent out two primary shoots. The leafless branch seen here sticking to the left was a curiously aberrant secondary shoot which grew from the base of the graft last year and it produced huge fruits at every node up to November last year, but has not leafed out this year, and seems to be wilting away.
three year old sugar canes. Grows like weeds here, and consistently productive, but only after a prolonged lassitude on their first year of being planted. Much better-tasting as dried dates than when eaten fresh
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Very nice trees. I hope to get all the newly grafted trees from two years ago to produce fruits this season. They are starting to bloom. The rootstocks were from Roger Meyer.
Tony
jujubemulberry, nice looking jujubes. Like the sculpture on the wall 
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always a pleasure seeing them bloom doesn’t it? And fills the air with fragrance that will probably still plant them even if they don’t fruit.
@jujubemulberry, my crop was similar size at that age on those varieties (I didn’t have contorted but I had the others). The problem is production declined at about 5 years on. I expect you will be better given your better jujube climate, but time will tell.
This year I have lots of flowers, hoping for better fruit set. I cleared out the stand a lot so overall more sun is coming in.
thanks for the input @scottfsmith . My mini-trees are 3 to 4 yrs of age, so there’s a chance, or risk, that like yours, they will decline in production.
evidently it is not something i would like to happen, lol!
in las vegas, there are only 2 jujube trees i have access to(that i know of) which are older than my trees: there is a >10 yr old li at the unlv campus, and a > 8 yr old contorted at a permaculture cooperative . Both are quite fruitful every year. The li at unlv yields >50 lbs in one season, maybe even twice that, since it blooms and bears fruits successively.
i could presume you acquired yours from Mr. Meyer? he uses suckers as rootstock, and it could be a variable which causes the decline, especially if the rootstock was itself obtained serially from even older rootstocks.
will be proactive about this by growing some of the wild-type jujus from seed, and use them as juvenile rootstocks.
jujus could live and be fruitful for hundreds of years, but i guess the rootstocks ultimately decline, and perhaps the decline accelerates with each successive removal from the mother rootstock.
could surmise the reliable old jujus at unlv and at the cooperative have been grafted onto seedling rootstocks, and also seems to explain the differences in growth vigor and fruit production between the specimens i already have, since have obtained from at least 5 vendors. I think burntridge grafts theirs onto seedlings, as all of the trees i got from them are vigorous across the board. Same with the juju’s from lowe’s and star nursery.
will definitely update two or three years from now if things change at my end. I hope this thread doesn’t die down/or get deleted. And keep us posted here about your future successes. And just as importantly, tell us about the failures, if any. Will be doing the same.
I have a bunch of rootstocks from different sources, maybe half from Roger. All of them seem more or less the same for vigor. I have no decline of vigor, in fact there is too much vigor if anything. But I just don’t get many fruits. I think my climate is the biggest factor but the level of maturity also seems to be a factor.
I know nothing about growing jujubes but was wondering if anyone had tried scoring the bark or partial girdling to induce fruiting. I know they used to do this too apples before there were rootstocks to promote early fruiting. Just a thought.
in that case, my juju’s are either held back(in growth) by the type of budwood used for the grafts, and/or held back by sheer lack of moisture/ humidity in this desert. But fruit production seems fairly reliable, despite the harsh, even near-death wiltings in between waterings
conversely, your trees are probably getting too much moisture and not much sunshine/heat, which may encourage growth, but probably not the best conditions for juju fruit production.
i have seen really old literature which advises the same. I am tempted to try, but a little wary, considering the risk involved.
can’t think of any scientific explanation for the seemingly dangerous practice. But surely, those chinese farmers probably know something about which we don’t.
My So and Sugarcane are both covered by flowers. Due to all the grafts, I’ve been paying more attention to them than in past years. I’ve noticed several potential pollinators. I’m not sure if ants help any, but I see them on it. I’ve also seen a bee (not sure which kind- maybe bumble) and what looked like a yellow jacket- I didn’t know they went after flowers. Maybe they will make the paintbrush (which I just found this evening) unnneccesary. I think I’ll try it anway on a couple branches.
I’ve also seen flower buds on a lot of the new grafts. I’m not sure if any of them will open in time to pollinate the host tree’s flowers, but it is something to watch.
Maybe the additional sun will help with your fruitset- similar to how most of my set last year was on the South side of the tree (as mentioned in post #2 in this thread). I’ll be interested to see if the same sort of thing happens again.
Nice pics- the Contorted and Sugar Cane both look like they’ve got heavy crop loads.
The Sugar Cane and Honey Jar fruits look larger than I was anticipating. Possibly my expectations have been limited due to the small size Fruitnut reported. While So was very good, they aren’t all that large.
thought about it for a bit @Borer_the_explorer , and it could be that the chinese farmers score their trees to simulate the water-stress typical of desert conditions. While most xerophytes flower and bear fruit when the monsoon rains visit, there also are desert denizens which respond in reverse sequence …
The native tepary bean is one which actually gets stimulated into producing plenty pods, when summer heat arrives and soil moisture starts disappearing, and will have poor production when grown in cool, moist conditions.
Could be the chinese score their trees to re-create stress and deprived conditions, to stimulate their trees start into bearing fruit in areas with too much moisture.
maybe this will work for cooler regions of usa, but could kill the trees where am at, since the stress and deprived conditions are dangerously here already…
@BobVance, my honey jar and sugarcanes actually bear larger fruit than the contorted so.
many of my hj’s and sc’s fruits approach or exceed an inch long, which is quite rare with the so.
at least the so’s have been getting bigger each year.
here’s a pic of our semi to fully ripe hj fruits, which aren’t really tiny. For size comparison, three still-green li fruits are visibe behind(slightly off-center on the right)
as for people being disappointed with jujube’s taste and size, well, it is really hard to rate taste since that is subjective, and as for size, people tend to forget about the abundance factor. One might be able to grow a peach the size of a coconut, but bears just a few peaches per sq foot of land. Juju’s could easily trump that weight-for-weight, and per sq footage of land used. Moreover, jujus will bear fruits in succession beginning spring until early fall. It will shoots fruits like a gatling, whereas peaches and apples generally bear fruits in shotgun fashion–and only once a year, so will not reload until next year… Thus said, we can’t limit our ratings of fruits to just taste and size. Moreover, water usage, pesticide footprint, sq footage footprint, longevity, abundance of fruiting, nutritional value, etc should also be accounted for.
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was at unlv campus today and figured i paid the specimen tree a visit. It is a li which have been picking fruits from the past 7 years. It was definitely >3 yrs old when i first stumbled into it. Fruits are still tiny, but a closer look shows production is quite dense.
the mobile cart to the right is ~6 feet tall, for scale. In the southwest, juju trees grow rapidly the first 5 years , but slow down in growth thereafter at around 15 feet tall.
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