More fruit. I have grown pawpaws for 14-15 years. Each year, I like it less for several factors.
Jujubes, on the other hand, continues to hold my interest.
After 3 and a half days of serious rain, fruit that were ripening such as plums and jujubes have cracked like crazy. My vision plums usually did not suffer much cracking but not this year.
So many jujubes cracked. Not sure what to do with so many of them.
i had about half of my black ice crack after a good shower. they became jam and juice. 
Those plums all look bad, but I bet they still taste great!
Do the Birds really attack the jujubes ?
I’ve heard that they did not really attack them the way they do blueberries down here. Seriously considering ripping up my blueberries and trying some jujubes . I get so few of them because I don’t live at my Orchard and if you don’t pick them twice a day they’re gone.
@steveb4 We still have many bags of fruit in our two freezers. Got no time to make jam from those and no time to make it from these, either. I probably will give them to my neighbors who do not mind imperfect fruit. They shares them with their dog.
@mrsg47 yes, most tasted good because they were ripening or about to ripen. However, we had a lot of rain (5-6”) which did dilute fruit’s sweetness.
Birds are not an issue for jujubes. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that other animals namely, chipmunks, squirrels and wasps (a big issue with wasps) like jujubes and could cause some damage.
Thanks
Sad to say, my Empress plums are 98% cracked!! Very disappointed.
@Ahmad were you able to pick your Empress before the rain storm last week.
That is a very sad, yet strikingly beautiful picture.
We got 3.2” of rain over three days (Sat-Mon), got a few cracked Vision and about half a dozen apples cracked. Figs were the biggest victim, as all the figs picked since last Wednesday have been watery. I am glad though that cracking is minimal with Red Lebanese BV and non existent with Smith. RDB on the other hand has been a total failure for me this year, either severe cracking or completely spoiled with the weekly rains we have been having since late Aug.
Empress is not performing for me (has nothing to do with rain), for the second year in a row the fruits go from unripe to spongy with dark brown areas in its flesh. Sometimes half the fruit is under ripe and half of it is spoiled with this dark brown, soft and bland regions. Not sure what’s wrong with it. My first crop of it in 2024 was perfect. Vision has been fantastic since I started cropping it in 2024. Both Vision and Empress are grafted to the same K86 rootstock, each constitutes half the tree.
I finished picking Vision today, and 95% of the crop was dried. It is great fresh and dried.
@alan Have you seen such behavior by Empress before?
Beautiful color too!
Empress was the only E. plum that bore a decent crop in my orchard this year- it is among the most reliable of E. plums, but I could not get much of the fruit to optimum quality- amber flesh with brix above 20. Our extreme april weather swing seemed to have caused an obscene level of pit splitting in most stone fruit which incourages untouchable rot that starts with the pit.
For me, a key problem of both pit splits and cracking is that cutting arond fractured pits and cracks when I’m slicing fruit up for freezer storage is a big PIA. The lower sugar is not that much of a liability for cullinary use of my frozen plum pieces. At least the plum flavor and acidity is there, and sweetness can be compensatef for in other ways, but I certainly prefer them as sweet as they can get here. Split pits also seem to encourage uneven ripening. .
Is anyone growing President here in the NE?. It seems promising, but I’ve only had it for about 4 years and it is just beginning to produce.
Vision is 50% cracked here. Empress is almost 100%.
Thank you @ahmad and @alan re. how to preserve them, drying vs freezing.
I have only two potted figs so my headache and heartache re. Fig vs rain is minimal.
The mystery around your Empress is similar to my Coe’s Golden Drop. One perfect fruit tear and after that many have been greenish (instead of golden) but to touch and fell to ground but were not ripe, some with half ripened, half unripened texture, little to no sugar in ripened fruit, etc., etc. My Empress, so fat, has amber flesh and decently sweet (not very sweet) after the rain.
I freeze them after cutting them up (halves for tarts) on a flat pan and then lift them up with a spatula an put them in freezer bags. They then can be used a little or a lot at a time.
Coe’s Golden Drop and Green Gage haven’'t been useful varieties on my site, although I’ve had good luck with Gage elsewhere. When it’s good it’s very good, as I’m sure you are aware. .
I refrigerate mine for a few days because it’s hot here when I pick them. When I need the space for apples, I bring a couple dozen Potomacs out. I think being cold a couple weeks seems to help keep them longer on the counter. They are definitely firm outside, but semi-crisp and very juicy this way.
I do the same with my Bartlett-like old pear tree, except I end up canning a couple hundred of the fruit. They turn to mush in a couple days not refrigerated and in maybe 4-5 days if refrigerated before being placed on the counter. No way could we eat them fast enough.
