Does anyone know the variety of Jujube that is sold at Costco?
It’s dried, all brown, roughly two inches, with walnut in it. Packaged by Snak Time.
It’s so good! I’m hopeful it’s one of the varietals I’m growing… but if not—I may need to get another tree.
Thank you!
Probably Lang or Li. Are they from California? If the “walnut” you’re referring to is in the center that’s just the pit/seed. Or they could be packed with loose walnuts too for some reason, I haven’t seen them.
Oops! It’s SnakYard. Seems the holding company is Alli & Rose.
They are based in Redlands, CA.
It’s an actual walnut in the middle of the split dried jujube and individually packaged.
My trees were just planted a month ago—so 3 years to go!
they might even be the jujube variety redlands, named after that city 
some jujus can fruit on same year they’re planted, and many will fruit on second year, just plant them at the sunniest spot in your orchard
I dry my Li and Shanxi Li fruit every year and they taste pretty much like that snack. I feel most varieties of dried jujubes are gonna taste fairly similar.
Oh wow—didn’t realize there was a Redlands variety and maybe there could be fruit this year! I’m so excited!
Got my Lang/Li jujubes from Ison’s. They are roughly 4 feet tall, so not sure on the age. My Honeyjar is from Home Depot’s about 18 inches so I’m guessing it will take a long time…
Neat! Looks like I need to and Shang Li to my wish list!
I honestly don’t notice a big difference between them. Shanxi just seems larger and but otherwise if I was blindfolded they taste the same.
I ger way too much production from two trees occupying a 10 x 5 feet space… last years crop; half of the jujubes I ended up composting (I could not dry them all in time).
Given your username you seem like the right person to ask this question. How do you process your jujube to make them as tasty as possible. People rave about them, but the harvest I had last year was not that remarkable. I have the cultivars empress gee and autumn beauty. They are still young trees. Would that make a difference in fruit quality?
we don’t really process them, they just need to sit on a dry kitchen counter for several days and let them shrivel until they are squishy, then bagged
just like palm dates, drying jujubes any further could result in the pulp sugars crystallizing. Still edible(in fact extremely sweet) but can crack a tooth
some jujus don’t get rock hard, we have a variety we named ‘vegas baby’ which, when crystallized–tastes exactly like fruit loops and has similar texture/crunchiness
with jujus, the quality of dates is determined mostly by the cultivar you are drying. Most cultivars that are great eaten fresh are great as dried dates as well, but there will be varieties that are not particularly good for fresh eating but excellent when dried, lang and sugarcane being two could think of(although sugarcane probably is good eaten fresh when grown outside of vegas’ extreme heat).
sihong cultivar is one of our favorites eaten fresh or dried. It has a unique, complex, flavor, and is quite meaty, being a dense-fleshed cultivar. Honey jar when dried is also excellent, but there is not much pulp being small-fruited.
here in vegas, honey jar will bear fruits at 6 inches tall. The most critical part is to plant jujus where they will get the most hours of direct sunlight. Btw, have never heard of home depot selling honey jar jujubes ever! That they already have it sure makes me happy
That’s great information. Thanks!
So far they have grown very well for me. The climate is rather mild, being along the Pacific Coast. Very little extreme weather, though the amount of rain over 5 winter months is always substantial, and I suppose some people would find somewhat extreme, especially desert dwellers. Is it possible all that rain could adversely impact the flavor? We do have an annual drought that coincides with fruit set and ripening. For 7 months the rainfall is sporadic or nonexistent which they seem to really enjoy. They look happy during extra hot sunny days. I’ve never seen them sulking on account of the heat. Which, I’m sure, is no surprise to you. The summers aren’t Vegas hot here, but it’s around 90 often from late June until early September. Do you think that’s favorable for the jujube fruit after all the rain? Or is it not that important? Perhaps my concern with the amount of rain or lack thereof is much ado about nothing.
I’ve never had any of the cultivars you mentioned. Do you know where I can buy some to sample? A reasonably priced online retailer?
What are your thoughts about the two cultivars I’m growing? Empress Gee and Autumn Beauty. I chose those two because they were the only ones available when I was at the nursery looking. Hopefully the rootstocks make lots of suckers I can pull up and use to graft some different cultivars. If you could only have one jujube for the rest of your life which would it be? I’ll plan on making my next tree that cultivar.
Thanks again for sharing your insights and taking the time. Much appreciated!
we dont have empress gee, and while we do have “autumn beauty”, there has been so much confusion with this named cultivar as there was a time onegreenworld was shipping different-fruited jujus under the same name. “Winter delight” was the other cultivar it may have been sending out.
to complicate things, autumn beauty seems to be under another name posted at new mexico state u website.
The autumn beauty we have has large fruits, but mediocre in quality, perhaps affected by our extreme summer temps. It often leafs out much earlier than the interstem it is grafted to, and will even leaf out earlier than wild-type rootstock. It also often presents with long forward-tilting thorns, which could reach 2"
we don’t get much rain here, but from observing well-watered potted plants and neglected potted plants of the same cultivar the variety honey jar seems stable in fruit flavor and quality, while bigger fruited cultivars such as li will have variability in favor of the well-watered specimens. Our sample size is rather small so there might be other factors involved.
what is conclusive though is that a sudden downpour will invariably result in cracking of some cultivar’s fruits, especially the cylindrical or pear-shaped. Lang, norris, r4t3, xu zhou are quite susceptiple. Sugarcane also cracks with a sudden downpour but thankfully just tiny slits instead of gaping wounds.
while a legitimate question, nobody can really claim authority when it comes to rating fruits. Have come across several(all ladies) who rate sour-fruited wild-type jujus as superior to the more in-demand cultivars as honey jar and sugarcane. While i don’t understand why they like them sour, they --conversely-- probably don’t understand why i don’t like them sour, haha. Just because have grown and sampled 70+ juju cultivars won’t make me an expert on what the next person’s choices might be. It is all a matter of personal preference since like color-blindness and odor-blindness, humans probably also have taste-blindness and varying taste perceptions
moreover, juju quality can also vary between different regions of where they are grown, and as jujus can multicrop in one season, there will be considerable differences between the first crop and the second crop(at least here in las vegas)
lastly, you probably will notice, most juju aficionados posting in this forum(myself included) are promiscuous fruit-hippies who can’t be satisfied with just one cultivar 
i think the best aproach would be to grow as many cultivars as your orchard will permit, and then decide which ones you;d want to keep and propagate the most
in a nutshell, a good number of folks in this forum and other fruit forums favor honey jar and sugarcane. While i admittedly love honey jar eaten fresh and dried, and also like sugarcane when dried, i would much prefer the varieties sihong, chico, and li(of the relatively available cultivars out there)
and since you’ve mentioned being handy with grafting there are many of us here who share/trade/sell scionwood. Just post requests this winter and will guarantee several members will be more than happy to accommodate
and in our own little way enjoy sharing every thanksgiving what we’ve been ardent proponents of: self-rooted juju cultivars, postage included 
It is subjective, but since I’m only going to plant one more, I like to hear what other people consider their favorite. I’d rather use that as a guide than just taking a shot in the dark. Perhaps I’ll try my hand at grafting multiple cultivars to a single rootstock. I’ve managed to pull that off with plum and apple, but I have no idea what the difficulty level is for grafting jujube. For as much success as I’ve had grafting poms and stone fruit, citrus and feijoa still give me fits. It got so frustrating last year that I switched to cloning them instead. Will be giving citrus another shot soon. Received all my scions recently.
jujube has high grafting success rates . It is actually a stone fruit and is the easiest among stone fruits, probably due to disease/pest resistance and drought tolerance.
That’s reassuring information. No grafting is really ‘hard’ per se. some are just more forgiving of a novice’s mistakes than others. Apples make a first time grafter feel like an old pro. I suppose that’s a good place to start. Much like taking a child to a trout pond for their first fishing experience. My mom brought me to one of those places when I was 4. Made me believe filling a stringer with 10 trout in 15 minutes is the norm.
the only issue with grafting jujus would be its wood being harder than most other species.
I dry them further- I think it was about a day per batch in the dehydrator at around 130F. But that is because my wife will use them for soup, so they will get rehydrated during that process, so I might as well dry them fully, so that they keep better. I find it a bit tricky to get just the right level of dryness which will keep, yet still taste OK. Not that I am much fan of them dried. They are much better fresh and crisp.
I have Empress Gee, but haven’t sampled it yet. From the recently published genetic testing, Empress Gee is at least related to Li, I’ve tried several of the others in Li’s group and it’s hard to distinguish them from Li. If EG follows that trend, it will have large fruit with OK texture.
Autumn beauty gets a range of reviews. I think Castanea has it as one of his top favorites. I see it as an OK mid-tier, not much different in level from Li (maybe a bit better than Li). It is relatively early season which is nice. It also has large (but thinner than Li) fruit.
Here’s what I view as the 10 best to get you started. The first 6 can be purchased, though not necessarily widely. The last 4 will require grafting.
Honey Jar
Sugar Cane
Black Sea/Russia #2
Sihong
Fuicuimi
Dong/Sandia
Bing Tang
Early Golden Crispy
Mei Mi
Pinggua/Apple
It isn’t difficult. Most of my jujubes (a bit over 100 trees in-ground, not counting small seedlings) have at least 3 and as many as ~10 varieties on them. Though if the rootstock is small, you probably won’t be able to get so many on it at first. I’d put jujube grafting at around the same difficulty as plum. Not quite as guaranteed as apple and pear, but a high success rate. The wood is a bit denser/harder, so that is something to watch out for.
Thanks for all that great info. So you have over 100 jujube trees? Are you doing a small scale commercial grow?
A decent amount of the trees are still pretty young and don’t produce much yet. Even so, the 2023 harvest was up to about 500 lbs (300 lbs in 2022), so I could be looking at the farmer’s market at some point.
That sounds like quite an adventure. You’ll meet lots of curious people at farmers markets. Especially when selling something fairly unknown to the general public. Would you be selling them as dried fruit like a date? What other kind of food products do you make with jujube? I was contemplating using them in a chutney. I make many batches of physallis chutney each fall so perhaps I’ll give it a shot with jujube.