lol! Yeah, i’ve heard unsavory comments and dubious accounts about bbb too.
on a less accusatory note, i just try to give purveyors and experts the benefit of the doubt, and see their potential errors being primarily due to honest mistakes, and not outright deception. Sellers of faux morus nigras, for example.
at this point, we just want more people to be able to grow and enjoy what could prove to be performers. We already know jujus are quite cosmopolitan in hardiness, low-maintenance, and need no pesticides, so all we need to know now are finding ways to get them a bit more productive in frigid michigan or in wet and humid florida.
and more productive in states falling in-between those climate extremes.
or simply find a cultivar that isn’t just cosmopolitan in hardiness, but innately prolific wherever it may be grown.
so far, li and lang are still the only varieties i see being sold in asian stores here. This may have been due to that notion that li must have lang and vice-versa to be productive(li is self-fertile, but lang does seem to need pollen from other cultivars–but not that this matters, since lang is one of the worst ways of vouching for jujus anyway). And being the only two which have been around the longest time in usa, it follows that those two will be the most readily available stock for whoever might want to start a farm.
i could surmise those 800 trees in cali may just be li and lang.
to complicate things, li, when grown in hot and dry regions, bear not-so-good fruits on its first crops, so the first crops of jujus any newcomer would get to taste would be a sub-prime li, and/or a lang that is way below mediocrity even when at its best.
I’ve planted 30 or so jujubees in the last 10 years, and not once have I gotten a fruit the first year. I planted a dozen this spring, 8-9 have flowered profusely, I saw 3-4 tiny fruit which fell off.
was going to post pics of our extremely productive jujus but now afraid it will not carry much weight since didn’t do much other than abuse or abandon… Quite sure many people here(myself included) would rather see pics of productive trees outside of so cal/phx/las.
incidentally, some of your xu zhou and autumn beauty budwood amazingly survived being grafted right in the middle of our endless >110F days, and now see some flowers!
so just when i thought was done jotting down each and every juju superlative, that additional finding came along. Am sooo running out of space in my logbook
I know I mentioned the same thing very early in the thread, but figured that these pics are pretty clear. Also, Raf asked for pictures of productive jujubes.
There are some other branches with intermediate light which have intermediate amounts of fruit. One close to the ground on the north side has none at all.
I also noticed a few jujubes with dark spots. Hopefully they don’t signal local insects adapting to them, as they look a bit like PC feeding marks (not from laying eggs).
nice pix! Our jujus do get attacked by yet unidentified insects/vermin. But with thousands of fruits, the damage is a literal drop in the bucket. Hopefully the damage in your fruits is just as isolated, and that it will be the same scenario when your trees get bigger and bear more fruit
First year tree and I’ve got fruit. There isn’t a lot–8-10 jujus on it but it looks like they are going to mature. It’s been very dry here in july and august and I have been watering some. Now it’s raining and is supposed to rain for days so I’m not sure what that will do to them.
Bob those pictures of the two sides of the So do tell a graphic picture about sun requirements… I now have three trees in spots with 8+ hours and I hope they will be as covered as your So in a few years.
quite precocious right?
could also predict that rain improves quality of li’s fruits(with good drainage, of course)
our li’s taste much better when borne later in the year when it is much cooler and when the soil retains moisture longer(oct and nov), even though fruits are generally smaller than those which ripened at 112F.
being an early variety, it seems to be more adapted to relatively cold and wet regions with shorter growing seasons.
Update on my Shanxi Li- the newly planted one which was carying some fruit dropped it all. Maybe it happened last week when we had a few rainy days with lower light levels.
But I did find another new plant with some fruit. The Norris #1. Unlike the Shanxi Li, the Norris hasn’t grown any. It just sent out small laterals. Several of the smaller jujubes (those from Rolling River and One Green World in particular) haven’t put on any growth yet.
Visually, these things remind me a bit of Candy Corn, the horrid Halloween treat. Hopefully they don’t taste anything like them, other than having plenty of sugar
I let a bunch of suckers grow up around my Sherwood tree for rootstock. I grafted a couple additional varieties onto 5 of those suckers last year, but there are a bunch more that I haven’t grafted yet. I may just cut them down, but they’re there in the meantime. Curiously, most of the suckers don’t have much fruit this year, but one sucker, in particular, has lots of fruit. The main tree (the grafted part) has a sparse like most of the suckers. It had a heavy crop last year. Nothing stands out about the sucker with the heavy fruit set at all. Obviously the location is the same, the climate, the genetics… there’s nothing notable about it’s micro-location or exposure or proximity to the other varieties. The only possible difference between it and the others that I can imagine is that it’s possible some of the suckers were severed from the main tree when I dug up some suckers to transplant the last couple winters, and this could be one that was, although I have no particular reason to think that’s the case other than the difference in fruit set.
This year it looks like only two grafts are going to fruit for me. Zhang Huang Da, which I added last year, is full of fruit. @BobVance did you get set on yours this year? Mine is not in a super sunny spot but still set well so maybe that variety is a better one for our climate. ZHD is a bottle-shaped fruit. I also have a graft of Honey Jar that I put in a sunnier location and it is fruiting this year.
I now have 8 varieties going in sunnier locations so will have more data in a few years on how much difference that makes.
I got home a bit late tonight and wasn’t able to find the graft in the dark. Hopefully it made it through the winter- several of the grafts didn’t. I hope you did a better job of keeping them alive than I did. I saw that one of the TVA grafts had a fruit on it.
I checked back and Zhang (I spelled it Zang) Huang Da actually gave me one fruit last year (a pic in post #161 of this thread). It ripened, but wasn’t all that good. Dry and dense is my recollection. But, given the early fruiting for both of us, it is probably in the Honey Jar class in terms of fruitfulness.
When paging through this thread, I noticed the post from Raf (#62) where he mentioned a list of good producers. In addition to Honey Jar, Contorted, and Sugar Cane, it also had Norris. Norris is the only one of my new trees to be carrying fruit (pictured in #370), so his assessment seems to apply to my climate as well. They look freakish,yet kind of cool at the same times. I’m not even sure I’ll be able to tell when they are ripe.
