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.
No, my Shanxi Li eventually dropped everything. Only Norris has kept it. But, the price is that the Norris hasn’t grown an inch of new wood. I’m thinking that next year I should pick the fruit off to give it a chance at growth.
It is also one of the smaller trees (Rolling River) and none of the small ones put on much growth. Hopefully they can all grow together next year.
Ah well. All of the non-round shapes I have tried have been drying types so no big surprise I guess. All I really want is one variety of jujube that reliably fruits good fresh-eating jujubes.
I can send you wood this winter if you need any more. I have all the ones I sent you going still, but one is really small and I just noticed the deer munched it back sigh. The deer seem to have a 6th sense for going after the weakest graft.
I should also mention that the Shanxi Li which never set fruit grew almost 2’ more (aprox 7’ vs 5’), than the one that had fruit, which eventually dropped. So I gave up some growth in the failed quest for early fruit (happens a lot).
I think that Honey Jar fits the bill here. The only downside seems to be that it is small. It would be nice to get a 3-4 oz fruit that is otherwise like a Honey Jar. I’ll try to germinate the seeds from mine this year…
Thanks! I’ll do a survey before the leaves drop to figure out what made it. I can start to spread out the grafts more next year as well. Having so many in one spot isn’t ideal.
Ok. My So is fruiting, but these fruit are so small, I can’t do anything with them. These are more seed than fruit. All the nurseries described these fruit as ping pong ball sized, but that is far from what I’m experiencing. I’m considering yanking this thing out of here if this is what I have to look forward to.
Should I try a LI , which is supposed to be larger fruited? The other SouthEastern members also report disappointing performance. Maybe jujubes are only worth it further west…
My contorted so’s have never reached ping pong ball size here in Dallas, but all 3 trees produce fruit bigger than yours. How do they taste? Could they be wild jujube from below the graft? Where are you located? Li’s always a good choice.
