@castanea East Coast. Your right it does make a difference. So far I have most of the ones that crop here. Just looking for something larger than what I have.
Again, that depends on where you are.
The east coast is a large place. There is a huge difference between Maine and Florida.
I think that may depend on cultivar. Shanxi Li seems better each year. But Honey Jar has been great from the start. It just gets more productive each year. Other jujube which are quickly productive would be Bok Jo and Xu Zhou. Sugar Cane, So, and Massandra are slightly slower, but pretty quick too.
Wow- getting 30 feet tall before fruiting is pretty remarkable. Maybe it would have fruited quicker if it wasn’t busy using its energy to reach for the sky…I try to not let my trees get more than 10-12 feet tall, though that is mostly because I don’t want to have to climb too high on a ladder…
Also, I think I’ve grown a peach with your username. I may be confusing my Chinese peaches, but I think it was pretty good.
I’ve grown over 10 Honey Jars there is often a little fruit in year #2 and all but a couple produced fruit by year 3.
Li is already fairly large, so you may have trouble getting something bigger. Redlands, Dae Sol Jo, Tae Sang Wang, and Shanxi Li are all possibilities. And Autumn beauty is almost as large (probably longer, but narrower). I’ve had at least one season out of each, but will need more more time to come up with evaluations. So far, I thought all were fine, but none matched up to Honey Jar, Black Sea, Russia #2, etc. Or even Massandra.
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@SoCalGardenNut … glad to hear you approve of your lang fruit… i bought a shanxi li from OGW but now that it is fruiting nicely this year (yr 3) the fruit are pear shaped. Others have said it looks much more like lang than shanxi li.
What do you think ? Shanxi li… or Lang ?
Could you elaborate on what you liked about the taste or texture or flavor or sweetness of your lang ?
Thanks
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My guess is it’s a Lang, Shanxi Li is more like Li, more rounded.
Not sure where you found Dae Sol Jo at, but that thing has some meat on it. Is it possible to create a multi variety franken jujube? I grafted some rootstocks to sugarcane, but jujube branches seem a little different.
There are quite a few people who grow multi-grafted jujube trees in California, especially on older stock, and a few in Texas as well.
Dae Sol Jo is a Korean cultivar that was introduced into the US by Clifford England.
Left to right below are Shanxi Li, Li, and Dae Sol Jo. The best tasting for me was Dae Sol Jo.
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Somehow I thought Shanxi Li was bigger than Li. Those all look pretty good size. Unfortunately Li has been somewhat of a freeloader for me. HJ doesn’t play games though.
Size is variable in most jujubes. You can find small and large fruit on many cultivars. Li has both large and small fruit.
In China, at least 30 years ago when I was there, jujube grew wild, nobody cared about it. The tree grew to 30-50 feet tall and then start to set massive fruits each year. So the person who planted the tree might never happen to taste it. I only tasted the fruit from the tree I planted 40 years ago once.
Nowadays they grow jujube tree very low and dense in a commercial setting to increase productivity. This is a Qiyue Xian (Autumn Beauty) jujube orchard. People in the picture are inventors of Autumn Beauty.
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I need to cut my jujube trees down then.
I’d like to see the structure of these trees when dormant. Wonder how they’re trained so low.
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I need to find their secrets of getting jujubes to be incredibly productive like that.
Another 2 pictures:
Obviously the orchard uses some trellis support system, pretty much like the high density apple orchard in the US. The guy who gave the lecture was the one who developed Autumn Beauty jujube.
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Definitely looks like a trellis system and continue top off at waist high to promotes lateral branching and tie to the trellis.
Tony
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Great photo of Autumn Beauty but the Chinese absolutely did care about commercial jujubes 30 years ago and had many commercial orchards. Jujube has been cultivated in China for more than 4000 years. There are still remains of cultivated orchards that were planted more than 1000 years ago.
Jujube trees have been setting massive quantities of fruit while small trees for hundreds of years or more.
Today they do choose to grow many jujubes commercially in orchards with trees that have been pruned to remain small, just as they are doing with other fruit trees and with chestnut trees. Most such trees are small because of how they are pruned, not because they are genetically limited to small size. Autumn Beauty can grow well over 15 feet tall in 15 years if not pruned.
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There really is no secret. Prune them to stay small as set forth in Shengrui Yao’s video on pruning. If pruned correctly they will continue to set massive quantities of fruit as they age. Then grow them in hot dry areas with plenty of sun, water and fertilizer.
This Australian grower explains how to keep them small and productive although he does not keep them as small as some of the Chinese growers -
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Thank you. Saw this video a while back. Admittedly, forgot most of the tips in the video.
Thanks for a reminder.
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I’m in trouble, now I need to find Autumn Beauty and Chico.
Chico will be easy. Dave Wilson Nursery, the massive California wholesaler, produces Chico every year and distributes it to dozens of retail nurseries around the US. It should be easy to find in SoCal.
Autumn Beauty is a different story. One Green World started selling it years ago at the same time they started selling Winter Delight. I bought two AB that first year, along with one Winter Delight. A couple of years after that, OGW got the two trees mixed up and when they sold AB, they were really selling WD, and vice versa. This apparently went on for quite a few years until finally OGW apparently discovered their mistake and the AB trees they sold after that were really AB. But some buyers have still reported getting the wrong tree, so it’s not clear that OGW entirely fixed this problem. So if you order AB from OGW, you might get AB and you might get WD. Your better option might be to order both of them. Because you have a long growing season, you can mature WD fruit, which is very late and difficult for growers in colder climates to mature. WD is a good jujube if it gets a lot of heat late in the growing season.
Autumn Beauty fruit-
Winter Delight jujubes -
Autumn Beauty’s Chinese name is Qiyue Xian. ChineseRedDate.com sells Alcalde #1, which is also supposed to be Qiyue Xian. I haven’t seen anyone yet confirm that Alcalde #1 and Autumn Beauty are the same, but they probably are.
You will also occasionally see other nurseries selling Autumn Beauty and some of them seem to be selling the real AB while others are really selling Winter Delight under the AB name.
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