It would be interesting to have a chart/table of:
Jujube Cultivar : USDA Hardiness Zone : Locale : Production
In the case of the plant @jujubemulberry spotted at UNLV the cultivar could be specified as “unknown” or “seedling”.
Anyone interested in composing this chart from the 80 messages in this thread?
I’ve posted this on another thread, but it has some relevance here. I can only speak to Tigertooth which is the variety I started with. While my field planted trees are around 5 years old in full sun but with no supplemental water (zone 7a) none have fruited.
Trees started from root cutting from those trees kept at my house fruited in their first year of life only about a foot or two tall. This is likely due to the root pruning containers, but there is the interesting thing. The trees at home probably get 3/4 sun and plenty of water. They are watered regularly and use a lot of water during the summer.
It doesn’t appear to me that too my water by itself distracts from fruiting. It could simply be stress. Once a tree is established, stress causes them to want to propagate. Perhaps in my case the containers pruning root growth are the stress source for early fruiting and the trees in the field get less stress. Perhaps in the case of others, water or other factors provide the stress.
It seems there is so much we don’t know about Jujube…
more pix:
below are gi-1183 on left, and jin(chang?) at right. These are my sacrificial juju’s, as i situated them at the northeast corner of the yard, with the wall possibly radiating 5 or more degrees F on top of the ambient 113F, and where irrigation hardly reaches it.
the jin is dubious, as the fruits don’t resemble the description, though it may be due to its pre-pubertal age. Whatever variety it might be, it sure doesn’t get bothered by extreme heat.
the left one is a constant laggard, aside from assuming a weird growth habit. Received it as secondary shoot graft from Mr Meyer.
below is ant admire received from rollingrivernursery two years ago as a secondary shoot graft, and just now assuming a backbone, and finally bearing fruits.
sihong below is the best tasting juju imo, but not as productive as honey jar or contorted. Fruits are very dense, very sweet with a good mix of tartness. Tastes sweeter than sherwood, hj, or sugarcane when grown here. Also awesome as dried dates, if you have a sweet tooth. I think this is best grown in very hot climates, as feedback from other states aren’t as stellar. When picked immature, it tastes exactly like coconut cotyledon. Probably shares some lineage with the ‘coco’ variety
could also be that tigertooth holds that rare distinction of being water-loving and humidity-loving, as it seems to be the only variety which does very well in wet and humid FL.
i agree though that juju’s are quite mysterious.
You are absolutely right. So far, my experience is limited to Tigertooth. As a side note, I grafted some of the tigertooth I started from root cuttings this winter. One that took was Admiral Wilkes. It is now only about 1 foot tall, but it has small fruit forming. The Tigertooth rootstock is 1 year old (container grown) and the Admiral Wilkes scion was grafted to it this winter.
i don’t have admiral wilkes, so good luck re: yours, and keep us posted!
There’s 86 posts in this thread. A chart would really be helpful.
I don’t think there is enough hard data. To have a good comparison, you want to grow things in a consistent method (pruning, amount of sun, spacing, etc). That way only climate and cultivar would vary. You could then make some nice graphs, like yield vs rainfall (or vs latitude), possibly with a curve for each cultivar.
I think the best you can do is have each single grower produce a grid like Bob Hawkins did a few years ago (linked from post #4 in this thread). It is somewhat subjective, but one of the most helpful I’ve seen. Of course, you need to wait quite a while before the grower gets a good handle on how how everything performs.
If you get enough growers to produce charts like that, then I think it would be a very interesting analysis and produce some neat results. Personally, I plan to do something like that once I have enough info and baseline for comparison. In the meantime, I’ll report things from a more qualitative standpoint.
On the pollination topic, I did some manual pollination on a few small branches today. I also noticed another type of pollinating insect, a large black wasp.
Bob, I’m in agreement with you to a point. But in two posts I said table, chart – not graphic. Clearly there’s no significant number of numerical measures in the 88 posts to graph, but there is interesting data to tabularize. See you on the backside of my summer vacation 
I went out to check on the jujube trees and so far there were thousands of flowers. Hopefully I will get some fruits this late summer.
Tony
At best our data on Chinese Jujube is fuzzy data. Roger Meyer’s book has a lot of good information but much is a combination of personal experience and second hand anecdotal accounts from a broad variety of sources under different conditions. It is great that we can share our experiences here. Fruit that is commercialized here on a broad scale seems to have a lot of hard data with respect to USDA zones and such. Fruit with limited commercial success like persimmon and pawpaw have much less information available. I’ve been working with folks to identify ripening time of different persimmon varieties in their respective zones. Other than things like “early”, “mid-season”, “late”, etc. we have very little information on specifics and these are native fruits.
Fruit that has been introduced from China with a limited commercial market has even less USDA zone related information. We can’t even figure out if varieties with different names are actually the same variety or different varieties.
I am hopeful that now that we have shared our OPM data with the Chinese, they will be willing to share more Jujube data with us. 
if growing jujus in colder regions, ‘early’ ones are probably the most promising. From my experience with the popular cultivars, honey jar, contorted, and sugarcane are ‘early’. Li bears fruits early too, but takes a while to reach its large size. Because juju’s aren’t like the single-shot drupes and pomes( jujus bear flowers and fruits in succession from spring until early fall), being ‘early’ significantly improves the chances of attaining ripe fruit, as late frosts or relatively cold springs or early summers could spoil the first batches of flowers/fruits.
silverhill bears plenty tiny fruits, but despite the small size, takes forever to ripen!
looking good! Good luck and congrats in advance!
more pix of contorted and sugar cane
seemingly unable to grow these contorteds to ‘golf ball -sized’ as described by another grower. But shouldn’t be complaining given the amount of fruits it has been churning
same with hj’s, our sugarcanes fruit from bottom to top.
sihong-- again proved itself the sweetest and most flavorful of the mojave desert jujubes
Jujus,
Very nice photos of your jujubes. I bet they are crunch and sweet right off the tree. I hope one of these day my trees have fruits set like yours.
Tony
thanks Tony! And yes, from the pix you’ve posted, i am confident yours will be fruitful anytime soon
Yours are light years ahead of mine, both in terms of fruit-set and how ripe they are.
My So (Contorted) has some fruit set, but they are still pretty small.
Here is the biggest fruit on the So (with a more representative one peeking out on the upper left):
A lot of the branches on my trees are still in flower. I don’t know if any flowers are still setting, or if they could hope to ripen before winter. Here’s one of 2 fruits which have set on my Sugar Cane- this was on a branch I hand pollinated on 6/26. You can see that it is still flowering now.
One other interesting thing I’ve noticed is that one of my grafts (Li #2 from Roger Meyers) seems to have set 2-3 fruits. Many (most?) of the grafts are flowering, but this is the only one I see fruitlets on.
thanks for sharing @BobVance
your contorted seems to have quite mature and hefty branches. And the fruits seem to have breached the stage when fruit drop usually occurs.
btw, what is your elevation? reason am curious is because sugarcane’s seem to be unhappy with very high altitudes, per findings over at the jujube plantation being run by new mexico state U.
I’m about 5 miles inland and about 350’ (from what I recall) elevation.
My Contorted So produced some fruit last year (not a ton but several dozen) and is now in year #4 (planted Oct 2011). The Sugar Cane is almost the same age (May 2012), but it spent the first 2.5 years in a pot, so it is way behind. I planted the Sugar Cane (fabric pot and all) last August.
350’ sounds pretty harmless then, as our elevation is ~2000’.
the NMSU orchard is located at a whopping ~6000’ above sea level
jujus manage to reliably produce fruit over there, being flexible to late frosts. Intriguingly, only sugarcane stunts and runts at that altitude
