Hi folks:
It’s been a while since I have seen anything posted on Jujube varieties. Curious what recent experience growers have had with them. I am trying to grow them in containers in Zone 5 (in unheated garage in winter) so am most interested in the short season, easier growing/fruiting varieties. Thanks!
Honey Jar. You can grow it in zone 5 just fine in-ground or container if you would like.
Tony
agree with @tonyOmahaz5 . HJ is hands down the most recommended, being one of the more cosmopolitan of the early-producing jujus in usa. Contorted is perhaps its peer in that department but probably better as a starter or a companion to hj, since contorted is self-fertile.
IS HJ self fertile ?
we did some basic bagging of hj and contorted flower buds(before the petals unfurled). The HJ’s were hardly fruitful, and the few fruits they produced yellowed out and dropped before reaching mature stage. The contorted’s did so much better in production, and fruits ripened. Only difference is that the pits were seedless, whereas open-pollinated contorted fruits often have seeded pits with good viability.
Great experiment, although i guess that you tested for parthenocarpy and not self-fertility, in that maybe HJ could produce on his own if wind/insects cross pollinated its flowers ?
the ‘bags’ we used were porous on one side with n-95 barrier, so fairly permitting of air circulation/breezes, but no foreign pollen, and of course, no insects. Have to confess we’ve gotten lazy doing further studies, since the overall value of obtaining findings is negligible(in practice), considering the reflex reaction of people to grow more than one variety any way, primarily due to pollen-paranoia, and the innate desire to collect as many cultivars…
if there’s any value to our tests/hindsight analysis, it is that the cultivar li may be the most potent source of pollen. More than half the biomass of our trees is li, so all of our other cultivars were likely to have been ‘serviced’ by li pollen. And the 50+ cultivars we have grafted to our trees or planted around our trees produced fruits on first year, and if not on first year, on the second year of grafting/planting. A good number of cultivars we’ve received produced fruit sooner than the mother plants they were taken from(some haven’t even fruited yet where they are at, for many years). So we have inadvertently assumed ‘surrogate’ to folks from out of state who’ve been wondering what the quality of fruits their relatively rare cultivars might be. Of course, climate and growing conditions also influence precocity, and also possible that plenty li pollen may not even be the reason behind production, but shouldn’t hurt to have them around.