They are very good for fresh eating.
It’s always a top 10 fresh eating jujube for me and in many years it’s a top 3 jujube. At its best it’s crispy and sweet with a tiny amount of sourness and just a little more flavor than most jujubes have.
And I love the color they develop -
6 Likes
Trying to delete this post for now, cant get my pics to upload correctly. They come out squished andfat and do not do the trees justice
1 Like
My favorite jujube this year has been ‘Baby Red’. I’m not saying the best jujube I ate this year was necessarily a Baby Red, but across the board, this cultivar been excellent for the following reasons:
Heavy productivity of fruit.
A very lengthy period of productivity with some of my first mature fruits and last mature fruits.
No splits from rain.
No skin degradation from sun, humidity, insects or microorganisms.
Fruit can hang on the tree while mature for a long period before beginning to dry.
Consistent high quality fruit with good crispness and sweetness but slightly different flavor profiles at three stages -
- Initial browning - has good sweetness with good crispness and slight sourness
- Fully brown - peak crispness and sweetness
- Brown beginning to dry out, but still solid - crispness with excellent complex flavor and excellent after-taste, one of the best jujubes I’ve ever eaten. Reminiscent of the late season stage when Chico reaches peak sweetness but with more flavor.
Almost no predation from birds or insects who seem confused by the inedible red fruit later turning brown.
I also noticed this year that while it can be difficult to tell when a red fruit turns brown, if you leave a fruit on the tree long enough and it has not turned fully brown late in the season, it will eventually reach full sweetness and flavor anyway, even with some reddish color.
This is an old photo that I’m including because I ate most of mine this year before I could even photograph them.
9 Likes
anyone grow jujube on own roots from JFE? please share photos of the ripe fruits! they were the only nursery i found that sold own roots than the grafted. Im wondering if they grow it from the seed of the variety or actually rooted it from cuttings. Anyone sucessfully root jujube cuttings?
if the fruit differs or growth habit differ from own roots than grafted or any pro or cons? thank you!
Tony described the method in details.
2 Likes
Here’s “Mango Dong” on its own roots from JFaE, though I think they accidentally rooted Autumn Beauty. It’s fruit is identical, as far as I can tell.
I also have Honey Jar and Sugar Cane on their own roots from JFaE. The fruit for both matches well. The SC hasn’t been all that productive yet, while the HJ has a massive load of fruit. So much so that it has been slower to ripen this year compared to most (not all) of my other Honey Jars.
Regrettably, I haven’t seen any root suckers from any of the “own roots” trees. When you want them, suckers never appear…
I’ve been busy picking jujubes and have actually been weighing them recently. 72 pounds in the last 8 days.
Here’s 11.5 pounds of Honey Jar from a tree at a rental yesterday. And there was even more ripe at the top, but I forgot my ladder (was using it the day before to pick the tall So at home.
I tried to replicate what Tony did and it wasn’t very successful for me. Out of about a dozen, 2 kind-of-worked. They limped on for maybe 6 months and then died.
Were those frozen, or did you just put fresh ones in ice water. Given my large harvest, I’m thinking about freezing some of them and I think you did that with some in the past. How is the texture after thawing? I put a few in the freezer last night and will start defrosting them today to see what happens.
8 Likes
ok cool i was wondering how JFE own root jujubes turned out compared to grafted! thank you!
1 Like
I have a So on its own roots from JF&E. Fruits are good and typical of So. My tree put out one root sucker this year.
1 Like
I freeze them and eat like popsicle. If you let them thawed then they were just sweet with jujube flavor and not crunchy.
1 Like
@BobVance
One of my scionwood from you that I grafted produce long fruit. I am sure it is not Massandra.
Can this be Maya? I don’t think I ever got Tsao or Moonlight.
The 3 on the left my Massandra. The one on the right is an unknown.
The unknown tasted a little dry by it was from a potted tree so the fruit quality was not the best due to a watering issue.
1 Like
Orange Beauty is ripening. It is quite productive. Size-wise, it is bigger than Sugar Cane but smaller than Shanxi Li.
The fruit’s shape can be a bit different. These two fruit of Orange Beauty are from the same branch.
6 Likes
The fruit can have different shapes, even from the same branch. Most fruit, but not all, does have a point on the tip-
5 Likes
I just moved my HJ from a smaller container to a bigger container and in full view, more sun. I noticed it’s pretty small, is HJ supposed to be a small tree?
My Orange Beauty all have pointed tips. In fact, my daughter thought it was an acorn at first.
I don’t think it has rained for a while, but most of the OB is still cracked. Maybe it cracked before it was ripe from the last rain a week ago. Even the ones which aren’t cracked have somewhat iffy texture. Worse than Xu Zhou, but better than Lang. Flavor was better than both.
Interestingly my daughter actually liked the Lang better than the Xu Zhou. I guess 29 vs 21 brix is enough to compensate for a dryer texture. I think I prefer the XZ, but not by much and neither was good.
It turns out that there does seem to be a limit in how many jujubes I can eat. I didn’t reach it last year, but with the good jujube weather this summer and the trees being another year older, I think I’m there. Not just there, but well past it. I picked 24 pounds today (mostly Honey Jar and Dae Sol Jo) and 160+ pounds over the last 2 weeks. And that is just measuring what I bring back, not the many pounds I ate while picking…
And I know I mentioned my thoughts on an ideal mix of trees being mostly Honey Jar, Bok Jo, and Black Sea. But 2 big things will change that. Cracking and small fruit being a pain to pick. I’d still have some of them, but I’d want to mix in more big ones where you can pick 10 pounds in 10 minutes, not an hour. Right now, Dae Sol Jo seems like a good option.
5 Likes
Is anyone in the humid, rainy Mid-Atlantic region having good results with jujube? I read years ago that they need dry conditions at least at ripening so I wrote them off my list here in humid, rainy Maryland.
I don’t think my weather is much different than NJ/PA (I’m near the coast Northeast of NYC), but it depends on what you mean by “good results”. 160 pounds in 2 weeks shows they can be plenty productive. But, some varieties have been much more susceptible to cracking than others. Only 3 of the 7 Orange Beauty in the pic above are un-cracked, which is fairly representative for it, as one of the worst crackers. Though it is worth noting that I only have 1 OB tree, so I don’t have a large sample size and there is some variability by individual tree. For example, I have one Honey Jar tree with bad cracking (almost as much as OB) and others where it is much more minor, Shanxi Li and Sugar Cane are also crack badly.
Some varieties, such as Maya/Massandra seem to only crack a little. Maybe 5% vs 40+%. It has occurred to me to maybe put a painter’s drop cloth over one of those susceptible trees in the future when it is almost ripe and a big rain storm is predicted.
If you pick it when the fruit cracks, it is still plenty good to eat. But, if you wait, it starts to soften. It is usually still good for a while, but if you get a week of rain, it could start to go bad. Without the week of rain, the softened cracked fruit will eventually start to dry, something that is done in China with a lot of the varieties, so they can be used later (months or years) in soup, etc. I recently found a bag of 3+ year old jujubes which were tucked away in a fridge. Even given their age, my wife said they would be fine, as they are well dried and will get re-hydrated when used in soup.
2 Likes
I had some very ripen GA-866, it’s cracked too, I must have missed them when I left for my vacation. It’s awful, soft and mushy.