I got a good sized GA866 from Trees of Antiquity in 2016 and planted it in a full sun location next to my driveway. Now, 7 years later and it has still never produced a single fruit. I’ve gotten fruit for several years off of a graft on it (Dae Sol Jo), so it isn’t the tree being weak or non-productive, just the cultivar. I’m fine keeping it almost indefinitely out of curiosity if it will ever produce. And because I have enough productive jujubes that I won’t be hurt by its non-productivity. But, if it was one of 2 trees, I’d want something like Honey Jar, Sugar Cane, or So.
I should mention that Shanxi Li has taken a while to produce decent fruit (I planted 2 in 2016 (also from ToA) and last year was the first year I got more than a few fruit off either tree). In several years, it has dropped a lot of unripe fruit half-way through the summer, so don’t get too excited about the early fruit set (as I have with mine…).
I went around and checked grafts at home (I missed a few trees- I can update tomorrow) and at a couple rentals. I only counted established, in-ground (no pots) hosts.
| Location |
Fail |
Decidous only |
Shoot |
%Fail |
%Shoot |
| Home |
5 |
19 |
16 |
12.5% |
45.6% |
| …Home Self Source |
0 |
10 |
11 |
0.0% |
52.4% |
| …Home GF |
1 |
4 |
3 |
12.5% |
42.1% |
| …Home Bought |
4 |
5 |
2 |
36.4% |
27.2% |
| 2 Rentals |
1 |
9 |
9 |
5.3% |
49.9% |
| Total |
6 |
28 |
25 |
10.2% |
47.1% |
While 90% are alive, only 47% have a vertical shoot, with the rest just having the deciduous fruiting branches.
One other trend I noticed is that the source of the scionwood seemed to impact both failure and shoot generation. Stuff I cut myself was best, likely because it didn’t need to go through the mail. Stuff from other Growing Fruit members was almost as good. But the wood I paid for had much higher failure rates (0% vs 12% vs 36%) and lower shoot rates (52% vs 42% vs 27%). Now, the Elk Grove hurt the commercial stats, as it added 2 failures, but even excluding that the failure rate was almost 2X that of GF sent wood.
The wood from Castanea and Tippy was very good. Tippy’s deserves special note, as it was re-gifted (Heitian Jade), so it went through the mail twice and still managed 3 shoots in 3 tries.
Another trend- medium-thin and and smaller (thin, very thin, tiny, etc) wood was much less likely to have a vertical shoot vs Medium-Lg and Large wood (2/13 = 15% vs 6/13 = 46% vs 10/19 = 53%). I’m guessing that the thinner wood was from laterals, while the thicker wood was from primary shoots. So while the failure rate was very low for all 3 (no more than 8%), the thicker wood is more likely to generate a shoot which has a better chance to survive the winter.
Edit:
At another rental (the one where I got the only take for Elk Grove), I was 10/10 on grafts. But anything smaller than medium was all deciduous growth only (5/5) and 4 of the 5 thicker scions are sending up vertical shoots.
. I should not have done the acid spray on open flowers with temp in the 90 for 3 days in a row. It was a stupid move on my part. The impact on the trees was that the acid burn wiped out 95% of the blooming flowers from all my jujbe trees esp. the big 3, HJ, SC and Shanxi Li.
