Jujubes- Our New Adventure

@scottfsmith Thanks. Have you tried girdling them?

I’m helping a friend plan a public fruit garden along a future hiker/biker trail here and from something I read (maybe Edible Landscaping) jujubes sounded bulletproof, a slam dunk. Now it appears they are anything but a sure thing at least in Md. Scott your report on easy fruit for Baltimore came in handy-- thanks.

I tried girdling other trees but not jujubes. The giberrelin should be better than girdling from what I hear…

1 Like

Just want to thank you for your generosity. Both grafts took.

When does China Yellow ripen for you, please?

Please understand that I have been thinking about this for a long time on whether I should mention my personal experience as a warning, because I have no concrete proof on what the cause was, but I really don’t want it to happen to anyone else.
As mentioned in the comment on “Jujube in zone 5, Feb 6th, 2019” I was sick after repeatedly eating jujubes from a farmer market for a while. What I didn’t mention was my hair was suddenly falling out a lot. It was so scary because it never happened that bad before. However, I knew it would be a kind of hormone disorder even though I didn’t know why. After the hair fell out for a week I stopped eating them, and the hair stopped falling a few days later. My hair is back to normal now but I don’t think I will eat jujubes from the market again. We have five fruiting jujube trees in containers now because that is one of my husband’s favorite fruits.
I know everyone reacts differently to chemicals, we always jokingly say snake venom is all natural, so maybe it was just me having problem with it. That is why I don’t want to name the farm the jujubes came from.

2 Likes

Gibberellic acid Is used all the time with citrus. That is how they get those seedless clementines. Mine are chock full of seeds.

1 Like

I don’t use anything but my navel orange, satsuma, yosemite gold, kishu mandarin are all seedless, and I have had them for many years. Dancy and honey mandarin have seeds but not many. The ones I bought the last two years are seedless, but I don’t count those at least for a few more years, because I am not sure what they did at the nursery.

My sisters and I stopped buying clementines more than five years ago because they are not sweet as before. When they are in season I would only buy the grapefruits from Cal Poly Pomona farm store, and no they don’t sell jujube fruits, just the Li and Lang trees. The Oro Blanco type is seedless but the Frua is full of seeds. They are very sweet if I let them ripen on the counter. They are grown on campus.

China Yellow is mid-late season. I don’t have the exact dates but it’s probably late September to early October.

1 Like

“Longevity” fruit.

7 Likes

Updated photo of Baby Red. These fascinate me. Looks like they are going to be an early season fruit.

17 Likes

now that’s something new! An absolute novelty, at least to us here in usa.

autumn b’s reddish fruitlets typically already goes back to green when it reaches peanut size. What you have even turned a deeper red/purple, so quite curious if will ripen with that color or if it will turn to the usual tan-brown coloration of practically all other jujus when fully ripe

2 Likes

My thought too. Will the color change?

2 Likes

your most intriguing juju cultivar is such-- that it will give me sleepless nights-- waiting for you to report back on the verdict !

3 Likes

Very orenmental! Definitely a must have!!!

2 Likes

That is a beautiful sight! This is an exciting new cultivar. I can’t wait to hear a description of the flavor profile.

…a possible downside would be that it would stand out earlier than every other cultivar, visually to birds and other critters.

1 Like

That’s what I’m wondering. I can walk by most of my jujubes without paying any particular attention to them, but this one really stands out. It draws my attention every time I see it.

1 Like

I read somewhere that netting the tree when flowering will prevent bees from pollinating and seeding the fruits but I never try it. My sister navel orange tree has two type of fruits randomly since there are a lot of citrus trees in the neighborhood. Some years they are very good, and some years they are so weird and bad.
I don’t plant clementines because there are conflict information on the trees, and I am not sure what I would be buying or planting.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/humbioresearch/cgi-bin/wordpress/?p=71
https://citrusvariety.ucr.edu/citrus/algerian.html

This is fantastic. New jujube cultivars from you and @jujubemulberry look great. I wish it weren’t such a big unkown as to how they’ll perform in other areas. I’m still considering trialing all of the Dr Yao NMSU introductions in SW Missouri - maybe in the next year or two.

5 Likes

hopefully not an unknown for long, as the good members here from various zones continue to share respective findings.
we’ll hopefully solve the sometimes-inscrutable riddle that is jujubes! :slight_smile:

1 Like

Nice! I’m a big fan of ‘Tigertooth’ and ‘Tsao’ fruits. They make very nice dried fruits.

2 Likes

they don’t look at their prime, at least from what i can see. Did you just plant that tree this year, and was it just delivered from out of state?
reason i ask is because our mature hj trees’ fruits are still far behind in reaching their prime, and can safely presume that juju trees here in las vegas should ripen sooner(or not much later) than fruits on trees in WA.

injury to fruits may also result in premature ‘ripening’, wherein fruits turn color/texture due to trauma.

but if none of the above, it is also possible for jujus to bear duds as younger trees due to various factors(unfavorable root-to-stem ratio, among other things that compromise recently planted trees)

1 Like