Actually I have that same problem but ironically I grow juju seedlings because they CAN be precocious. 
. I have >30 seedlings this year that are fruiting and some of them it’s their third year to fruit. So it’s exciting to see what they produce. Some of the ones producing are 2-3 years old. Who knows…… ???
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It took 10 years for my Sherwood tree to produce fruit and the quality continued to improve for years after that.
I once had 4 Shanxi Li grafted trees. It took at least 6-7 years for the fruit to reach good quality.
Many grafted jujube trees do not produce quality fruit for at least 5 years. The reason might be that the mature wood drastically overproduces flowers and sets too much fruit while the leaves are not adequate and the root systems are not developed well enough to provide full nutrition to the trees.
Many seedlings and many grafted trees (like Black Sea) produce quality fruit at a young age, but many do not.
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Wow- I thought that things were a lot quicker for you in TX with the longer growing season. I guess I didn’t do too badly to get fruit from the BV1 seedling (crisp, mid/lg size, early season) for the first time in 2022, after planting it in October 2016. One of its siblings had fruit the year before, but it was small and low quality.
I’m thinking about dedicating some in-ground space to seedlings. Maybe putting them fairly close together, for ease of maintenance.
I grafted OB into a few new locations in the hopes of getting some crisper fruit. So far all 5 grafts in 2 locations have taken, with some putting on a lot of growth.
Here’s one graft which is sending up 2 shoots, one from each bud on the graft, which was made on 3/26.
Some of my grafts, even from April, seem to just be waking up now. Here’s one from 4/20, with just the smallest wakening bud.
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This pic may not seem like anything out of the ordinary, but it has a bit of a strange past. I grafted it in late March, then sometime in late April or early May, the tape gave way, letting the graft open up (I wish I had a pic, but can’t find one). I pretty much wrote it off when I saw it, as it had been open for some time.
Fast forward another month or so and when I was passing by the graft (after mowing at the rental), I wrapped new tape on it, closing it up again just to see if anything would happen. I just used tape to reclose it- no parafilm on top like usual. This was on June 2nd, after the graft had been exposed to the elements for 1 to 1.5 months.
A week after wrapping it up again, there is a green bud forming on the wood. Jujube have to be one of the most forgiving trees to graft. Previously, I have re-grafted the wood in that situation and had it take in late June, but this is the first time I’ve just re-closed a graft without making any cuts on the wood or the scion and had it work.
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Awesome!
I recently had the exact opposite experience. I had a graft that I had perfectly matched to stock. Wood and stock were in good shape. I kept the graft in shade about 22 hours a day and in morning sunlight for two hours. In less than 3 weeks the wood had totally dried out. Completely dead. Most grafts done at the same time are showing some new growth. The others look fine. Somehow this one dried out.
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I went ahead and planted a lot of the potted seedlings I had hanging around.
I used an area that I reclaimed from raised bed, as shown in the 2nd pic in this post.
I was able to squeeze 20 seedlings into a 18’x3’ area, so they obviously can’t get too big. I have seen rabbits eat low growth on jujubes, so I put a fence around the area. And while I’ve been working on it, I haven’t been able to get rid of the rabbits.
Some of the seedlings were from as recently as this past winter (8 of the 20). Others were from -2-3 years ago and had a decent amount of roots. This one from 2020.
Wow- I wonder if enough of my graft was touching that it kept the moisture in the scion. Though I can’t explain why yours would dry out so quickly. I would think only 3 hours of sun would buy you some more time. Did you have parafilm covering the whole scion (other than the part touching the host tree)? Maybe the wood could have been a bit iffy to start with.
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your juju nursery looks so promising 
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The wood must have been iffy, but there was no sign that it was. I have had jujube grafts in full sun in California that were not wrapped and some took over a month to bud out, and they never dried out.
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It looks like I have a tiny Autumn Beauty here. This is the tree or small stick I bought from OGW, I did give it lots of my compost.
Empress Gee has a few tiny fruitlets
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Yes, the potted trees from OGW are often like that. I’m not sure if their bare roots are bigger, as I haven’t gotten any from them. But, I’ve gotten at least 8 of their one gal potted jujubes. I measured several at 3/16" caliper and under 2’ tall. IMO, calipers of 3/4" inch are great, 5/8" is good, and 3/8" is OK, so OGW is about half of OK. I wouldn’t have gotten the last 3 from them, but I wanted the varieties, which weren’t offered anywhere else. Very expensive scionwood…
I’m now in the process of revisiting the failed grafts and seeing if I can do anything about it.
One that I was particularly distressed to see was a potential early sport of Sugar Cane. I had one small branch on a Sugar Cane with fruit ripe 2+ weeks before the rest of my Sugar Cane. And it was particularly noteworthy, as Sugar Cane was the first variety to ripen. So, if I can make more of it, I can lengthen the overall season with excellent quality fruit.
Fruit from the single branch (the green ones were from other nearby branches):
10 days later and none of the other sugar cane (on the same tree or 3+ others) have fully turned dark:
It was a fairly small branch and I wasn’t sure how far down it is a sport, so I didn’t want to cut too much. For that matter, I’m not even sure that it is a sport- maybe something interesting happened from a physical standpoint (broken branch at the right time caused earlier fruit-set, etc). So, of course, the one graft of it failed to take…
The graft had 3 closely spaced buds, so I cut off the top 2 and grafted them on new growth on a nearby branch. We’ll see if it works.
A couple days ago, I smelled the first jujube flowers of the year (grape-soda aroma). They were on a So multi-graft (with Xu Zhou and Dong) at a rental.
It’s the tree on the left. The one on the right is a IKKJ persimmon, which has it’s own flowers/fruit.
OK- I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad that my seedlings often take forever.
@k8tpayaso , at what point do you start fertilizing them? I worry that before a certain age/size it would just damage the roots.
For instance, I’m guessing that the one on the middle-left is probably too small.
But, maybe some of the ones below (planted 33 days ago) could be ready.
Since I started numbering the pots (above grey pot from 5/14 is #1), I’ve gotten up to #22, with ~108 seeds planted. I was happy to plant a bunch of seedlings, so I wouldn’t need to take care of the pots. Then I planted more seeds 2 days later in some of the same pots… 
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vegas honey root cutting poached from mother tree earlier this yr, already demonstrating some degree of precocity(seen here as a lone flower bud) despite tiny root cutting caliper and equally tiny pot it is growin on.
and yeah, due to non-durable labels/markers have foolshly used in the past, finally adopted what some gf members have been using as tag of choice: engraved tin can /aluminum sheets. Plopped the labels in the pots as there is nothing to tie them to when starting root cuttings.
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All the jujube grafts have some flowers, maybe I will get to taste some new fruit this year. Except is SiHong, it puts out long cane but no flowers.
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@BobVance I plant my seeds in my potting mix with added Osmocote+. I add for the seed planting 6 full scoops of Osmocote+ to a 3 cu/ft bag of my landscape mix to which I’ve already added a gallon of perlite. When I transplant the 1-4” tall seedlings I transplant them into a mix with 8 scoops of Osmocote+. Different varieties will respond differently. Wild rootstock and Xu Zhou will burn at up to 10-15% loss. Honey Jar and SiHong never have a problem. My aim is to push them for fast growth and because I have so many I can afford to push them and lose a few. They respond well to feeding in contrast to what many of us used to think. But just like other seedlings some of them are not going to make it and some are not going to grow well whatever you do. I used to think Honey Jar seedlings were frail….they are not and they grow very fast but they need feeding to do that. Xu Zhou I think are the fastest growers once the weaklings are weeded out. They love water and fertilizer.
I have plans to pot up my last seedlings tomorrow morning before the heat makes me a weakling. I have 60 more HJ waiting. Total number of all transplanted is somewhere close to 400…. 392 at one count. Here are some photos
HJ seedlings planted on Memorial Day
Far pots are HJ potted up on Memorial Day and the close pots were done one week later.
A few more shots.
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I already knew that this was the motto for adult jujubes (“sun” as well), so it is good to know that this applies to the babies as well. I’ll get on fertilizing them.
You are up-potting stuff that you planted on Memorial Day? Or are those just new seedlings which will be in their gallon pots for a while?
That’s better. I’m much happier with a shoot than just flowering laterals. It greatly increases the chances of the graft surviving the next winter. And if there is a vigorous shoot, there is still a chance for fruitset later in the season.
I had two more grafts I wanted to see if I could save. On very close examination, one was showing a tiny green bud, so I left it alone.
The other graft was still dormant, so I opened it up. The graft fell apart easily, so it doesn’t look like it callused.
But, when I cut off a layer, there was green underneath (this pic is from when it was only part-way cut)
I cut ~6 inches under the current graft and was considering re-grafting it there. But, it looks like some of the cambium (near bottom in pic) is dead, so this wasn’t the best branch to graft to.
Instead, I chose a vigorous new shoot and cut it off near the base. The graft got made part-way into the new green tissue and part in the old lignified tissue.
This new graft is pointed 90 degrees up from a horizontal branch, on the left in the below pic. I nipped off the top of the new growth along the branch to push the energy into the graft.
And yes, as you might be able to tell from the sky, this pic was taken a few minutes before the rain rolled in.
I’ll end with a general pic of the jujube in the front yard of a rental. The 3 Jujube on the right (and the persimmon) were planted in spring 2019. The small one on the left was planted at the end of August, 2020 (4+ growing seasons of growth vs 2+). All of these trees have at least 4-5 varieties grafted on and are very productive. Particular the Honey Jar and the So on the right, which produced a combined 60 lbs of fruit last year.
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Yes. Planted seed in mid April.
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Thanks @BobVance, last year I read your advice on how to prune jujube, I did cut back my GA-866 and this year I grew.
I didn’t trim HJ, but moved it to a very sunny location, it also grew.
But after this year flowering/fruiting,I need to move one frankenjujube to a bigger pot, it’s in much smaller container, maybe it needs to grow bigger.
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Done for this year. They are all growing well so far. That is except one and I’m waiting to see if it comes back out. All its leaves were stripped by something. Have any of y’all noticed that occasionally a tree will get eaten on but none of the other trees? It seems like sometimes some bug will find a tree that tastes good to them….but none of the others taste good.
Eaten!!!
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Probably pill bugs, I found one of my fig leaves in the ground.
i guess misery loves company-- as leaf cutter bees and grasshoppers do the same exact thing around here. Thankfully the damages haven’t been lethal, and typically a one-time thing.
yes, pill bugs do eat juju leaves, especially seedlings. Glad they are not arboreal in nature and will only eat seedlings or fallen foliage
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