What variety was it?
The tree did not have enough water. Jujubes need a lot of water to produce crisp fruit. Without enough water the fruit will still mature, more or less, but will not be crisp and will not reach peak sweetness.
With all the rain we have had this year my fruit is better than it has ever been.
It is a Shanxi li. 3rd year in ground. We had 3x normal rain this year. If thst isnāt enough, I might as well pull them, as this was one of our rainier years!
Honey Jar is the one you need. Crunchy, juicy, sweet, and productive. A must have for jujube.
I do have a Honey Jar, but it hasnāt produced, yet. hopeful for next year! I got them because everything i read said they were drought hardy ā iāve got all kinds of peach - plum hybrids producing ok on citation, pears, apples (on m111) with no supplemental irrigation. Was hoping they would out perform those⦠Could be nutrition as well, because i havenāt fertilized them ā just mulchā¦
Also the fruit from young trees is not always primeā¦ā¦or anywhere close. I havenāt tasted Shanxi Li yet. I have fruit this year but not ripe yet. Li may be similar and Li is very variable from fruit to fruit to year to year. Donāt base it on your first fruit. Iāve had first fruit from trees that I didnāt like and following year was better and third year even better. Sometimes though jujus can be dry and tasteless. Depends on a lot of things.
Small jujube trees often do not have a root system big enough to pull up enough water for a fruit crop. It doesnāt matter how much it rains.
Do not judge any jujube tree before it is at least 6-8 years old.
All jujube trees are drought hardy. That is a completely separate issue as to how much water the tree needs to mature fruit properly. Small trees that produce fruit, especially large crops of fruit, often produce sub-par fruit, in part because the tree canāt pull up enough water.
My Honey Jar in California rarely produced fruit that matured properly because it produced a heavy crop and couldnāt pull up enough water in high heat to mature the fruit. Itās possible that when the tree was larger it might have gotten past that problem.
When jujube trees are older, they will outproduce any fruit tree you can think of. Just donāt expect them to do it while they are babies. Jujube trees can live to more than 1000 years old. They donāt die young like many modern fruit trees.
basing on your screen name, i presume youāre in San antonio area? While iād expect jujus to be precocious and productive(especially honey jar) in your locale, there are folks who seem to have trouble getting their jujus to be substantially productive for yet undetermined reasons(even in southern california!)
are your trees grown in part shade? Is your soil too wet/waterlogged? From what gathered from your posts, those are the two scenarios could think of which may affect productivity
i should add, there arenāt any studies re: juju cultivar performance on various rootstock, and i can surmise your rootstock is just as randomly sourced as mineāand everybody elseās⦠It may just be the rootstock that might be the culprit.
re: pithy/styrofoam textured juju fruits, they do occur, usually on first crop of summer(here in hot southwest), but fruits borne later in the year will be more juicy.
speaking of studies on jujubes, there is hardly any here in america, and have to admit that virtually everything have been posting here are based on my own informal studies and independent analysesā¦
anyway, hope you give your trees a couple more yrs to evaluate and pls keep everbody here posted
It looks like heās doing the same thing that many new jujube (and persimmon) growers do - expecting young grafted trees that have recently been planted to be massive producers of perfect fruit. While some jujube trees absolutely will do that, most donāt, and no one should be expecting it.
I have all of my jujube trees in container. This year, Li had the biggest fruit, last year the fruit was tinier for some reason. I donāt recall fertilizing them at all.
I need to move HoneyJar to somewhere with more sun. I have GA-866, this is a variety that was sold in my local farmers market, and Shanxi Li, both first year, so no fruit yet.
Debating whether to get Empress Gee.
Hereās an issue that has recently come to light -
The OGW description of Black Sea fruit does not match Black Sea fruit I have grown.
OGW describes Black Sea fruit as:
āBlack Sea Jujube ⢠is a popular selection from the Nikita Botanic Garden in Yalta, Ukraine, Black Sea ⢠bears abundant crops of long, pointed fruitā
I bought Black Sea, Massandra and Coco the first year they were available from OGW. I liked BS so much that I bought 3 more plants over the next few years. All had the same fruit. The fruit was never long nor was it pointed.
Below is what my mature Black Sea fruit looked like:
Does anyone have any idea what might be going on?
Iām curious what youāre basing this on, or are you just making a general point? And as for the rest of the seedlings, any guess as to whether theyād eventually bear palatable fruit? Seems like several people are growing sour or wild types, which I assume are worth having given no space constaints.
I have already eaten all of mine but they were a bit more pointed than yours. Mine came from scion sent to me from one of the forum members here.
Well, maybe notā¦ā¦
I wouldnāt say mine are ālongā, but they are pointed. It isnāt visible in every picture, but I found one which shows off their points.
Itās hard to say for sure, but I think I see points on at least 2 if not all 3 of those fruit.
My Black Sea (at least the one which has fruited) was from OGW in October 2015. I havenāt had great luck with Black Sea, though some of it could be from putting it in tough situations. Of the 4 I got, 2 died at rentals and 1 got transplanted back into a pot (this one is from Burnt Ridge). Only the one from 2015 has been putting on good growth and sizing up.
On to other jujube picsā¦
The remnants of Ida revealed the need for stakes on several jujubes. Here are 3 of the worstā¦
I used to use 10.5ā 17 gauge (1 3/8") galvanized chain link top rail as posts. But, theyāve gone from $11 to $19-21 each, so Iām thinking about using galvanized conduit instead (1/2" is only $7 each)
Shanxi Li seems to have the heaviest set ever this year, even as other cultvars are lighter than usual. Maybe the more mature age (now 6 years old) is taking priority over other factors.
Xu Zhou has had more black, prematurely dried fruit. I looked around and found one such fruit on the largest So tree. None of the others seem to exhibit this behavior, at least to this frequency.
I tried several of the fruit and at least one was mildly sweet. Still not worth eating.
My Black Sea fruits look just like yours on small trees or on trees that lack vigor. They grow out of that shape when the trees are more vigorous. Below are fruits from the same tree that produced the large fruits above, but it is in decline because itās been potted too long.
Mutated branch?