I’m sure you can guess the answer is “It depends”… I’ve noticed that small seedlings take a while for me. Starting with 3-4’ tall, 1/2"+ caliper trees is best. But even they have a massive range, depending on the conditions where I plant them.
One of the biggest factors is getting them enough water. With little water, they survive, but don’t grow much. I have one rental where the ground tends to stay dry and after 4 years they went from 3-3.5’ to maybe 4’. I watered them a lot more last summer and got a bit of growth (maybe to 6’). I have another site which is well drained, but gets a lot of runoff and keeps it’s moisture (good soil too I guess). At that site, the trees went from 3’ to 10’+ by the end of the 2nd year. And they can put on 5+ feet of growth (at the expense of fruit) if I don’t stay on top of pruning them.
I think incorporating more organic material into the soil before planting is a good step, both to increase their access to water and to make the soil a bit lighter.
Is that counting your own seedlings? If so, Katy has way more, with 350 new ones
I grafted a bunch of new varieties this spring, including Baby Red. I also started a lot of seeds, though nowhere near Katy.
How do you prep and plant so many seeds- you pre-crack each one? During the winter, or do you plant in spring? How is the germination rate- I often plant 4 per pot, just to get one to come uo, though that is over the winter.
In the last few weeks I planted a few more in pots outside, and just saw the first pot up yesterday.
Thanks @castanea@SoCalGardenNut@BobVance. That makes me feel a bit better to know my trees are in the realm of normality. I will keep with same care schedule of watering and fertlization, mulching with wood chips, and keeping weeds/pests at bay.
I will monitor more the soil wetness on the Jujubes more closely this year to see if it is an issue. I suspect, in my case, soil dryness isn’t an issue since clay holds great amount of water and other trees (including those on drought-prone Citation) with more growth are planted in same conditions and given same care.
yeah, she is churning new cultivars like a costco operation
quite certain she’s already surpassed my overall seedling starts even though i started earlier.
while it can take several years(have a 6 yr old sihong seedling that has yet to blossom), there will always be relatively precocious and prodigious ones from the bunch, especially if it is a large bunch
Is seedling come from the seed? Do they come close to the variety you eat. The reason I ask is that I did buy some dried jujubes from a Korean store, they are huge and sweet growing organically in California, I don’t know the variety, but I wonder if I can plant the seeds and get a new variety for my yard.
yes, when we mention “seedlings” we mean baby juju trees which we planted from seeds.
not necessarily, but you have a higher chance of getting a new cultivar which has similar characteristics to its mother. What meant by mother is the cultivar which produced the fruit which we’ve eaten and then used the pits to extract seeds from to produce desirable cultivars
most definitely! It can be painstaking but is soooo rewarding once the seedlings prove themselves productive of fruits with desirable qualities.
also elicits a great deal of “home-grown pride” – some sort of green-minded vanity since jujubes can live for centuries.
Thanks @jujubemulberry. This is a farm in Helendale California, it’s has U Pick, most likely a lot of Korean Varieties. I have a lot of seeds in my compost bin, most seeds sprouted in my compost bin but i have never seen a jujube seedling, so do I need to break the hard shell to get these seeds to sprout. I suspect, they are not easy to sprout.
they are relatively easy to sprout, but the only caveat is there will be cultivars that are sterile(chico, li, r4t3 etc)
if producing viable seed, many are relatively precocious, often bearing fruits within 3 yrs of age, which is unheard of for a fruit species that can live a thousand years.
some will bear fruits at 6 months of age, not even needing an intervening period of dormancy!
forgot anwer your other question, for faster response time, cracking the shell to extract the seed/s is the way to go. You can also plant the pits, but may take much longer for the seeds to germinate as the pit takes a while to degrade/crack, and even if seeds germinate soon enough, the leaf-cotyledons get trapped within the half-shell of the pit(like a helmet)which can compromise the tiny apical bud between the cotyledons.
cracking the pits also gives you a fair idea of viability since you can assess the density and thickness of the seed.
if you have good hearing you could give dried jujubes or dried juju pits a shake near your ear. A distinct rattle indicates dense seed/s within
Things seem a bit slower coming out than I remember in the past. Today, I went around checking on my grafts (a good time to snap off competing growth) from home and one rental (I’ll try to do the others over the course of the next few days). Only considering grafts on established trees, made before May 1st, I’m 63 for 83 (76%). Either there is more to come, or this is one of the worst take rates I’ve had in years. Maybe I’m getting worse at grafting
I don’t think it is a matter of me grafting too early. The grafts I made in March had a higher take rate (81% March vs 73% for April).
Even more important than the take rate in some ways is the percent which have developed a new vertical shoot. Those are the grafts that will actually grow and also stand a better chance of surviving the winter. 45% of March and 27% of April grafts have such shoots. Though many of the April grafts (about 19%) are too early to say what type of growth they will have, so maybe they will get to about the same rate.
Here’s one of the new ones- Goat Tit, which I have growing over a garage roof at a rental. My finger is on the shoot that the original tree tried to send up that I previously snapped off to push growth into the graft.
I crack all my seeds. Different cultivars germinate at different percentages. The best is Honey Jar at 85-90%. The worst for me (about 30-40%) has been rootstock but that may just be what seeds I have had access to. SiHong is usually about 60-70%. Xu Zhou does good to germinate 50% of its seeds. I have seed trays of 50 per tray and I plant all of mine in the spring. Those that are planted in the fall and go through dormancy will not necessarily have an head start on those planted in the spring. Those planted in the winter will usually go through a quick dormancy and drop their leaves for a couple of weeks come spring. So I usually wait until spring and it’s getting warm and they do much better. I do have an advantage of earlier warm to hot weather. Last year I lost a lot of seeds planting too early and it came off cold and wet. After my seeds germinate and grow some roots I repot them into larger pots. Most go straight into gallon pots. I use Osmocote in my mix and feed them well. I’ve developed my set up to where I can handle a lot of seedlings but it’s time consuming.
This tray is all Honey Jar and all but 5 seeds germinated.
your contorted seedling seems to produce bigger fruits than burntridge’s contorted, and that is in itself a plus. Was curious if the seed was from jfae’s contorted or burntridge’s? Keep us posted on the eating quality
don’t give up on it yet, fruits normally get bigger and better as the young tree gets seasoned over a couple yrs.
conversely, there will be odd(but thankfully uncommon) ones which produce big, quality-eating fruit on first crop, but smaller fruits and/or subpar quality on subsequent crops.
while this may be due to weather conditions, and might just be transient, already come to the conclusion that v. glitzy will always produce smaller fruits as an older specimen than on its first crop. Thankfully the flavor is still great(having a waxy maple syrup quality to the fruits when fully ripe or about to turn into dates), but the fruits continue to be tiny, smaller than HJ
I’m surprised you didn’t post it…afterall, the name of the thread is “Mature viewers only…”
So it looks like you start one per pot. Maybe it was the fact that I was germinating them indoors over the winter that was the problem. Your jujubes look so neat and orderly. Mine are an adhoc mess:
These are most of the seedlings from last winter- there may be half a dozen more spread around, but I don’t think I have more than 15. Probably from 100+ seeds planted.
On the other hand, I planted 10 seeds just over 2 weeks ago in this one large pot. Already, 7 have come up.
My thought for these is to grow as many as possible in the pot. Maybe if I can size them up fast with fert and water they will be large enough to graft, either next spring or the spring after. At that point, I can snip them all off about an inch above the roots, and bark graft them on mature trees. I bet that would be the fastest way to evaluate a bunch of seedlings. Though I’ll need a continuing supply of mature trees to act as rootstocks. I guess i need to buys some more rentals
adhoc mess is my default setting too, which is why not too confident about the identity of some of our seedlings’ mothers, and that is not good since the fathers can’t possibly be determined without dna testing
I started out like that and it has developed. Growing them in bulk and keeping them labeled requires a bit of organization. I have tapped into somewhat of a market for them so I’ve kinda expanded the process.
I actually grafted some seedling scions onto a bearing tree this year. Some that had been growing in my orchard for 4 years and hadn’t fruited yet. So one of them actually is going to fruit by itself this year. Guess it will be interesting to try the fruit side by side.
We have had a coolish wet spring this year. I grafted lots of scion into a rootstock tree and some of the limbs were just the right size to graft very small bits of scion to. BUT…… I had really good growth this year so now I’m having to anchor these to larger limbs. This is the famous Goat Tit.
