It’s my summers I worry about. Much easier to concentrate water to the tree in a pot than in the ground when the temperatures are in the high 90’s. Would really like them to be spreading their roots though!
Can you plant them now and mulch the base well to retain the water. I like the idea of getting the roots to spread now.
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will keep them potted for now. We’re planning to plant them on virgin property(where jujus have never been planted before). Hopefully next year at the latest. While have benefited immensely from using spinosa rootstock(and we still do for our grafted giveaways), our innate snobbishness tempts us to establish an all-exclusive jujube utopia, where only named cultivars on their own roots will be welcome.
i guess am a ‘racist’ after all, lol
have at least one good-fruited cultivar on its own roots that has survived several winters(vegas booty) with no protection/tough darwinistic love, so hopefully will never have to revert to using thorny wild-type rootstock.
incidentally, ga-866 was supposedly grown from seed here in usa back in the 60’s, it most certainly makes it a relatively juvenile rootstock if it is true that clonal age is same age as original seedling. Chico,which is ga-866’s contemporary as usa-born and bred, would likewise be an excellent candidate considering the quality of fruits and heavy production. Have been trying to airlayer chico but so far unsucessful. I feel like i need to blame our oven-hot and oven-dry summers for our zero success, as Jfae is based in florida, and so is @Livinginawe, so there must be something about humidity that makes it easy to clone jujus 
if you’re inclined to ‘set them free’ directly on mother earth, observe how much roots you may have lost or damaged in the process of removing them from the pots. If you didn’t lose much roots, then they’d be ok. If you lost quite a bit, it would be good to remove some of the foliage by pruning the herbaceous fruiting stems(painful that might sound). Plants generally have a foliage surface area-to-root volume ratio which needs to be addressed if a considerable amount of roots are destroyed or damaged. The higher the ratio, the more likely the plant dehydrates, so best that you remove some foliage as prophylaxis. I don’t really have an exact ratio in mind and merely eyeball it, but if you’ve been trying to grow plants from raw cuttings, the most crucial thing to do is remove most if not all of the foliage(though it sounds cruel and seemingly counter-intuitive) and just let the plant develop new growth from its buds.
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I think I would be good with keeping most if not all of the roots at this point since these were potted up in early February and shouldn’t be too root bound at the moment. Might be a challenge keeping water to them — or not depending which year the one coming up resembles! 
. We’ve had everything from droughts to floods lately and sure wish we could do a successful rain dance whenever we wanted too! 
. The land they are going on has deeper soil above the clay so very tempted to set them out. I ended up with all the Vegas series except Baby. That graft didn’t go but I have a great one with upright growth of Booty and some fruiting stems growing well with Spicy and Candy. Thank you very much.
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Still so disappointed that Chico is seedless…
One of my favorite tastes and tree.
as long as your booty is ok, i am happy! The rest(which have unique qualities but a bit small with low pulp-to-pit ratios) are mere curio’s, but will gladly resend baby next year until you get a graft going.
will try to air layer low -growing chico branches again this year. Hopefully one of them roots out.
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Hi,
I recently purchased a So and a Lang tree, each about 5 feet high in pots, intending to plant in Yonkers NY at a house I own there. It is mostly clay soil so I would need to add amendment, thinking of peat moss and perhaps a little lime based on pH, have read adding sand is not advised for clay.
But I am concerned about a few issues and would appreciate feedback:
- Invasive roots: will the roots seek out pipes and foundation if there is enough water in the soil? From what I read seems a problem in drier climates, just not sure how far they will go if there is clay, which should retain moisture, around the trees.
- How close together can I plant these? The available space is relatively small. The seller, England Nursery in KY, said I could plant them very close together, such as 4 feet, and had said two are needed to get better pollination/production. I have read of spacing much farther apart elsewhere.
- Productivity: would these produce better in North Florida (Gainesville), where I also have a house and the soil is much more sandy and well drained? Zone 8B vs. 7A for Yonkers.
- Any suggestions for soil amendment would also be appreciated.
Thanks
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I’m no expert on jujube. But until one answers I’ll give my opinion. I think they’ll do much better in FL. In NY plant in full sun and the hottest place you’ve got. The reports I’ve read on here from your area are about lack of production esp in some shade.
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for query 1, that is a tough one to answer, but can wager that it is less likely for roots to damage pipes if the soil the trees are growing on is constantly moist, as there’s no physiologic need for roots to grow thick into tight spaces if the vast expanse of mother earth is moist throughout. Tropism only gets heightened where the desirable stimulus is isolated/situated, so in your case, the stimulus(that is moisture) is pretty much everywhere, so no need for roots to converge, network, and enlarge at plumbing systems. Of course there is always a risk, and not just with jujubes but with other trees, especially larger and fast-growing species. Jujus are not particularly large trees. They will grow relatively fast the first five years but inclined to slow down thereafter. The ~20 yr old jujube tree have been watching at UNLV has not even attained 10" caliper of main trunk thickness and not much taller than 15 feet. Here in hot and dry las vegas, we’re growing some ~10 yr old juju trees quite close to our house(tallest is ~ 15 ft tall, and all with calipers of less than 5 " at the thickest portion of main trunk) and will definitely update once we start having plumbing issues. Important to note that certain rootstock(often the wild-type spinosa’s used by many nurseries) can sucker prodigiously, sometimes more than 20 feet away from main trunk, and this can be a problem if you let each sucker grow into trees. Consistent decapitation of suckers will inhibit the suckers’ buttress roots from thickening. Btw, the tendency to sucker varies, as some nurseries use random seed, so there’s no way of predicting if the rootstock you’ll be getting will be invasive. *probably good to buy cultivars on their own roots, which has been a recent craze, as posted at @mamuang 's thread. HJ would be a good candidate due to its small-ish growth and skinny trunks, so even if suckers grow into trees, the roots beneath shouldn’t get too thick to lift the concrete slab off of one’s driveway. Besides, an hj on its own roots suckering would be considered by many here as extremely desirable instead of a pest!
have to mention that @BobVance also has a relatively old So that seems to be dwarfish(just recently determined that there’s at least two cultivars of So being sold by nurseries).
for query 2, we plant them at ~3 feet apart here in vegas, but clearly a different story in new york where you’d want your trees’ branches to be getting maximum exposure to sunlight as @fruitnut mentioned.
for query 3, also agree with @fruitnut that gainesville will likely be more conducive to production, although also have to say that @mamuang and @bobvance(northeast usa), @tonyOmahaz5(nebraska) and even @Chills in michigan have gotten theirs to fruit, and some have posted photos of incredible production-- for their respective locations.
and speaking of gainesville and jujus on own roots, would be wrong for me not to volun-tell @Livinginawe to give you tips, since he lives there, and has been doing amazing stuff with his juju trees.
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That is a tough call…‘Li’, ‘Lang’, ‘Silverhill’, ‘Ant Admire’, ‘Sugar Cane’ (and I have high hopes for ‘Chico’, ‘Autumn Beauty’, and the “Vegas series”) have been producing well, but ‘GA-866’ and ‘Sihong’ (so far) are very meager here in North Florida. So it may be that certain cultivars will produce better in New York, while others may do better in Florida.
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even here, sihong is not over-the-top productive as other jujus. Noticed that jujus that have meaty/dense flesh(sihong/sherwood/priest) seem to be not as productive as the other cultivars with less pulp density.
i hope your v. booty will have decent production, as it seems to be the most productive of the dense-pulped jujus
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Mi SiHong is covered in fruitlets. But it was at one time last year and almost all of them dropped. I can always hope!
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young sihong grafts/trees unfortunately aren’t as precocious as hj’s. Older grafts should get more productive though. Just don’t expect it to be as fruitful as li and hj.
sihong grafts tend to retain juvenile traits as well(perhaps one of the reasons for the long gestation period), as grafts take so much longer to get barky. Often retaining its smooth complexion even at >2" caliper size. Most other cultivars develop sharp roughshod bark at ~1" caliper
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thanks to @castanea for this “SweetTart” sucker(on its own roots, that is 
)
juju aficionados seem to be just like jujube trees-- they seem to enjoy giving-- and giving more than they take 
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Nice! That just makes me feel good to see it making it.
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why couldn’t i click “like” more than once?
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The Aunt Adm. rootstock graft and the Chico graft could not handle the -20F this past Winter and died. I was crushed but my Honey Jar jujubes lifted my spirit up.
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sorry to hear that @tonyOmahaz5, and just glad that hj’s resilience means you have at least one cultivar that will overwinter with little dieback even after frigid conditions
below are three jujus(hj, shanxi li, and ga-866 supposedly on their own roots from jfae) that are a bit uplifting, having survived getting baked inside the UPS truck, and a winter d that seemed to have succumbed to the traumatic florida-to-vegas ground shipment.
hoping the winter d merely underwent a self-induced-autumn as most jujus do when deprived of moisture. The stems still have some degree of turgidity, and not wrinkly(at least not yet)so there;s a chance may still be alive and that it will just leaf out from dormant nodes.
below is the solo photo of the moribund winter d. The foliage looks green but are all of a crispy texture that crumbles or falls off when touched… 
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Hi,
My sincere thanks to those who replied.
At this point I will plant these in NY, in the best sun on the lot and hope for the best.
However your comments and other information on this website lean me toward getting two more jujubes to plant in Gainesville. Though I think these are good specimens of So and Lang, and are growing well in their pots right now, it seems that there are better varieties and the self-rooted approach also seems interesting.
Thanks again!
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