Thanks for that, Raf. I am going to try one in a day or two. Thanks for all your help, expertise, and especially the samples last year. I will likely be adding more jujubes in the future!
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I am so grateful for getting so much informations from you and will definity choose one as your suggestion. I was very impressed by the taste of date from li when I recently visited my friends in LA. I understand that our here doesn’t have that much hot and sunny days.Do you have li tree? how does the fruit taste ?
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li is a dr jekyll and mr hyde. It is a actually one of the best-tasting jujus, but if fruits mature in subprime conditions(extremely hot summers), it may also be the worst-tasting cultivar.
li often exceeds 30 brix(even in sub-par condition) and a hint of tart which makes it interesting.
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I actually had a few Li sent from everybody’s favorite Jujube friend, confidant and expert Raf aka @jujubemulberry and I really liked the Li he sent me. Very much so. I actually have a Li (purchased this spring) no fruit this first year and a Honey Jar with 5 fruits about to ripen. I am really curios how the Li will turn out in comparison to the ones Raf sent me. Hope it tastes as well as the Sun baked Vegas ones.
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those were actually sub-par li’s having been ripened at several consecutive days of >110F, @zazlev so you;d definitely like it more if growing in your area. Li’s are way more juicy when borne and ripened in cooler weather
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Many thanks to thecityman and jujubemulberry! I will put Li and Honey Jar in my shopping cart for sure. Hopefully they could be pollenizer for each other.
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Sorry, Many thanks to Zazlev and Jujubemulberry
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you’re welcome, and good luck!
Darn, I thought I was getting credit for something I didn’t do! haha. But they did steer you right.
@zazlev let us know how your 5 taste. You’d be shocked at how many HJ jujubes I ended up getting. I’d say around 20 and they were (and still are, I have about 5 left) very very good. In fact, I’m warming up to jujubes more and more.
@jujubemulberry I ended up with about 20 HJ and a whopping 2 SC. But I must say, I liked my SC quite a bit better. I don’t remember having that reaction when you sent me some samples (thanks again) My 2 have about equal sweetness. The biggest difference, and it is one I really like, is that my SC were just a lot juicier. MY HJ were good and they werent mealy or anything, but they were just more dry, less moisture in the fruit. Is that generally the case or just a fluke with my trees this year? Thanks
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sc and hj are typically both juicy, even at the height of our summers, but hj is so much better quality here than sc, hence your tepid reaction to the sc’s have sent you. Our hot summers are clearly doing something bad to sc’s which make them undesirable(bitter off-taste).
likely just an isolated glitch that your hj’s aren’t juicy, being a young tree. Your trees should start producing so much more next year, and it is then, or perhaps a year after, when you’d be able to get a fair assessment of cultivar quality. Jujus are generally precocious, but more often than not, the quality of fruits on first few years hardly approximate the quality of fruits borne on an established tree of same cultivar.
congrats nonetheless, and may your trees bear exponentially with time 
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Great to hear you are warming up to them Kevin and hopefully that (mystery jujube I gave you *we think Sherwood) does well for you :). So many positives to Jujubes—I like the unique tastes and I most like the “no work” “no spraying required” attributes of Jujubes best.
I will let you know how my 5 taste. They are still not brown. Must be getting close its almost October for goodness sake.
None of my Honey Jar are ripe yet either. Sugar Cane and So just started getting some brown and I’ve been picking 2-4 each day for the last 3 days.
A week or two ago, there were a few So, but they weren’t any good. Each year, the first few seem to be dry and not all that sweet. In past years, I though it was some rain which juiced them up. Not so. This year, there was plenty of rain when the first 5-8 fruits were ripening and they were still dry (on the inside…). Now, when the main crop is ripening they are crisp and sweet again. And the first few Sugar Cane are even crisper and juicier.
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yeah, there always seems to be some inscrutable nuances occurring on a yearly basis. Here, it seems that hot temps negatively impact the quality of fruits more than anything else. It all boils down to having one’s trees produce as much as they can, and for protracted periods, increasing the likelihood of one catching a bunch of fruits in their prime. Ultimately.
Good thing about jujus is that subprime fruits may still be ‘repurposed’ with good results-- as dried dates.
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I thought that it was random dry weather causing the first few fruit to be dry. But, now it is at least 3 years in a row and this time it wasn’t dry weather. But the first fruit was still dry. Something else must make the first ones bad. Maybe it is fruit where there is something wrong that the tree rushes to completion.
Actually the first few Chico’s that I had this year were not good. I blamed it on the drought and picking them too early. I was fearful that they all would taste like that but no, the others were delicious!
Katy
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Tony,
That may depend on location and weather. You have very hot summer, right?
We have had so much rain. Not much sun these past several days. In fact, I have not seen the sun since Fri. Cloudy from Fri and now is raining since this morning until tomorrow.
I am waiting for HJ to ripen. They are still very green. No sun does not help the case, either.
For us here, I am still not sure if HJ would beat out SC.
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How well do Jujubes do with 5 - 6 hours of sun? I want to plant a Li and honey jar after reading this thread.
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Unless you are in a very sunny spot like Vegas or Phoenix I think the answer is they do very badly. I have had no luck with jujubes and I think the lack of sun has been my biggest problem.
Scott,
Have you harvested any this year?