As my family waits with baited breath for our Red Baron peaches to ripen, we've moved on to harvesting jujubes. Outside of the cactus pear, the jujube remains one of the easiest fruit trees to grow here in Arizona. It's impervious to the 115 degree days in full blasted sun and thrives in the poor alkaline soil, putting on 3-5 feet of growth easily per year, with fruit often appearing on newly planted bare root trees. They are a favorite of everyone's favorite trash bird, the house finch, but the trees produce so heavily that I don't bother netting.

I currently have So (aka "contorted"), regular/standard Li, Sugarcane, and Sherwood growing on my property.

The Li and Sherwood trees are grafted onto Indian jujube stock from a local grower (Reid Rodger, RSI Growers of Glendale); the other two were purchased through Dave Wilson on their own rootstock. I also have a Li from Dave Wilson on its own rootstock and it's not as precocious as the grafted Li.

Many of us have relied on the picture from Bass (who runs the Trees of Joy website in Pennsylvania) to have an idea as to how big the various jujube cultivars get.

{{gwi:123289}}

I figured I would do the same, as I have yet to see a picture of So, Li, Sugarcane, and Sherwood next to each other. So here goes.

{{gwi:123290}}

{{gwi:123291}}

Taste wise, we prefer Sugarcane over the other four varieties. So tastes similar to Sugarcane, just not as incredibly sweet. Sherwood tastes similar to Li, just smaller. So in order -- Sugarcane >> So > Li=Sherwood. In addition, the later harvest in September/early October tends to taste better than the August harvest in my opinion.

Next year, I plan on grafting some Shanxi Li and Ant Admire to my trees. My Honey Jar grafts held up this year, but no fruit.

This post was edited by AJBB on Sun, Aug 4, 13 at 19:37