Jujube

Site and soil

Jujube wants full sun and heat and tolerates almost anything else. It grows in sand, clay, rocky ground and alkaline soil across a pH from about 5.5 to 8.0, and it is one of the most drought-tolerant fruit trees you can plant. The one site to avoid is a wet one; standing water in the root zone is the only soil condition it does not forgive. Water needs are low once established.

It leafs out late, often in May, which is a feature: the flowers open after the last frost, so jujube sets a crop in years when peaches and plums are frozen out. Give it the hottest spot you have, because fruit sweetness depends on summer heat.

Spacing

Mature trees run 15 to 30 ft tall and 10 to 20 ft wide, upright and somewhat narrow, with a slightly weeping habit. Set them 15 to 20 ft apart. Keep pollination partners within about 50 ft.

Jujube suckers from the roots, sometimes several feet from the trunk, and the suckers from a grafted tree are the thorny rootstock, not the variety. Mow them or cut them at ground level. Plant it where a few suckers in the grass will not bother you.

Planting

Plant in spring. Jujube is slow to leaf out, so do not assume a tree is dead when it is bare in April.

• Dig the hole as deep as the root system and twice as wide.
• Set grafted trees with the graft union 2 to 4 inches above the soil line; set seedlings with the root flare level with the ground.
• Backfill with native soil and water in well.
• Mulch 3 to 4 inches deep, kept back from the trunk.
• Guard the trunk against deer rub and rabbits for the first few winters.

Pollination

Honey Jar and Sugar Cane are partly self-fertile and will set some fruit alone, but both bear much more heavily with another jujube variety nearby, and they pollinate each other well. Seedling trees can be either; plant them near a named variety. The small yellow-green flowers open over several weeks in late spring and early summer and are worked by honey bees and native bees.

First-year care

• Water deeply once a week through the first growing season. After that, water only in a long drought.
• Keep a mulched, grass-free circle around the trunk.
• No fertilizer in year one; jujube grows well on lean ground.
• Young trees carry small thorns at the leaf joints. Handle with gloves.

Pruning

Jujube needs little pruning. Train it to a single trunk with a few well-spaced scaffold limbs in the first two or three winters, and after that remove dead, crossing and crowded wood in late winter. Fruit forms on short deciduous shoots that drop in fall, so there is no fruiting wood to protect. Cut root suckers at ground level whenever they appear.

Harvest

Grafted trees begin bearing in about 2 to 4 years, seedlings in 4 to 6. Fruit ripens from August into October. For fresh eating, pick when the skin has turned from green to about half mahogany brown and the flesh is still crisp; this is when the fruit is sweetest and crunchiest. Left on the tree, the fruit turns fully brown, wrinkles and dries into a chewy, date-like fruit that keeps for months.

Fresh jujubes keep a week or two refrigerated. Dried ones store all winter and are the classic ingredient in teas, soups and sweets across East Asia. A mature tree gives 40 to 100 pounds.