Jujube

A tough, thorny, drought-proof tree that fruits in a year or two and crops where nothing else will. Eat them crisp like a sweet apple, or let them wrinkle into something like a date.

Full sun, sharp drainage, hot summers, and very little else. Plant two cultivars for a heavier crop, and put it where you can deal with suckers.

Jujube's requirements are short: full sun, drainage, and heat. It wants the hottest, sunniest spot you have — long, hot summers are what ripen the fruit and build the sugar, and a jujube in a cool, shaded, or maritime garden grows perfectly well and produces mediocre fruit. Soil hardly matters as long as it drains: sand, gravel, poor ground, and distinctly alkaline soil all suit it, and it tolerates salinity better than almost any other fruit tree. What it will not take is heavy, wet, waterlogged ground.

Buy a grafted named cultivar. Jujube grows readily from seed but seedlings are thorny, slow, and usually produce small poor fruit. Most cultivars will set a crop alone, but nearly all crop noticeably heavier with a second variety nearby — Li and Lang is the classic pairing, and there is a good argument for planting one of each on principle. Space trees fifteen to twenty feet apart, and plant in early spring in cold zones or in the cool season in the warm Southwest.

Then think hard about where. A grafted jujube sends thorny suckers up from its rootstock, and they can surface a long way from the trunk. Put the tree in a lawn you mow, or in an area you cultivate, rather than in a shrub border or a wild corner you rarely touch, and cut suckers off at or below ground level as soon as they appear. One more word on identity: this is Ziziphus jujuba, the hardy Chinese jujube. Ziziphus mauritiana, the tropical Indian jujube or ber, is a different species that is regulated as a noxious weed in Florida — check your state's noxious weed list before buying anything sold simply as “jujube” in the subtropics.

Almost nothing: water the first two summers then back off, feed lightly if at all, prune in late winter in leather gloves, and stay on top of the suckers.

Once established, a jujube asks less than any other fruit tree in this catalog. Water deeply through its first two summers to get the roots down, then cut right back — a mature tree fruits well on natural rainfall across much of its range, and constant irrigation actively works against you, encouraging suckering and inviting the root rot that is one of the few things that kills a jujube. Feed lightly or not at all; this is a tree adapted to poor ground, and rich feeding grows whippy wood instead of fruit.

Prune in late winter while the tree is dormant: take out dead, crossing and inward-growing wood, keep the center open, and shorten the long whippy shoots. Jujube fruits on new growth arising from short permanent spurs, so ordinary thinning cuts do not cost you a crop — it is a forgiving tree to prune. What is not forgiving is the wood itself: young growth carries paired spines at the nodes and rootstock suckers are worse. Long sleeves and leather gloves, every time.

The real ongoing job is suckers. Walk the area around the tree a few times a season and cut every sucker off at or below ground level; snapping them at the surface only makes them branch. Winter, with the ground bare, is the easiest time to find them all. Beyond that, pests are remarkably few — in the arid West, essentially none — and the main thing to watch is the weather at ripening.

Pick over the tree every few days through September and October. Half-brown and crunchy is the fresh stage; fully brown and wrinkled is the date stage.

Jujubes ripen unevenly over four to six weeks in September and October, so this is a crop you pick over repeatedly rather than harvest in one go. The important thing is deciding which stage you want, because the fruit passes through two of them.

The crisp stage is when the fruit is about half turned, its skin mottled mahogany-brown over yellow-green. Here it is crunchy, juicy, and sweet like a small dense apple, and this is how most fresh-eating cultivars are best. The date stage comes weeks later, when the skin has gone fully brown and the fruit begins to wrinkle and soften on the branch; now it is chewy, dense and caramel-sweet, and this is what you want for drying. Fruit shriveling on the tree is not spoiling — it is doing exactly what a Chinese date is supposed to do.

The one thing to watch is rain. Water on ripening jujubes splits the skin and split fruit rots or ferments within days, which is the single biggest limit on jujube quality in the humid Southeast. Pick ahead of a forecast wet spell, clear split fruit off the tree and the ground so it does not draw wasps, and in wet climates favor earlier-ripening cultivars that finish before the autumn rains arrive.

Crisp fruit keeps weeks in the fridge - unusually good for a fresh fruit. Dried jujubes keep for a year or more, and drying is what the crop is really for.

Fresh crisp jujubes are surprisingly good keepers: in a bag or covered container in the refrigerator they hold for several weeks, and at room temperature about a week before they begin to brown and soften. That softening is not spoilage — a jujube left on the counter simply moves along toward its date stage — but the crunch that makes fresh jujubes special is gone once it starts.

Drying is the classic answer and by far the best one. Pick fruit fully brown and just wrinkling, then finish it on racks in a warm airy place or in a dehydrator until it is leathery and firm. In an arid climate much of the crop will dry on the branch and can simply be gathered. Properly dried and stored airtight somewhere cool and dark, jujubes keep a year or more and only get better — they are the form in which this fruit has been traded across Asia for millennia.

Beyond drying: jujubes candy well in syrup, cook down into a thick dark jujube butter or paste used across Chinese baking, make a good honey-colored jam, and are steeped whole into tea. They also freeze acceptably once pitted, though drying is a better use of the fruit. Whatever you make, remember the single hard stone comes out first.

Eat crisp ones out of hand like a small apple. Dried, they go into soups, teas, congee, stuffings and pastes across Chinese and Korean cooking.

Fresh crisp jujubes are best simply eaten out of hand, whole, spitting out the stone — crunchy, sweet, faintly appley, and unlike anything else in an American fruit bowl. Sliced into salads they stay crisp where apple browns, and they are excellent in a slaw or scattered over grain bowls. In China the crisp stage is enjoyed in exactly this straightforward way, and children eat them by the handful.

Dried jujubes are where the culinary depth lies, and it is considerable. Across Chinese cooking the dried red jujube (hong zao) goes into slow-simmered soups and broths with chicken, pork or herbs; into congee; into steamed cakes and buns; into the sweet stuffings of festival pastries; and into teas, often with goji berries and ginger. Korean cooking uses daechu the same way, sliced into samgyetang and into cinnamon punch. Simmering softens them and releases a rich, molasses-dark sweetness quite unlike the fresh fruit.

In a Western kitchen, dried jujubes substitute directly for dates in baking, chopped into breads, bars and cakes, though they are less sticky and a little less sweet. They candy well, cook into a dark spiced butter that is very good on toast or with roast pork, and make an interesting jam. And a few dried jujubes dropped into a pot of chicken stock is one of the easiest ways to see what the fuss is about.

Exceptionally high in vitamin C fresh - several times an orange by weight - plus fiber, potassium and antioxidants. Drying concentrates the sugar and the minerals.

Fresh jujubes are one of the richest fruit sources of vitamin C there is, carrying several times as much per ounce as an orange, alongside good dietary fiber, potassium, and a spread of flavonoid and polysaccharide antioxidants. They are low in fat, moderate in calories, and unusually satisfying for their size. Much of that vitamin C is lost in drying, so if you want the nutritional headline, eat them fresh and crisp.

Dried jujubes are a different food nutritionally: the water goes, so sugar, fiber, potassium, iron and other minerals all concentrate, and the fruit becomes an energy-dense snack much like a date, with a similar caloric load. That concentration is precisely why dried jujubes traveled so well and mattered so much as a stored food across northern China. As with any dried fruit, portion size is the thing to keep an eye on.

Da zao is one of the most-used ingredients in Chinese herbal medicine - as a harmonizing food-herb in formulas and soups rather than as a drug. Genuinely gentle, and genuinely food.

This section records how people have traditionally used this plant, and what is known about the risks. It is history and general information — not medical advice, and not a recommendation to treat anything. Plants are not dosed like medicines, some interact with prescriptions, and some are harmful in ways that are not obvious. Talk to a clinician before using any plant medicinally.

Jujube has one of the longest continuous medicinal records of any plant in this catalog. As da zao (or hong zao, red date) it appears in an enormous proportion of classical Chinese herbal formulas, where its role is characteristically gentle: it is used to nourish, to tonify, to calm the spirit, and above all to harmonize a formula — softening harsher herbs and making a decoction easier on the stomach. Korean and Japanese traditional medicine use it the same way.

What makes this unusual is that the line between medicine and food essentially does not exist here. Da zao is not a potent drug taken in isolation; it is a sweet, mild fruit simmered into soups, congee, and teas by the handful, in kitchens as much as in clinics. Modern research has looked at its polysaccharides, flavonoids and saponins for mild sedative, immune-modulating and antioxidant effects, with results that are interesting rather than conclusive.

The practical framing: jujube tea with a few slices of ginger is a pleasant, harmless, long-established home remedy for feeling run-down or unable to settle at night, and it is worth trying on those terms. It is not a treatment for anything diagnosed, and anyone on prescribed medication or managing blood sugar should treat concentrated dried fruit sensibly and talk to a clinician before taking herbal preparations. The fruit itself carries no toxicity at all — the only inedible part is the stone.

A bare tree in April is normal - jujube leafs out in May. Thorny shoots in the lawn are rootstock suckers. Split, rotting fruit means rain at ripening.

The tree looks dead in April: almost certainly it is not. Jujube leafs out later than anything else in the garden, often not until May. Scratch a twig with a thumbnail — green underneath means it is alive and waiting for heat. This is the single most common jujube panic. Thorny shoots coming up in the lawn or beds, sometimes far from the trunk: rootstock suckers, and they will keep coming — cut them at or below soil level whenever you see them, and never let one grow a season. Fruit splitting, then browning and rotting on the tree: rain at ripening. Pick ahead of wet weather, clear split fruit away, and choose earlier cultivars in humid regions.

Plenty of flowers, very little fruit: usually the lack of a second cultivar — most jujubes are partly self-fruitful but crop far better with a partner — and sometimes drought or extreme heat at bloom. Fruit that never sweetens and stays green-tasting: not enough summer heat, or too short a season for that cultivar; jujube is hardy to cold but needs hot summers to make sugar. Small, poor, extremely thorny fruit on a tree you grew from seed: seedlings do not come true — that is the expected outcome, and grafting a known cultivar onto it is the fix. Tree declining in wet ground: root rot — jujube demands drainage and will not survive a low, soggy spot.

Hardy to about -20°F but ruled by summer heat, not winter cold: superb in the desert Southwest and hot interior valleys, limited by autumn rain in the humid Southeast.

Jujube's range is set by summer heat, not winter cold, which is unusual and worth understanding. The wood takes roughly -20°F, so cold hardiness reaches into zone 5, but the fruit needs a long, hot summer to ripen and sweeten. A jujube in a cool, cloudy, or maritime climate makes a healthy, handsome tree and disappointing fruit — the Pacific Northwest coast and cool northern gardens are exactly this case.

The desert Southwest and hot inland California and Texas: jujube's ideal ground. It takes 110°F, drought, alkaline soil and salinity better than any other common fruit tree, needs almost no spraying, and crops heavily — there is a strong case that it is the single best backyard fruit tree for Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, El Paso and the San Joaquin Valley. The humid Southeast: it grows well and fruits, but autumn rain at ripening splits and rots the fruit, so quality is variable; earlier-ripening cultivars that finish before the wet weather are the answer. Zones 5-6: the tree survives, but plant the earliest cultivars in the hottest, most sheltered spot you have and expect the crop to be the limiting factor. Zone 10 and warmer: it grows but sets less reliably without a proper winter dormancy.

Buy grafted. Seedlings are thorny, slow and poor, and the easy vegetative route - digging a rootstock sucker - gives you the rootstock, not the cultivar.

Jujube seeds germinate readily after cold stratification, but seedlings are a poor bet: they are markedly thornier than named cultivars, slower to bear, and produce small, indifferent fruit. Growing them is worthwhile for one purpose only — as rootstock to graft a good cultivar onto, usually by whip-and-tongue or cleft grafting in late winter, or by budding in summer. Nearly every jujube worth eating is a grafted tree.

There is a trap in the easiest-looking route. A jujube throws root suckers freely, and digging one up looks like free propagation — but on a grafted tree those suckers come from the rootstock, below the graft union, so what you dig up is the wild, thorny, poor-fruiting parent, not the cultivar you liked. The exception is an own-root tree grown from a cutting or a sucker of an ungrafted plant, where the suckers are genuinely the same plant; those transplant easily and are how jujube spreads among neighbors in the Southwest.

Hardwood and root cuttings can be rooted with some persistence, and root cuttings taken in late winter are the more reliable of the two. For most gardeners, though, the honest advice is to buy two grafted cultivars from a nursery and put your effort into siting them well.

Domesticated in northern China over 4,000 years ago and central to its food and medicine ever since; brought to the US in 1908 and still barely known here.

Jujube was domesticated along the Yellow River in northern China at least four thousand years ago, and it has been continuously central to Chinese food, medicine and ritual ever since — there are hundreds of named cultivars there, and the red date appears in wedding customs, festival foods, herbal formulas and everyday soup. It spread early across Central Asia to the Middle East, the Mediterranean and India, picking up names and uses in every direction; the Arabic and Persian traditions used it much as the Chinese did.

Its American history is short and oddly institutional. Jujube arrived as a curiosity in the 1800s, but the varieties that matter came in 1908, when the USDA plant explorer Frank Meyer — the same man behind the Meyer lemon — collected superior cultivars in China and sent them home. Li and Lang, still the two most-planted jujubes in the United States, both trace to that introduction.

Then, largely, nothing. Despite being one of the best-adapted fruit trees for the American Southwest and one of the most important fruits in the world by area, jujube remains almost unknown in mainstream American horticulture, grown mostly by Chinese-American gardeners, desert fruit enthusiasts and a handful of specialist nurseries. It is one of the clearest cases in this catalog of an excellent, easy, well-adapted crop that simply never got a marketing campaign.