Grow This Fruit NOW in a Desert Climate!

So today we want to give you an update on the perfect fruit for desert climates. That's up next. Hello everyone, this is Dwayne with Edge of Nowhere Farm and we're coming to you here in July. Now if you guys have been following us along you know that we have over 200 fruiting trees, vines, and shrubs here on the Sonoran Desert Farm. One of the things we love growing here are jujubees and no it's not the candy, it's the fruit. Let's take a look at it. Now jujubees or jujubes, we call them jujubees so if you want to call them something different, hey more power to you. But this is our lang jujubee right behind me here. This has fruit that's in varying stages of ripeness but this is not the only jujubee that we have. We've got our ant admirer, we've done a video on that before here, just a wonderful fruit eaten fresh or dried. We have our empress gee or gee, that one is a nice big round jujubee loaded with fruit again this year. We have our Shanxi or Shanxi Li jujubee, another wonderful jujubee variety just on the verge of starting to ripen up here in late July. And then of course our honeypot jujubee that we just planted this year. That was a bare stick a few months ago and it has fruit on it right now. Of course we'll remove all of those, we don't want it trying to ripen fruit right now but I want to show you guys a lang jujubee and a couple different ways to look at them as far as ripeness is concerned. I'm just in one part of the tree here, I can see I've got a completely dry jujubee here. I'm going to take that one. I have a just about fully ripe starting to dry jujubee here and I have one right here that's probably a little bit on the under ripe side. So what I want to do, I'm going to try each one of these with you guys. Let's see how they taste. So now when you're eating fruit the back or blossom end is going to usually be the ripest part of the fruit. So what I'm going to do with this one I know is going to be under ripe, I'm going to just kind of eat from the blossom end. So let's see what it tastes like. Very crunchy. So the flavor on a jujubee, the best description I can give you is a dry apple. So if you had dried apples before, that's going to be a lot, in my opinion, it's a lot of what this tastes like is a dried apple. This one's definitely not ripe. So again, pretty spongy like a dried apple, a little bit of sweetness. There's also just a tiny bit of I'll say bitterness because it's not quite ripe. So still not bad. Second one that I have was showing you this one's got a little bit of green on the tinge. It's starting to soften up a bit, getting just a little bit wrinkly. It's almost completely brown. Quite a bit sweeter. I'd say that's twice as sweet as that first one that I ate. Very little moisture. You add the moisture. It's not so much coming from the fruit, but still nice, mellow sweetness. Again, very similar to a dry apple. Okay. Last but not least, this is the fully ripe or in the dry stage, more like the date or Chinese date. So this one here pretty much fully ripe all the way around. I'm going to go ahead and just bite it right in the middle. Really good. Very similar flavor actually to the last one. I would say you probably harvest these just a little bit earlier as opposed to some of the other varieties. So very good. Nice, mellow sweetness. And again, tastes like a dried apple. All right. So let's talk a little bit about jujubes. All of the ones that you see here, we've bought through online nurseries. That can be pretty easy to find in the fall. So you're looking to shop for these here probably in another month or two. Once everybody gets their fall inventory in. We had mentioned the honey jar jujube. That is the last one that we planted. It was just a stick. It's already got fruit in there. We've got to get that thinned out and get those removed, but it's growing really strongly. We've got probably three or four feet of growth already. And again, that was just a stick when we planted it a couple of months ago. The tree behind me, you see behind me here is the Empress Gee or Gee. Very, very good, very large jujube variety and extremely productive, which we found to be the case with all of these trees. Now these trees are one of the last trees to break dormancy. They break dormancy when it gets nice and warm. Usually it needs to be up near or above 90 degrees before these things start growing. So these have only actually been putting on growth for about three months. Whereas some of our other trees have been growing for six months already here in July. Now they will put on two crops for you. So the crop that you're seeing here would be our spring set. As soon as they start growing on new growth, you're going to see flowers that will emerge. And then these fruit, the first batch of fruit or first set of fruit is going to start ripening now. So late July, August, maybe even into September. And you can actually see we've got brand new growth and flowering on this tree right now. Even though it's ripening fruit, it's getting ready for its fall set. So you get a whole new crop of fruit, although lighter as we get into the fall. Now, one of the things about these trees, they break dormancy very late. And as soon as we get a cold snap, these trees are not happy. They will be one of the first trees that are going to drop their leaves on you. And then of course, they look wonderful in my opinion, all winter long without any leaves. And then again, back into that late spring before they break dormancy again. Talked a little bit about the flavor. It is a very, very mellow, sweet fruit. The fruit itself tends to be fairly dry and very similar, in my opinion, to a dried apple. Varying degrees of sweetness. We found that our Aunt Admire is pretty sweet. The Gee or Gee is maybe in the middle. The Honey Jar, we did try one today. Very, very sweet. The Shanxi Li, we didn't have any ripe ones last year, so I don't know. Supposedly it's a bit sweeter. And then the Lang is definitely not one of our sweetest ones. In fact, I would tell you out of the varieties we have, the Lang would be one that I might skip. So now these trees are typically grafted. One of the things that you're going to find is that rootstock is very aggressive, and you're going to have rootstock suckers popping up all over the place. So just keep that in mind if you plant one of these trees in your backyard. A lot of times, a smaller backyard, you've got a lot of moisture everywhere. Those roots are going to probably expand on you. So just keep that in mind. And these trees have a lot of thorns. And so you're going to have some spiky, spiny, little jujube pups coming up all over your yard. So just keep that in mind. Best if you can, separate them out a bit. Dry ground, it's not going to go through. So if it has moisture, it's going to be able to grow. If it doesn't, then it probably won't do that on you. So just keep that in mind if you're going to choose a jujube. So what do you think? You think a jujube is in your future? I think it might be. We're a big fan of jujubes. We've gone from three varieties to five. We're even looking at some other spaces that we might be able to put a jujube in. The trees grow really well here. They do really well without a whole lot of water because these are really desert adapted trees. A fantastic option for us here in Arizona or similar climates. So just want to thank you for joining us today. If you haven't done so already, subscribe to the channel. We cover a lot of things here on this Sonoran desert farm and would love to see on a regular basis. If you have any questions or comments, those go in the comment section down below. And our Amazon shop, I'll leave a link down in the description. That's a free, painless way to help support the channel. If you start with the link down below, it doesn't matter what you buy. You help to support us here. And if you haven't found us on TikTok yet, find us over there. You'll find us at EON Farm, E-O-N Farm, and we post content there you typically won't see here on YouTube. So just want to thank you for joining us today and remind you if we can farm on the edge of nowhere, so can you. And no, not the fruit that you get at the cinema. Cinema. Not the movie theater. Not the candy. Yeah. Not the candy. Not the candy. A fantastic option for us here in Arizona or similar clients. Clients. Clients.