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I’ve been reading conflicting articles on how to germinate jujube seeds. Some say to crack open the husk to extract the seed. Some say to plant the entire husk in the ground. I'll try both methods.
I cracked open a few of my jujube seeds and they were hollow inside. There was no dark colored seed. My question is are these seeds duds and will they actually germinate?
These were extracted from me eating fresh jujubes. I'm not sure of the variety, but they were bought in a Chinese supermarket.
According to the California Rare Fruit Growers, " Jujubes also can be propagated from seed, although they do not come true. Most jujube cultivars produce fruit without cross-pollination, but seeds from such self-pollination are usually not viable (such as from the Li or Lang cultivars)". This probably explains what's going on with your hollow fruits.
FWIW, the poster on this Permaculture site had the same experience as you. There is a ton of other jujube information on that thread.
Jujube you have is not fully ripened. These green jujubes will never germinate. You need to get brown, crumpled jujubes and eat "meat" of it and break shells to see if any has seed in it.
If you buy premium Jujubes from supermarket, 100% you will not get seeds in them, I guess producers protect their market by doing so. You will need to get smaller type jujube than ones labelled as Premium, and eat a lot of them to find seeds ))))). Just be careful, it seem to reduce blood pressure if you eat more than 4-5ea.
Alternatively, you can buy seeds online, but, in this case difficult to say you will get good type of fruits, I order it from few suppliers and if fruit is not what I need, will just have to graft from good one.
In the USDA plants database there is an image of what you should find inside the seeds. It looks like in your seeds the true seed is missing so germination would seem to be impossible. The next question of course is why the seed is empty; no doubt your guess is better than mine. Speculation might indicate immature fruit, lack of or incorrect pollination, lack of pollinator and so on might fit. You would think that in an entire bag that at least some might be correctly mature seeds, but which ones? The most ripe looking?
