Creating a new variety of dates is actually a relatively simple task. Dates are grown in one of two methods. You can grow dates from seed or you can grow dates from offshoots. The way to create a new a variety of dates is very simple, you do what most people do. You simply take a date seed and plant it. The hard part if the wait. Surely it will germinate in a couple of weeks or so, but then you have to wait for the date palm to produce fruit. Unlike other fruit producing trees date palms require a lot of patience. You have to wait about 14 years or so, to determine if the date palm will be producing fruit. You have a 50% chance that it will produce fruit and a 50% chance that it will not. About 50% are male and the other 50% are female. Most orchards have a few males or none at all. A date palm may not produce fruit at all, because it is a male. The male is used to pollinate can be of any variety and you will still get the same type of fruit consistently. The female is what determine what type of fruit you will get. After your 14 year wait if you find that your new date is a winner you can then propagate it using the second method for growing dates. The second method for growing dates will consistently produce the same type of date. You simply take a shoot from the date palm and transplant it. The process is very labor intensive and expensive, but you can consistently grow the same type of date. Your medjool date will always be a medjool date and your deglet noor will always be a deglet noor. The challenge is in creating a new commercially viable variety of date. Your 14 year date palm will likely produce one or more shoots per year. Initially it will be a very slow process in creating a new orchard. The date palm’s off shoot will need about seven years before it produces a new shoot to plant. At the end of seven years your 14 year old would have produced about 14 shoots and the new one about one or two, so you may have 15 date palms after 21 years. On the 22nd year it gets better you will likely have 4 shoots for the year for 19 date palms and then it keeps getting better and better. So 30 years later you might have new orchard of a entirely different variety. Just as your new date orchard is ready you are contemplating retirement. Sooner or later a genecist may come up with a short cut, but for now it is a long arduous process despite the easy in creating a new variety, it is the challenge of creating a meaningful orchard of new date palms.
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