Monthly Archives: July 2011

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Growing Date Palms in Florida vs. California

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Florida is commonly associated with lush tropical landscaping and with lush palm tree lined streets and gardens.  The same is true of many other tropical areas such as Central America, Vietnam, Thailand, and other Asian countries.   Date palms look like they should belong in these climates and should produce lots of fruit in fact you would think date palms would produce more dates than date palms in the desert, but that is not the case.  Date palms are native to the desert and belong in the desert.  The irony is that date palms require a lot of water, which seems to contradict the fact that date palms do well in the desert.  Tropical climates create a non suitable environment for date palms, not because of the date palm itself, but because of the fruit.  If you want to grow edible fruit you need a dry climate.  Without the dry climate the medjool dates or other dates for that matter will not ripen correctly and the crop will be mediocre at best.  Dates are grown in climates other than the desert, but the fruit is so poor that the dates are harvested and turned into a honey or other products.  At swap meets you may see some nice ripe dates which are fine, but they are not naturally good quality dates.  These dates are the poor quality substandard dates which have been microwaved.  This technique is also effective for tropical grown medjool dates.  The dates are much more edible after microwaving, but probably not a viable alternative for commercial production of desert grown dates.  California medjool dates and other dates are much higher quality than the best of Florida, because of the climate.  Florida has a tropical climate and California has deserts.  The deserts is what allows dates to thrive in California, but Arizona is catching up to California date production and may in the future be the leading medjool date capital of the US.  The reason being that Arizona also has lots of desert and is ideal for growing dates.  Water maybe the biggest problem for Arizona and California, but drip irrigation may keep farms at both places going for a while.

GHTime Code(s): nc 

The First Stage Of The Medjool Date 07162011

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The medjool date fruit grows in stages and each stage has a different name.  The first stage is when the date is green.  All medjool dates start out as green dates at this stage often the fruit is pruned.  The smaller green medjool dates are removed, so the remaining medjool dates can grown.  The remaining medjool dates will grown and go to stage two, which is changing from green to yellow.  The yellow medjool date looks good and even edible, but it is not edible yet, it would taste bitter.  The next stage is the ripening stage, that is when the date fruit starts to change to a golden brown and sweeten.  At this stage it starts to look more like a raisen.  The date can be picked off the fruit once it reaches a ripe stage.  Not all dates ripen at the same stage.  A few dates are removed from the date palm and the remainder are harvested at a later time.  It is a long labor intensive process.  A mature date palm can easily produce about 100 pounds of medjool dates.

GHTime Code(s): nc nc 
Dates Fruit Medjool Dates