Date Palms

[Agavephile]

Hello!

I germinated some Medjool dates over the winter and they are growing reasonably well so far. I know this isn’t the best way to get date palm trees, but I just wanted to see if I could do it. Have any of you grown date palms from seed? What is the preferred soil type? I currently have them in a very sandy soil mixture for drainage. Have any of you tried overwintering container palm trees in your garage? I live in zone 8/7 and I don’t think they would like the winter.

[Tom in Tucson]

Congratulations on sprouting your date seeds. You are correct in assuming that this method isn't the preferred one for guaranteeing your efforts will yield Medjool dates. Having said that. I'm guilty of the same thing. As you're probably aware the best way to produce any date variety is to remove suckers from the female tree which has known good tasting dates, and transplant them eventually into a location with dry air, a hot climate, and plenty of water for good growth of the frees and dates. Once you've completed these steps you'll have to supply pollen to the female flowers. You can either obtain it from another date palm grower or grow your own male tree. BTW, the male does not have to be the same variety if your're only going to eat the harvest.

As far as the preferred soil, I'd start with a coir based mix and once planted in the ground I'd use a sandy clay mixture.

I'm almost sure I told you more than you wanted to know.

[Agavephile]

Congratulations on sprouting your date seeds. You are correct in assuming that this method isn't the preferred one for guaranteeing your efforts will yield Medjool dates. Having said that. I'm guilty of the same thing. As you're probably aware the best way to produce any date variety is to remove suckers from the female tree which has known good tasting dates, and transplant them eventually into a location with dry air, a hot climate, and plenty of water for good growth of the frees and dates. Once you've completed these steps you'll have to supply pollen to the female flowers. You can either obtain it from another date palm grower or grow your own male tree. BTW, the male does not have to be the same variety if your're only going to eat the harvest.

As far as the preferred soil, I'd start with a coir based mix and once planted in the ground I'd use a sandy clay mixture.

I'm almost sure I told you more than you wanted to know.

I didn’t buy any offshoots since I really didn’t know if I could successfully overwinter them and Alabama is incredibly humid. Do you know how hardy date palms are and have you ever overwintered one? This project is really more out of curiosity for me.

[KLC]

Date palms thrive in sandy soil. They are relatively hardy to the cold. They grow incredibly fast, from a 5g to a 15g in just a few years. They will be 6’ tall by the time they are big enough for a 15g pot. Although I dont think a winter in the garage would kill one, it wouldn’t be too happy about it. And your humid weather will prevent pollinated dates from growing into edible fruit, they will likely rot.

We spend a good many weekends in the winter at the Imperial Sand Dunes just south of Yuma, there are many date farms located in Imperial County because of the dry air and little rain. It is very much like the climate in the Mid East where they are from. We stop and gas up at a place on the I-8 called Dateland, it’s a gas station/ice cream parlor/ gift shop and they have a giant date farm there. I’ve walked through the date orchard many times wishing I could take a few of their trees home with me. They sell rooted offsets but are $$. The male trees are even more $$ due to their scarcity. They tell me during the summer when they are in production that each tree requires hundreds of gallons of water each day to produce fruit. I don’t know how accurate that is but it’s what a farm hand told me. The soil there is almost pure sand.

There is a ton of info on YouTube about how dates are produced. If have some free time do some research about the origins of the medjool date here in the US. As I understand it all of them are offsets from 5 trees imported into the US and propagated near the Salton Sea by the dept of agriculture, or something like that. In order to be considered a medjool date it has to come from a vegetatively propagated tree from the original trees. As you have said growing a tree from the pit of a medjool date will not necessarily yield a good tasting date. It’s interesting stuff.

A good read: https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postde ... stnum=6586

[KLC]

I’ll post some pics of my seedlings tomorrow morning when there’s enough light to get some photos.

[Agavephile]

I didn’t realize Phoenix dactylifera (date palm) was hardy enough to support ~10 to 15 F. It is rarely that cold in Alabama. How large do you grow your seedlings before planting them outside or leaving them outside in a pot during winter?

[KLC]

That's much too cold for P. dactylifera. Mid twenties is what I would be comfortable with. A brief encounter with anything colder may not kill the tree but it would lose all of it's leaves. There are a good number of Phoenix species that survived the freeze in Texas though, Meangreen might have photos of the survivors.

[Meangreen94z]

They survived mid teens for decades in the Austin area, but the majority died from single digits in 2021. Granted it was over 120 hours straight below freezing, which is the bigger factor. Phoenix canariensis is definitively the hardiest, they came back at a high percentage in both Central and North Texas. Seeing as low as -2°F outside Dallas. I’ve heard of them surviving even colder, but more brief and dry temperatures in New Mexico.

There were a few dactylifera survivors. This dactylifera probably saw 7-10°F in Central Austin, benefiting from heat island effect.

[Meangreen94z]

The twin head dactylifera lives on in Kemah, Texas. It probably saw 14°-17°F in February 2021 and last December .

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