The 2022 Date harvest has officially begun! 🌴🙌🏻 Today we visited a fellow date grower’s ranch where harvest is underway and I got a lift (pun intended) up in the palms to take a peek at their date harvest and show you what we do! What most people don’t realize is that dates are an extremely labor intensive crop. Very little of the tree care and cultivation can be managed mechanically: most of it is done by hand. If you have followed our content before you may remember that date growers work in the tree an average of eight times per growing season to complete various steps in the care and cultivation of the crop. Medjool dates, prized for their large size and sweet, caramely flavor, require the most steps of cultivated dates. This variety responds positively to aggressive thinning of the bunches (which yields larger fruit) so the crop is thinned by hand a couple times during the early stages of fruit development and is harvested in 2 to 3 passes in order to remove the perfectly ripe fruit while allowing the unripe fruit to continue to hang on the tree to finish ripening. A mature Medjool date palm will average between 19 and 22 fruit arms, each having been thinned to allow for about 12 pounds of dates each. The fruit arms (the flower “stalk” that emerges from the palm and bears the date fruit) and fronds are both very strong (the mature fronds are even strong enough to support the weight of the skilled workers, called Palmeros) who nimbly walk on the frond bases to work the tree. However the fruit arms are tied up to a support frond to avoid breaking and losing that precious fruit. We had a blast visiting our friends today. There is a tropical hurricane bearing down on Baja Mexico which is bringing rain and monsoonal activity to our date growing regions of the desert southwest over the next two days - bad for dates but we make do. For any of you date fans who’ve had an encounter with black mold inside your date - this is why. Late season rains can activate the natural black mold spores around the seed and spread inside the date - nearly impossible to detect but not dangerous for most people, but definitely unpleasant. Cheers to the new crop!