Medjool Dates & Date Information

Whilst you are eating your delicious medjool dates, do you actually know where the name “date” came from? In actual fact, the word “date” comes from the Greek word meaning “finger” apparently arising from the fruits’ similarity in shape. In fact there are 3 main families of dates, which are “soft”, “semi-dry” and “dry”. Medjool dates as you may guess belong to the soft variety, along with “Barhee”, “Halawy” and “Khadrawy”. Something you might not know about dates, whilst you are eating your medjool date is that the date plant is “dioceious” – this means that there are separate male and female plants of the variety.

In terms of the pollination of the plants, this can be done by wind pollination – however, in commercial orchards etc. they are pollinated manually. Interestingly, only the female plants produce fruit, hence some growers might only have female plants, thus ensuring maximum use of space, whilst pollinating artificially as and when is necessary for reproduction purposes of the date plant. Talking generally about date palms, they can take 4-7 years from the planting stage to actually producing fruit, which might seem quite a long time to wait, if you are thinking of growing your own medjool dates. However, once they are fruiting, they can apparently produce 80-120 kilograms of fruit in each season harvest – one thing to note is that the fruit may come to proper ripeness at different times, so the picking will not be simultaneous.