Martha's Gardens

Hope you enjoyed the Air Circus in my last post.  Now on to some Date farming.

But first last Sunday and Monday we had some cool and cloudy weather which included a Thunder storm.  It only lasted a few minutes but it did leave us a nice reminder. 

On Tuesday we made a return visit to Martha's Gardens which is a Date farm and makes very tasty date shakes.   We had previously signed up for a farm tour and were looking forward to learning a little more about date farming.

This little fella was sitting outside the picnic area and seemed to be waiting for his picture to be taken so I accommodated.

We certainly weren't disappointed with the tour.  It was excellent and full of information.  If you thought livestock or grain framing was labour intensive let me tell you they don't hold a candle to date farming.

First a little history.
In 1927, French Morocco, the home of the Medjool Date trees, was having a serious problem.  Their date trees were dying off and they could not find the problem.  They feared that all their trees would be wiped out.  The US Dept of Agriculture was invited to try and help isolate what was killing the trees.  While they were unable to identify the disease they decided to transport some of the remaining healthy date trees to the US to try and preserve the species.  11 young and hopefully healthy trees were shipped to Nevada and planted in isolation.  While 2 of those trees died, dug up by the owners dogs, the remaining 9 trees are the progenitors of every Medjool Date tree growing in North America today.
A few years later the biologists found that the disease in Morocco was a fungus spread by the water.  Every Medjool date tree in Morocco died.

Martha's Gardens was founded in 1990 and they originally planted 300 Medjool date shoots.  They now have over 8000 date palms planted on 100 acres.  Each year they plant additional trees.  Their first harvest was in 1999.   Date trees can live up to 100 years and grow 100 feet tall.  They reach peak production at around age 25 and plateau after that.  The farm sits on a deep bed of sand with drip irrigation for each tree fed by a well which is about 130 feet deep.  They will give each tree up to 100 gallons of water per day during the winter months and during the growing season in the summer they will increase that to 200 gallons per day.
Each tree is visited up to 25 times per year for pruning and stripping of thorns, hand pollination and thinning of each fruit arm and harvesting.  New shoots grow from the base of the tree and these need to be cut off and either discarded or potted and kept for new stock.   Most of this work is done from the bucket of a special forklift, 80 feet in the air and in temperatures up to 110 degrees.

This farm is relatively young with their oldest trees only now coming into peak production at the age of 25.

He is pointing to one of the fruit arms.  Each tree contains 10 or more with each arm having 10 or more branches and each branch having 20 or more buds.
Each one has to be hand pollenated and then later they are thinned, separated with a wire hoop and bagged to keep dust and bugs off the fruit.

 It looks like the tree is wrapped in burlap.  This is naturally produced by the tree and it has the same texture and strength as burlap.

 One of the fruit arms.  Each yellow bud is potentially a date.  It is seriously thinned so the dates grow bigger and don't get bruised banging into each other.
What do they use to manually pollenate these buds?
An empty water bottle with a small hole punched in the lid.  Fill it with pollen and it makes a nice puffer.
I kid you not.
10% of the trees are male like the one below.  At the top of the tree in the centre is a pollen pod.  These are split open and the pollen removed.

Above:
On the right you can see the edge of their date farm.
To the left is the flood plain of the Colorado River.
On the right is sand as far down as you can go.
On the left fertile soil left by hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of flooding.

On top of the sand are their cuttings which will one day be planted to expand their farm.

This sand is perfect for any kids sandbox.

 

Here are some shots of the fields extending as far as the eye can see.  Literally hundreds of square miles of lettuce, broccoli, radishes, onions and other vegetable crops.  All irrigated courtesy of the Colorado River.
Below farm labourers helping with a new crop of lettuce.
These fields are always in one stage of seeding, growing, harvesting or preparing to seed again.  12 months of the year.

The irrigated farm land sells for about $31,000 per acre.  In addition they have to pay for water but it is kept quite cheap.  I think the water cost is about $3.00 per foot/acre which is equivalent to 1 foot of water required to cover an acre of land.  Most land has been owned by families for generations and leased to large companies like Dole.
By comparison land in the Napa valley goes for a few hundred thousand dollars per acre and water costs are significantly higher.  Enjoy that next bottle of California Red.

Value of the land if the water disappears, worthless.

This is a harvesting machine for a field of lettuce.  On the right, under the tarp are workers, bending and cutting the lettuce off the plant with a large knife, placed on a conveyor belt, sorted, hand cleaned and put in boxes for shipping.  You can see the boxes on the left side of the picture.  This is an organic field so I'm guessing no need to wash off any pesticides.
I'm not sure if some of these processes could be automated however with a minimum wage of $7.00 p/h there may not be a lot of incentive to develop a $500,000 combine.

Thats the farming lesson for today.  Wednesday Betty and Richard are coming over for Dinner.  Looking forward to some good company and more tourist tips.

Friday the Painted Desert.

Later