The Romance And Sex Life of a Date

There were two things my Father wanted me to do in life, one was to drink coffee to be sociable and the other was to eat dates to be regular, he figured that I would be a happy girl if I did these two things, but, coffee was too bitter for me and dates too sweet.  My father  sent me a box of dates every Christmas, even though I told him I gave them to Chuck every Christmas.

So Chuck, says get in your car and follow me, gonna show you around Yuma, and we go......

He shows us lettuce fields that are harvested every 6 weeks making this the salad capital of the world

Fields of cabbage, broccoli, and just about every vegetable you can think of

Chuck showed us Scott and Ken's new house, they are painting now and hope to be in it the first of December

And their "old" house, I think they are looking to sell it or rent it if anyone is interested

Then Chuck takes us to Martha's Garden, in honor of my Father, who always took me here and tried to talk me into having a date shake, can you imagine?????? Jerry has one, and Chuck has a vanilla shake, none for me, thank you very much, then, Nancy tells me that in Indio, where she winters, there is a famous date garden, (they don't call them farms for some reason) that plays a continuous movie called the "Romance and sex life of a date"

Now, I've spent my whole life avoiding dates, I might have been interested in them if I had known they led such risque lives

So I do some research, not in here actually, I just thought this was a funny sign because it said Superstore, wonder if they sell food in there too like at Wal Mart

Most plants have both the female and male parts on the one plant, but date trees don't, there is a male tree and a female tree, when I asked the woman at the date shake counter, if the date tree had a sex life, she said, "ha! Our female date trees don't need no stinking men trees! They go up the tree and they shake those little men trees, get the pollen off them and then shake it on the girl trees. No sex needed!"

Martha's Garden has 5 female trees to every one male, in Indio they have 49 female trees to every one male, but they aggressively shake the pollen off their male trees, in fact they build ladders up them as they grow, chop down their blossoms and bring them down to shake out their pollen

The female trees are only fertile for a short period of time, the fruit starts growing in March and in the fall they start picking them as they don't ripen all at once, you might see paper covering the fruit in the summer protecting it from the rain as rain ruins the dates

All and all dates are very labor intensive, expensive crop to bring in, and I should really have more respect for the very sexy date tree, there's lots of fiber in those dates too! There Dad, I said it, but I'm still not having a date shake.