For several months now we have been talking about How to start a more self-sufficient lifestyle and How to start your own self-sufficient food supply.  Here is another grow your own talk. This week is how to grow date trees from seed so you can harvest your own dates. Technically they are date palms. As with other recent talks, we continue with, how to start your own self-sufficient food supply.

We love dates, some of us do, others are not as fond and some of us will not get near them. But for those of us that love dates, they are a very important part of our daily diet. We use them as a nice, natural, healthy snack. Dates are naturally sweet so if you need a sweet, try a date. We normally buy the organic dates from the grocery store. As with most things that we use, we have been saving the seeds that come out of our dates.

Yes, they will grow, or at least the ones that we have bought have grown well.  We did, of course, buy organic dates to be sure what we would be getting. We have to do some research to find out how to grow dates as that is another thing the farm has not tries before. After the research and seed saving, we were ready for another experiment.

Dates are a good, natural, healthy snack on their own. They are sweet and soft and make a good alternative to candy.  Natural sugar is better for you than commercial sweets. Dates can be used for all kinds of cooking projects also but that is a talk for another day.

First, we eat the dates. The outer part of the dates is sweet and soft, this is the part you eat. The hard, long, pointy seed is inside the soft part. It is easy to separate the seed from the fruit part.  

We save the seeds from the dates and put them aside for later. It has not been an issue with the seeds waiting a bit to be planted. We keep them in a bowl and when there are a few, we start the planting process.

After the first experiment, we found that it works best if you soak the date seeds for a few days before you plant them.

Good potting soil, water, sun, and time are all that are needed. Put your date seed in a pot and keep it watered. The dates like to be watered regularly but not kept wet or they will rot. Dates also like full sun.

Side note:  As with many of our experiments in planting, it is best to protect your pots of dirt from cats and other animals that want to dig in them.

You must be patient with your date palm. It seems dates take a very long time to sprout. That is no joke. We started our first date seed in February and did not see any green until the end of May. We really had started to believe that our date seed was no good.

The first date seed that we planted, we did not soak before planting.  That may have been why it took so much longer to sprout.  Since we have soaked all other date seeds and it has cut off some time for sprouting.

Finally, there started to be some odd-shaped thing in the dirt. We opted to leave it alone as we were still not sure it was sprouting.   It was the start of a little, sprout.

After what seemed like forever, we saw a little green.

We were very excited. As we were not sure that the seeds inside the dates that we had bought to eat would even sprout, we had only started two. Unfortunately, as with some of our experiments, only one of the first two seeds actually sprouted and it growing. We are not sure why the other seed did not grow as we treated them with the same care. But that is how experiments go.

The baby date grows, very slowly.
As you can see in the pic, the date has one sprout. So far, the sprout has gotten taller and looks like one tall leaf.

 After some months, there are now two leaves on our first baby date. As we have said, dates take a long time. Be patient.

This first baby is just over one year old now.

For now, we are keeping it watered and out of the full sun. We also are keeping it away from the cats, who seem to be intrigued by the tall, thin grass-looking leaf. Note, do not let your pets eat the greenies.

We assume at some point, there will be more growth. After all, this is going to be a date palm when it is all grown up.

Now that we were sure sprouting could be done with these seeds, we started more.
It is best to soak your date seeds for several days to get the process started.  They seem to sprout faster that way.

The second batch of seeds, we soaked and they did sprout faster than the first two seeds that we did not soak.

After we could see the little sprouts coming on, we transplanted them to a real pot. Careful not to hurt the new sprouts, we put them in dirt and waited.

Some of the dates we put in solo pots but some we put in community pots. It did not seem to matter which way we planted them.

The second batch of seeds, the ones that were soaked, have sprouted and are growing. They look just like the first one.

At this point, we wait for them to grow up. We are not sure who long that will take. If their growth so far is any indication, it will be several years before they will be big enough to produce.

As you can see, we now have 10 or more baby date plants growing.  They seem strong and healthy. 

If you are doing more than one plant experiment at once, as we do, be sure to label your pots. It is almost impossible to tell what is in a blank pot.  It is equally hard to tell what that tiny green thing is going to be.

We recently did talks on how to grow almonds and recipes to use your almonds. As with those talks, our baby dates are far too young to produce fruit at this time. We will be buying dates to eat and to use in cooking for several years, till our babies are old enough to give us fruit. But for now, that is fine. As with many of our other talks, we note, if you do not have a way to grow your own ingredients, that is ok. You can buy in bulk and use fresh ingredients to make the products you want. Buying may not be fully self-sufficient but again, it is one step in the right direction.

We know growing dates is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. Not everyone will be able to grow their own. Many people may not even want to. You may grow your own dates and find that you only get a small harvest every year. All of those things are ok. You now know how to grow dates, even if you do not do it now, you have the ability to do so in the future if the need arises.

Next week, we will share some recipes to use dates to expand your cooking habits. Please do come back next week and see what we have to share. We hope you have enjoyed this talk and that you have taken some of this information to heart.

Thank you for visiting and please come again for another edition of Out Standing in the Field.