#11-6 Feb 14 and 17, Martha’s Garden and Jazz on the green.

Valentines Day found us with the Cactus Wrens HR club again on an outing to Martha’s Garden, a fairly new Date Grove. Their oldest trees are 20 years old. The son of the owner was our guide. They only take out 20 people at a time and we all ride on the tram with various stops along the way where we learned about date farming.

Above our guide is telling us how the dates grow, are pollinated, and harvested. This is a year round job, with the bulk of the work done during the pollination (all by hand) and then the harvesting, again all by hand.

The flower stem is just beginning to grow up through the fronds. It will be pollinated and continue to ripen throughout the summer. Dates need hot dry weather to produce. They are harvested in late fall or early winter. It all depends on the summer weather as to when they ripen.

Above is a newly planted field of date palms. They grow about 5 to 7 years before they produce any fruit. Sure looks hot and dry to me. The palms have to have water during the year and all the irrigation is under ground. This particular farm is not on the irrigation canal so has eight wells drilled and pumping water to each of the 3,500 acres of trees.

Below is the view looking down from the mesa that the palm trees are on and into the valley where the canal is used for irrigation. Acres and acres of “food.” It is the lettuce capital of the world.

The evening of 2-17 we attended the Jazz series concert at the Yuma Palms Mall. It is held outside, and again when the sun went down we got cold and returned to the RV. We stayed for the first half and were nicely entertained.