PROCEEDINGS OP THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 253 



planted along with one of the males. The male flowers are cut from 

 their sides as they emerge, carried to the female trees, and a very fine 

 pollen dusted over the female flowers. If, for any reason, the crop of 

 pollen should be destroyed in a given year, the date-growers realize that 

 they would lose their crops; so they make a practice of drying these 

 pollenating flowers, wrapping them in some tight material and hanging 

 them up until the next season. It is a very interesting fact that the 

 pollen will keep its vitality until the next year. I pollenated these 

 trees from flowers that were born in the little park next to the Indio 

 Hotel, took the pollen out three times, and it set fourteen magnificent 

 clusters of fruit. At the time I left the hotel in the latter part of July 

 I think there were fully four hundred pounds of green dates — perhaps 

 they would have weighed more than that — on the tree. They didn't 

 allow those dates to ripen properly, for I have been told that the partly 

 ripened dates were carried away by the pocketfuls. 



The most extensive date plantation is at, Tempe, Arizona, where the 

 U. S. Department of Agriculture furnished the offshoots. It now con- 

 tains six hundred trees, including something like two hundred of the 

 choicest grown in the north of Africa and the Persian Gulf district. 



The ground is furnished and the work carried on by the Arizona 

 Experiment Station, and the results as to fruit, usually shared by the 

 Department of Agriculture and the state. I spent two weeks in the. 

 study of this recently. The conditions for successful date-growing are 

 rather reversed this year. Instead of having the dry, hot weather all 

 autumn, there were two and a half inches of rainfall in the month of 

 October at Tempe, cool nights, heavy dews, and plenty of water in the 

 river, so that irrigation began on the ranches and the water came up to 

 within thirty-one inches of the surface. The date garden was filled 

 with a blanket of almost saturated air during the nighttime, moisture 

 emanated from the soil during the day and the dates began to rot, so 

 that only the earlier varieties were successfully cured. We are hoping 

 that some of the very choicest of the later ripening bunches may 

 still be cured, as they have had much better weather in the latter part 

 of November and into December. 



The very queen of all the dates so far brought into this country is 

 the Deglet Nuer, meaning the "date of light." Of all the varieties 

 that we have studied thus far, this is the date that requires the highest 

 number of heat units for its perfection. It is considered that the mini- 

 mum temperature for date-growing is about 64.4 degrees — that is, of 

 mean temperature of the day — so that all the heat units above that 

 during the growing season, from May to October, may be placed to the 

 credit of the date. If something like 3,000 or 4,000 units are accumu- 

 lated during that time, that is, if we have about a mean of 70 degrees 

 as is maintained in the Fresno country where the raisins are perfected 



