DATE CULTURE IN EGYPT AND THE SUDAN 37 
practice, both in Egypt and in the Sudan, of cutting in August can 
hardly be called in question. 
A shipment of offshoots collected by the writer in Dongola 
Province about September 20 reached Cairo in fine condition, and 
when planted in the experiment station gardens at Giza, they at 
once began a healthy growth. 21 
The date gardeners in Egypt, and still more so in the Sudan, are 
handicapped by the lack of suitable tools for the removal of off- 
shoots. Often with nothing but their worn-out cultivating hoes for 
digging and a small blunt chisel with which to sever the shoot from 
the trunk, they do not dig deeply enough to provide a ball of roots 
and are inclined to resort to wrenching and twisting to free the 
shoot from the mother trunk, often cracking and damaging it at 
the heart. The percentage of loss is considerable. A number of 
heavy offshoot chisels of the Drummond pattern were forged, under 
the writer's direction, for use in Dongola Province, and these are 
likely to work a revolution in offshoot removal in the Dongola 
reach of the Nile. 
A practice which is reported to be in vogue in Sukkot is to wrap 
three or four offshoots tightly in a bundle with date fiber (leef) 
and old sacking and anchor them in the margin of a river or in a 
shallow pool until they form a mass of roots, then under further 
wrapping of leef they are transported by camel several days to the 
nearest market. 
The valuable observations of Brown (3, vol. 5, pp. 61^-66) on the 
propagation of the date palm by offshoots are here reproduced. 
PROPAGATION BY MEANS OF OFFSHOOTS 

When the offshoot is planted it very soon commences to make other off- 
shoots, even if it has not done this before its removal from the parent tree. 
Some cultivators leave the offshoots until the mother plant has attained an 
age of from 15 to 20 years and then remove all the shoots at the same time. 
Others remove the most advanced shoots before that time and leave the 
smaller ones until later. * * * Under normal conditions a healthy tree 
produces 10 to 25 offshoots at its base. The entire group is known as a 
kosha. * * . * 
The offshoots which arise at the surface of the ground commence rooting 
before they are severed from the parent stem, but there are often one or 
two situated higher up in the kosha which show no signs of giving off roots. 
These are known as demmil or ta'oon and are usually thrown away as being 
unfit for planting, although the soil is sometimes heaped around them until 
rcots appear. * * * 
In Nubia the offshoots are usually allowed to grow on the mother tree until 
the young plants have stems 1 to iy 2 meters long. They are then cut half 
through, bent to the ground, covered with earth, and watered by hand until 
the young tree has produced roots. 
Date palms may be planted almost any season of the year. The time 
of the high Nile — August and September — is the most popular season in all 
parts of the country, but more especially in the south. The temperature is 
:hen comparatively low, the atmosphere moist, and water plentiful. Next 
to this the spring months of March and April are looked upon as being the 
most favorable season for planting. The vegetative growth of the trees com- 
mences toward the end of April or the beginning of May, 22 and the offshoot 
21 A planting of Deglet Noor offshoots cut and set near Indio, Calif., in August, 1923, 
when seen in 1924 promised a high percentage of success. Ahout 90 per cent survived. 
32 Mr. Brown has failed to note that the date palm has no really dormant period. 
