A date with destiny

A date with destiny

A fruit famous in the Middle East is now growing well in Thailand, but a helping hand is needed to get it to produce.

SOCIAL & LIFESTYLE
A date with destiny
Iin the mix: After pollination by hand, each bunch is tied loosely together to encourage the pollens to mix with the female flowers.

If I remember it right, Thais started to plant Phoenix dactylifera, or date palm, in the 1980s. I have never heard of the trees successfully bearing fruit, so I put it down to the climate.

Perhaps Thailand was just too wet for these natives of the Middle East’s tropical oases.

The annual agricultural fair at Kasetsart University last month was, for me, an eye-opener. Several growers from different parts of the country brought not only trees to sell, but fruit as well. One showed enlarged photos of his date palms in big woven baskets, with long bunches of fruit reaching to the ground.

He said his trees came from Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and Tunisia and the photos showed they were all thriving in his palm grove in Sam Phran, Nakhon Pathom province. Some of the fruit were cylindrical, others oval; some were dark brown, while others were lighter in colour, and some were bigger than the others, but the one I tasted was very sweet.

Trees ranged in price from 150 to 3,000 baht, depending on size. The nurseryman claimed the medium-sized trees would take only three years to bear fruit, the big and more expensive ones in only one year.

Is growing date palms as easy as he claimed? Could they bear fruit in every part of Thailand? Dates, which Thais call intapalam, are packed with essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals that are beneficial to one’s overall health and well-being. What’s more, they are said to be rich in antioxidants that guard against colon, prostate, breast, endometrial, lung and pancreatic cancers. If the nurseryman’s claims were true, imagine how wonderful it would be to have a steady supply of this nutritious and healthful fruit if you had a tree in your backyard?

Spiky: Part of Petchsuporn Rapley’s date palm orchard, and a tree in bloom. Note the giant thorns as sharp as nails.

It seems the nurseryman was telling the truth. “What he said applies to our 36 Deglet Noor and mixed Barhee/Deglet Noor varieties that I planted as an experiment a little over three years ago,” Petchsuporn Rapley, who has about 100 trees, wrote in from Chiang Mai after reading Green Fingers on Feb 14, which mentioned dates in passing.

“We had a couple of males that started to flower two years ago,” she added. “Last year, a few more started to flower. I was able to cross-pollinate them manually and bring them to fruition for the first time.”

Ms Petchsuporn said that more than 10 of her trees are now in bloom.

“One has just split open to reveal that it is another male. Of course, the hope is that there will be more females than males.”

Date palms are dioecious, which means that male and female flowers are produced on separate plants. Only the female plants bear fruit; they are wind pollinated, but in the Middle East where they originated, date palms are pollinated manually.

Getting her date palms to bear fruit is a new experience for Ms Petchsuporn and her gardeners. A former staff member of the United Nations in New York, she retired young to indulge in her love of gardening at Doi Saket in Chiang Mai. She set up her orchard from scratch, from rice fields that she and her husband Clint slowly expanded from just a couple of rai to the 20 they have now.

“I did my usual research prior to forfeiting more than one rai to growing these strange Phoenix dactylifera, which can grow as tall as a six-storey building,” she said in her email. “They are dioecious, much like avocado, and keep their sex a mystery until the first flower, years down the road.

“To compound the problem, the male will flower about a month before the female (around January and February), making it necessary to cut the male flowers, dry the pollen and keep it around to manually pollinate the female flowers, which will start to emerge from late February through to March or April. Bees would love to help, but there’s that pesky time-lapse.”

The pollination process is no piece of cake either, Ms Petchsuporn added. “You will have to brave those sharp-as-nail giant thorns to reach inside to sprinkle the male pollen onto the female flowers. You would repeat the process about three times on different days to ensure success, then tie the sprigs together to force them to droop down together. Then you wait for nature to take its course. Once the fruit arrives and is maturing, each bunch will have to be covered to protect them from the elements as well as from the eager eyes of birds and squirrels.”

A mature date palm can carry more than 100kg of fruit. Some, like the Deglet Noor, known as the queen of dates, should be eaten after they ripened; others, like the Barhee variety, can be eaten before maturity. Those golden yellow ones sold at Paragon and eaten fresh are of the Barhee variety, Ms Petchsuporn said.

Apart from date palms, Ms Petchsuporn also grows hundreds of other fruit trees, from longan to mango, coconut, betel nut, banana, papaya, sugar apple, lime, pomelo, etc. The water supply comes from the village water system, from rainfall and from her own wells and is retained in large ponds and a system of canals and ditches.

She has just converted another 10 rai of rice field into orchard land. While digging ponds, her workers discovered sand, so she had them pile it up and turn it into an island, on which she planted 100 betel nut palms.

“We also grow a variety of vegetables and herbs for our own consumption,” Ms Petchsuporn said, showing me her vegetable garden through photos she sent. “We also grow corn and peanuts in between fruit trees which also help improve the soil. We make our own compost and use natural fertilisers as much as we can.

“We are lucky to have wonderful, enthusiastic gardeners who love what they do; some of them have lived with us since the beginning, 20 years ago,” she added.

Ms Petchsuporn and her husband still divide their time between New York and Chiang Mai every year, but in a few years’ time, they hope to be able to move to their home sweet home on Doi Saket for good.


Email nthongtham@gmail.com.

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