How Dates Came to California: From Mission Gardens to the 1927 Medjool Rescue

Every Medjool date grown in America — including every one on our palms in Sky Valley — descends from a handful of offshoots that crossed the Atlantic in 1927 to escape a disease. That story is the short version of how California became date country. Here’s the longer one, from a farmer living inside it.

The mission years: dates arrive, but don’t matter yet

Date palms first reached California with the Spanish missions in the 1700s — grown from seed in mission gardens up and down the coast. Seedling dates are a lottery (every seed is a new, usually mediocre variety), so for a century and a half the date palm in California was an ornament with occasional fruit, not an industry.

We grow these. Golden Zahidi Dates — Nutty, Less Sweet, Never Sticky | California Farm-Direct from our family farm in Sky Valley, California — from $15/lb, shipping included. See them →

The USDA explorers: the desert finds its crop

The industry begins around the turn of the twentieth century, when USDA plant explorers — the botanist Walter T. Swingle chief among them — went looking for crops that could make American deserts productive, and came back from North Africa and the Middle East with offshoots: the rooted suckers that grow from a date palm’s base and carry the variety true, the only way to clone a proven date. Deglet Noor from Algeria’s oases led the wave, and a USDA date station near Indio put the imports to the test.

The Coachella Valley turned out to be nearly perfect — the old date-grower’s saying wants the palm’s “feet in water and head in the fire,” and this below-sea-level desert with water under it delivers exactly that. Hotter and drier than much of the Middle East in summer, mild in winter: the fruit cures on the tree. We wrote more about why in Coachella Valley: the Date Capital of the United States.

The 1920s boom: Arabia in the desert

By the twenties the valley had a full-blown date culture — groves from Indio to Mecca and Thermal, roadside date shops, date shakes, and a festival in Indio that leaned all the way into the Arabian Nights theme. Some farms selling today go straight back to that era (Fresh Dates by Anderson among them), and Shields Date Garden — founded 1924 — still pours the shakes.

1927: the Medjool rescue

The king of dates nearly didn’t make it here. Medjool was a prized variety of Morocco’s oases — and in the 1920s a fungal disease was destroying Morocco’s palms. In 1927, eleven Medjool offshoots were sent to the United States in the hope of preserving the variety. They were planted in strict isolation in southern Nevada, far from any date palm that could pass or catch disease, and watched for years. Nine survived.

Those nine were eventually moved to the USDA station in the Coachella Valley, multiplied the slow way — offshoot by offshoot — and released to growers in the 1940s. Every American Medjool palm is their descendant. When you eat a California Medjool, you’re tasting a variety that exists here because somebody moved eleven root suckers across an ocean ahead of a disease.

And today

American dates now grow in two great desert regions — the Coachella Valley here in California, and the Yuma/Bard Valley country along the Arizona–California line — plus small groves like ours scattered through the desert between. The work hasn’t changed much: offshoots, hand pollination (here’s what that looks like), bagged bunches, hand harvest. The farms of the Coachella Valley are the living museum of all of it.

Our own small chapter: Medjool, Zahidi and Barhi palms in Sky Valley, hand-harvested every fall — this season’s descendants of those nine survivors, from $19, shipping included.

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Written by Jason Shopshear of Desert Sun Dates, Sky Valley, California.