Harvesting Medjool Dates

It's that time of year again... It’s time to harvest our delicious, soft Organic Medjool Dates! Our dates are specially grown and handpicked to ensure we are providing your family with the highest quality date possible. We want to share the steps and process that our team of Ranchers and Palmeros go through to grow and harvest Coachella’s Best Organic Dates!

Location, Location, Location
Our dates are grown under the beautiful, hot Coachella Valley sun, at Del Rey Farms, a one-hundred-acre organic farm. The Coachella Valley is known as the Date Mecca of the United States and for good reason! The dry, hot desert provides an optimal growing environment for dates because they cannot pollinate in temperatures less than 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

Lending a Hand
Given their name, you would think that Dates are love experts, but in actuality, when it comes to pollination they need a little help. Unfortunately, birds and insects are not particularly attracted to the flowers produced by the date palms. Wind pollination can do the trick, but it is unreliable. In order to ensure a successful date, we pollinate our palms by hand. In late February/ early March the pollen is collected from the male trees and used to pollinate our female trees. Around April to May, we will begin to see the date fruits begin to bud!

Picking a Date
As our dates start growing, we wrap a white mesh bag around them. Not only does this help catch any ripe dates that fall off the vine, but it also helps to protect them from insects and birds since we never use any harmful chemicals or pesticides at our farm! Once the dates are ready to be harvested, our Ranchers and Palmeros head up the trees in a lift. They attach a flat basket on a branch above the fruit and untie the mesh bag. They then shake the branch and all of the dates fall off the vine and into the basket. The basket of dates is then dumped into a tray where they are hand-sorted, getting rid of any less than perfect dates. They are then driven to a sorting table where the dates are sorted through by hand (AGAIN) and packed into boxes. The boxes of dates are then taken to our storage facility where they are refrigerated until you place your order!

Order your Coachella’s Best Organic Medjool Dates today while they are fresh off the vine! Don’t forget to share your dates and tag us on Instagram @coachellasbestdates!