Welcome to Palm Hollow! If you've driven Highway 111 through the Coachella Valley in the fall, you've seen the rows of date palms with their fruit bunches wrapped up in paper bags like presents. Gardens like ours. Next time, pull in. I'll pour you a date shake, and you'll understand why people drive all the way back from Los Angeles for another one.

Our Story  ~  The Shake Stand  ~  Holiday Gift Boxes  ~  Visiting the Garden  ~  How Dates Are Grown  ~  Dates We Grow

I'm Cynthia Almanza, and this garden has been my family's for fifty-one years. My father came home from the war and went to work on a big date ranch down the valley, and in 1948 he and my mother bought twenty acres of sand of their own and planted it with offshoots, one hole at a time. I was seven. I remember the hot wind, and the water running down the furrows, and my mother telling me that the little palms would be taller than our house someday. They are a good deal taller than our house now.

The first palms bore fruit in the early fifties, and in 1953 my mother set up a blender and an ice chest under a lean-to by the road and sold date shakes for a quarter. The lean-to is long gone, but the shake stand is in the same spot, and her recipe hasn't changed.

I grew up climbing those palms, went off to school, married, and lived over in Riverside for a lot of years. In 1985, when my father's knees told him he was through climbing ladders, I came home and took over the garden. Today it's a little over thirty acres and about 1,400 palms, mostly Deglet Noor, with a good block of Medjools and a few rows of the less common kinds for the curious. My mother is 84 and still comes down to the stand on Saturday mornings to make sure I'm doing it right.

Our date shake is ground dates, vanilla ice cream and a little cold milk. That's all, and that's plenty. It's thick. You'll want the spoon for the first five minutes and the straw after that.

It's 110 degrees by noon in July and nobody wants to stand in that, including me. Fall hours start Friday, October 1, and the weather is lovely from then until May. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

Every November and December we pack gift boxes by hand and send them all over the country. We have customers who have sent the same box to the same aunt in Ohio every Christmas for thirty years. Each box is a mix of Deglet Noors and Medjools, packed in layers in a gold box with a card in your words.

How to order. There's no order form here. Just write to me the way you'd write a letter, at [email protected], or call us at (555) 555-0128. Tell me:

• your name, address and telephone number,
• who each box is going to, and their address,
• which size box, mixed or all Medjool,
• and what you'd like the card to say.

I'll write back to confirm, and we'll mail you a bill when your boxes go out. You can pay by check, or call and give us a card number over the telephone. Please don't send a credit card number by e-mail. We start shipping the Monday before Thanksgiving, and to be sure of Christmas delivery, order by Monday, December 13.

You're welcome to walk out among the palms. There's a shady path through the Medjool block with little signs that explain what you're looking at, and picnic tables behind the stand under the tamarisk windbreak. Bring the kids. Bring your camera. In the fall you can watch the dates coming down off the trees, and in the spring you can watch the pollinating, if you can stand to see somebody forty feet up a ladder.

School groups, garden clubs and tour buses are welcome with a call ahead. We'll give the talk and pass around a strand of fresh dates.

Finding us: we're on Highway 111 southeast of Indio, on the way to the Salton Sea. Look for the green sign on the posts with the palms behind it, the same as the one at the top of this page.

People are always surprised by how much handwork goes into a box of dates. Here is the year in a date garden, in short.

• Right here. Most of the dates grown in the United States come from the Coachella Valley. A date palm wants it hot overhead and plenty of water at the roots, and the valley has the heat, and irrigation brings the water.
  
  
• Planting. A date palm doesn't come true from seed, so we plant offshoots, the pups that grow up around the base of a mother palm. Every Medjool in our garden is a twin of the palm it was cut from. A young palm takes several years to start bearing, and a healthy one will keep bearing for generations.
  
  
• Pollinating, in the spring. Only the female palms bear fruit, and we don't trust the wind to do the job. When the flower clusters open, workers climb each female palm on ladders and tie strands of flowers from a male palm into the female flowers, or dust the pollen on. The clusters don't all open at once, so each palm gets climbed more than once. One male palm can furnish pollen for a lot of females.
  
  
• Summer work. The bunches are thinned so the dates that are left grow bigger, then tied down to the leaves so they don't snap off, and then wrapped in paper bags to keep off the rain and the birds.
  
  
• Harvest, in the fall. Dates ripen from late summer through the fall, and they don't all ripen at once either, so the pickers climb again and again. The dates come into the packing shed to be cleaned, sorted and graded by hand. That's where we are right now, and it's my favorite time of year.

A date goes through stages on the tree. First it's green, then khalal: full-sized, crunchy, and yellow or red depending on the kind. Then rutab, when it starts going soft and brown from the tip. Then tamar, fully ripe, soft and sweet. Almost every date you've ever bought was a tamar date. To taste the difference, see Dates We Grow.

Coming to the festival? The National Date Festival comes to Indio every February along with the county fair, and yes, there are camel races. Stop by and see us on your way. We're open.