Shhhh...the Elephants are Sleeping!

I just have to start this post with a story.  It really has nothing to do with anything I'm writing about - except babies, which is the whole theme of this particular post.  So, really, I guess I just gave myself permission to start with this story.

Back in the day when I was much younger, I was invited to spend a week at the beach in Florida with a dear friend and her family.  At the time her oldest daughter, who is now grown with a son of her own, was all of maybe 5 years old.

Most afternoons, after hanging out at the beach for a few hours, we would retreat to the nearby pool and restaurant to have a snack and a swim in water without sand (and without sharks, which at the time I did not think was a problem at that beach...but that's another story).

The name of the restaurant/pool area was The Elephant Walk, and my friend's daughter loved to pretend that the elephants swam in the pool with us.  Sometimes if we raised our voices a little too much, she would caution us with "Shhhhhhh!  The elephants are sleeping!"

I ended up spending a week at the beach with this family for many summers, even after the kids were grown.   That was the only summer I remember her talking about the sleeping elephants.  Maybe the elephants moved up north after that summer.

Thanks for enduring my little story.  Every time I think of babies sleeping (or anyone sleeping, for that matter) and the need to lower our voices, I hear her little voice in my mind saying "Shhhhh!  The elephants are sleeping!"

So that brings me back to the babies.

I have some babies, and I want to show them to you!

I don't have any baby elephant ears, which would go along perfectly with the story, but I have something even more exciting than baby elephant ears!

Ready?  Hang on to your seats!  Okay......

Look!

Isn't he/she so cute?!?
I think I will name him/her Medjie.

Now you are probably thinking "big deal" in some sort of sarcastic thinking tone.  And you are probably wondering what it is.

It's a baby Medjool Date Palm Tree!

I travel to Israel every winter for a few weeks, and I always bring home Medjool dates as gifts for various people (and some for me).  They are SO yummy!

Well, I forgot that I had spit two of the pits into a tissue and put them in my handbag.  I found them in April, and rather than just throw them into the trash, I decided to keep them and maybe plant them and see if I could get them to sprout.

So I planted them both together in this little clay pot at the end of May.
And look what popped up about 2 weeks ago!  (Talk about slow-growing!)

There is no sign of the second one, but one is enough excitement for now.  I don't know what I'd do with twins!  I wouldn't know where to buy matching outfits for Medjool Date Palm babies.

As soon as I saw that little head breaking ground, I went Googling to find out all I could about how to raise a Date Palm baby.

Well....let me tell you.  If I knew how complicated this would be, I might not have planted that seed.
No, I'm sure I would still have planted it.

But, what I discovered is that Medjool dates are so expensive and so yummy because of all the hard work that goes into pollinating and thinning them out.
First of all, this baby tree will either be a boy or a girl (maybe I should call them by the correct botanical names - either male or female).
No problem so far.  I wait and see if my tree produces pollen or flowers.

Then I read more...turns out that most good Medjool Date Palm Trees are grown as suckers from the root and trunk of the parent tree.  Seeds are never used to produce good Medjool Date Palm Trees.

Okay, so now I know I don't have to worry about waiting to see if the tree grows to produce a 10 pound pollen sheath or loads of flowers.
And I don't have to wait for another seed to sprout that happens to be the opposite sex of my baby tree.  And I don't have to wait years for them to grow old enough to reproduce.
And I don't have to collect the pollen from the sheath and thin out most of the flowers and pollinate each flower by hand.
And I don't have to move to the desert where cold winters won't kill my baby tree.
And there is so much more to this trick of growing Medjool Date Palm Trees.
(check it out online for yourself - it's actually quite fascinating!)

Now I can just be content knowing that I am raising a baby that will never grow fully and will never produce babies.  And I will be content knowing that my baby will have to stay in a pot and come inside every winter.  I will just watch him/her grow (slowly!) week by week and enjoy the fact that one of my Medjool date seeds actually sprouted!!


In my amazement at this sprouting, I must also share a sprouting much more amazing and formerly thought impossible (so now you know there is no way the sprouting was done by me!).

During my winter trip to Israel in 2012, my tour group visited a kibbutz named Ketura in the Arava Desert.  They grow many innovative crops (including crops of a special kind of algae).
They also provide the permanent home for Methuselah.

I'm not talking about the old bones of the very old man in the Bible.
I'm talking about the young bones (fronds) of the very old seed of a date palm from the Masada excavation.
That makes it about 2000 years old (but just a few years since the sprouting).

Here is a photo of Methuselah in 2012 (with the tour group members erased as much as possible - sorry for sloppy look).

Apparently they have discovered that Methuselah is a male (appropriately), and they hope to use his pollen to pollinate females to end up with a date palm with characteristics from a heretofore extinct date palm tree!

You can read more about Methuselah at the website of The Arava Institute.
And if you would like to read more about what Kibbutz Ketura is up to, check out their website.


Here is one more photo from my trip to the kibbutz. This is looking at one of their current date palm groves from inside the grove.  If you look closely you should be able to see two dots at the base of a tree.  These two dots are actually two donkeys eating weeds in the grove (and applying a fertilizing mulch).  That's how huge these trees are!

Now back to Oklahoma....
Before I put the babies to bed, I would like to share a few more baby photos from my nursery (pun intended).

Wisteria...now in it's second year.
One of the people I do some gardening work for gave me this as a 3 inch tall runaway sprout coming up in his lawn.  I'm going to keep it potted and see if I can do a large bonsai/small Wisteria tree.

And speaking of runaways...this is a 3-month old lawn shoot-up from my landlady's prolific blackberry bush.  These shoots pop up 5 and 10 feet from the mother bush, in the middle of the lawn.  They usually get mowed over, but sometimes I uproot one and pot it to give away as a starter.

My parents have a large thriving bush from one of these lawn-starters.

This one is going to its new home tomorrow...one of my gardening customers would like to have it.




One more....

These are sprouts of Mexican Petunia (Ruellia), the dwarf clumping kind.  They also came from a gardening customer.  I love these plants for Oklahoma. They do well in the heat and the dry summers.  They seem to overwinter just fine.  And the purple blooms and spiky dark-green leaves are a great combination.
Oh, and those little plants surrounding the Mexican Petunia?  Those are baby purslane seedlings...I have thousands of them!

But purslane will have to wait for its own post later - it's one of those great edible weeds!

I have a few more babies in the nursery, but these are all the photos I have at the moment.
And it's bedtime (at least for me...been a long hot day), so I will say good night.

Thanks for letting me share photos of my babies!