Date

Favorite Fresh Fruit (33 items)
list by kathy

Fruits By Season (68 items)
list by Meganfan

My Best Food (177 items)
list by MA7AMAD

The fruit of the date palm is known as a date. The fruit's English name (through Old French), as well as the Latin species name dactylifera, both come from the Greek word for "finger", dáktulos, because of the fruit's elongated shape.

Dates are oval-cylindrical, 3–7 cm long, and 2–3 cm (0.79–1.18 in) diameter, and when ripe, range from bright red to bright yellow in colour, depending on variety. Dates contain a single stone about 2–2.5 cm (0.79–0.98 in) long and 6–8 mm (0.24–0.31 in) thick.

Three main cultivar groups of date exist: soft, semi-dry and dry. The type of fruit depends on the glucose, fructose and sucrose content.

The date palm is dioecious, having separate male and female plants. They can be easily grown from seed but only 50 percent of seedlings will be female and hence fruit bearing and dates from seedling plants are often smaller and of poorer quality.

Most commercial plantations thus use cuttings of heavily cropping cultivars. Plants grown from cuttings will fruit 2–3 years earlier than seedling plants.

Dates are naturally wind pollinated but in both traditional oasis horticulture and in the modern commercial orchards they are entirely pollinated manually.

Dates are an important traditional crop in Iraq, Arabia, and north Africa west to Morocco. Dates are also mentioned more than 50 times in the Bible and 20 times in the Qur'an.