The air feels like an oven this time of year in the Bard valley. The temperature has reached over 110F every day for weeks now – some days coming close to 120F – forcing most residents of the agricultural valley, nestled at the intersection of the Arizona, California and Mexican borders, inside. But the date palms at Sun Garden Farms love it. “The old adage is that Medjool dates require 100 days over 100 degrees to thrive.” Hundreds of date palms fill Sun Garden Farms’ nearly 200-acre property. But each palm, and every other one of the thousands of date palms grown across the Bard valley region, are descendants of just one palm that was growing in Morocco nearly a hundred years ago. Today, two of the original date palms that Swingle imported from Morocco still stand – at Sun Garden Farms. Towering nearly 100ft in the sky, the two palms look over the Bard valley, where over the past 70 years thousands of their offspring have grown. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/01/medjool-dates-arizona-heat-climate-bard-valley There are about 3,000 varieties of dates grown worldwide
