Male flowers produce pollen, and female flowers develop into fruit. Thick, sweet flesh, covered by tough skin, surrounds a single large seed. Dates range in color from yellow to orange, red, or green, depending on the variety. Dates grow in clusters at the end of stalks. A single cluster on some mature varieties of date palm can hold between 600 and 1,700 dates at time of picking.
Date palms bear much fruit.
Cultivation and production. Dates require warm temperatures and low humidity to ripen properly. The roots of the date palm need a regular supply of water, such as that provided by irrigation or an underground spring. Date palms may be raised from seeds. But growers more commonly raise them from suckers cut from a parent plant.