Charleville - Part 3

Who’d have thought that there was so much to see in Charleville?

On our next day we went on yet another tour.  This time it was to a date farm.  Now that is something different, so not to be missed.  We had spoken to a lady at the caravan park who highly recommended it after her tour the previous day.

The farm is “Outback Date Farms” and was established in 2014.  Mark, the owners had grown some date trees at his property near Brisbane and wanted to take it further.  He settled on Charleville, due to the climate, and in a very enterprising manner, approached the local council.  The property he had selected was just down stream from the sewerage treatment works.  The runoff, after treatment, was basically just running down the paddock.  Mark requested that he could use the water.  They said yes, but on the condition that once established, he run tours of the farm.  

He has established a series of ponds and dams.

There are 500 trees in the farm.  He had planned to expand more, but has determined that it would create too much work to manage.

Date palms are the most salt tolerant of all fruits, so suit the climate well.  They also produce lots of offshoot plants, so are easy to propagate and expand your grove.

There are several varieties.  The only variety that most of us had heard of was Medjool.  Most of those are grown in California.  He has a lot of other varieties and people from the Middle East are familiar with them and were delighted to be able to buy them fresh in Australia.  You can see one of the offshoots on the date palm in the above photo.

We did a taste test, and there really was quite a difference, and some of the other varieties are sweeter than the medjool.  As well as just the dates, we tasted date juice and date liqueur.  All very nice.  As they are a relatively small operation, they mainly sell fresh dates, not dried.  Sadly, in the heavy rains earlier this year, his cool room leaked and much of the most recent harvest was damaged.

The tour concluded with morning tea of a delicious date loaf, and we were all given the recipe.  You could buy some of the products, and we purchased some sticky date pudding for tea that night.  Yum.

We really enjoyed the tour and Mark was a very engaging and informative guide.  It was not something we had expected to see, so a nice bonus.