Date farm uses castoff clothes to keep birds at bay

TECOPA, Calif.-- Junior Huffman made his living in the Mojave Desert as a miner and a rancher. It wasn't until he reached his mid-60s that he developed an interest in women's clothes.

Don't judge the man. He just wanted a few more dates.

Huffman is credited with a novel solution to an annoying and expensive problem at the China Ranch Date Farm, 80 miles west of Las Vegas. To protect the ripening dates from ravens and other birds, Huffman started "clothing" the fruit with old dresses and other garments cast off by a thrift store in Pahrump.

China Ranch owner Brian Brown said he was skeptical and a little "horrified" by the idea at first. He quickly changed his mind once he discovered that the dresses worked better and cost less than the butcher paper he had been using to wrap his dates. Plus, many of the garments could be reused.

"There was nothing bad about it," Brown said.

Thus began an August tradition at China Ranch: the annual dressing of the dates.

"You spend most of your life learning to take dresses off. Now at 75 I'm learning to put them on," Huffman said.

He and Brown get started just after the sun comes up to avoid the worst of the heat and the horseflies.

The dates on some of the smaller trees can be wrapped from the ground, but much of the work must be done from the top of a man lift. For the farm's oldest palms, grown from mail-order seeds planted 90 years ago by Brown's great aunt, that means dressing dates more than five stories up.

They break out the dresses and other old clothes as the dates begin to ripen from green to yellow or red.

The farm has roughly 500 fruit-bearing trees, each with multiple date bunches, and it takes several weeks to wrap them all.

"It gets real tedious," Brown said. "But it saves us thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars in bird loss, so it's worth doing."

As an added bonus, the multicolored dresses hanging from the trees have turned into something of a tourist draw, boosting sales in the farm's bakery and gift shop.

"We get people calling the gift shop asking, 'When are you putting the dresses on the dates?'" Brown said.

Huffman's deal with the Pahrump thrift store hasn't changed in the more than 10 years since he first dreamed up the idea. He still pays two bucks for each trash bag full of old garments and bedding, and the store still has a way to unload some of its ugliest, most unsellable merchandise.

Brian said what turns up in the bags is always a surprise.

In the trees right now you will find ungodly floral print numbers and lots of garments in cuts and styles that didn't quite catch on. In other words, dresses that might never been on dates before.

Mixed in with these are old sheets, curtains and children's bedding featuring Goofy the dog and Barney the purple dinosaur.

One bunch of honey dates sports a rodeo shirt trimmed with a faux-Southwestern pattern of pastel shapes that no self-respecting cowboy would ever wear.

"One year we had a graduation gown in here somewhere," Brown said.

Once they even used a wedding dress, but it barely lasted one season. "Lace wouldn't hold," Huffman said.

As a general rule, form-fitting stuff is no good. What they look for is "big and draping," Brown said. "Muumuus work best."

They've also seen their share of negliges doused in perfume, "some of them big enough to cover a Volkswagen," Brown said.

"It's traumatic for me from time to time. I don't think it hurts the dates," he said with a smile. "If we didn't do this in another couple of weeks there would just be thousands of birds in a frenzy all over the place down here."

Some of the major date groves near Palm Springs, Calif., keep birds out by wrapping fruit in specially made cloth bags with drawstrings. Brown runs a small, boutique operation by comparison; he can't afford anything like that, he said.

China Ranch will start harvesting dates in mid-September. Brown said some of the fruit will remain on the trees -- and fully clothed -- until it's ready to be picked at the end of the year.

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350.