Trimming a palm tree

-
It's the first week of June and now is a very good time to trim your palm trees. Their flowering is finished and you can go ahead and trim all of that mess away. What I do is to trim back very hard, leaving only a few leaves. Believe me, they will grow back! Take a look at the spear leaf in the middle. If it's thick and growing strong, your tree is doing great. If there's a white powdery residue, that is also a sign of robust health.

I only have miniatures palms here at The Tropical Paradise. The ones in the picture, dwarf date palms (Phoenix roebellini) have been here for over fifteen years. I crouched down to take the photo so you could see the leaves against the sky, but the trunks are only about six feet tall. If I had planted full-sized palm trees here when I bought this house, all I would would be seeing would be telephone poles. In another fifteen years, these dwarf date palms could get as tall as twelve feet, but never the 80 to 100 feet of full-sized palms. If you suspect that you have full-sized palm trees growing in your backyard, dig them up now and get rid of them while you still can. And then go get yourself some miniatures.

Anyway, cutting back a palm tree very dramatically is called *candlesticking* - and for aesthetic purposes, many trimmers refuse to do it. But it does no harm to the tree itself. In fact, cutting it back to a *candlestick*, and especially trimming all the flowers off, gives the tree a nice break from the heavy burden it has been carrying. And it will come back strong and beautiful.

Now get out there and trim!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to tell if your cycad (sago palm) is alive or dead

-
Image
Cycads are strange plants. They're beautiful, and look like small palm trees, or large ferns. They grow very slowly, and can be very expensive, even common ones like "sago palms". But sago palms, in spite of their common name, aren't palms at all. They belong to a group of plants called cycads. They are wonderfully weird, and grow in strange ways. And sometimes they lose all of their leaves. Of course, if it were a palm tree that lost all of its leaves, you would know that the plant was dead. But it's not true of cycads. So don't dig that cycad up and throw it away! Not yet. If you've recently transplanted a cycad, and the leaves have all faded away, hang on. Take a look at the top center of the plant, at what I call "the pucker". There you will see some stubby, soft fronds, no more than an half-inch or so. At least that's what you should see. That means that the plant is still alive, and has dropped its leaves to focus on building r...
Read more

Rooting sago palm pups for more plants

-
Image
Once a sago palm ( cycas revoluta ) reaches a certain level of maturity, it starts to create pups. Like agaves, these are little plants that are exactly the same as the parent plant, only smaller. And yes, you can trim them off and grow them into new plants. This is how to do it. Cut them off from the parent plant with a sharp knife. If there are any roots at the bottom, try to save them, but chances are there won't be any. That's not a problem. The next step is rooting them. Douse the cut part and the bottom of the plant with some garden sulfur and some rooting hormone powder. Rooting hormone powder is pretty easy to find at your local Home Depot. I had to go to a real nursery to get garden sulfur. Anyway, the idea is to keep the little plant from rotting while giving it time to grow its own roots. Sago palm pups being rooted Bury them fairly deep in some free-draining mix. It should include volcanic pumice, if you can find it, and if not, you can use perlite. I ...
Read more

Growing sunflowers from Pennsylvania in Arizona

-
Image
It's October 21st, and I just received some sunflower seeds from a friend in Pennsylvania. Their season is ending and the season for planting here in Arizona is just beginning, and I'm kinda wondering if the seeds are wondering what's going on? It's spring again already? If you're new to the Phoenix, Arizona area, and are from back east it must seem kinda strange that fall and winter is our flower season, but it is. By springtime it will start to get so hot here that the flowers will die, and of course back east the season is just beginning.  Sunflowers growing in Peoria, Arizona, about a mile from where I live I've seen sunflowers blooming around my neighborhood of Glendale, which is a suburb of Phoenix, in the winter, and although I've never grown them I understand that they're easy to grow. I guess I'll find out - I learn best by doing! The seeds arrived safely, and it's my understanding that they were still connected to the spent flower (I do...
Read more