It puts out new growth, but it soon turns
brown and the tree looks pretty sad. I thought that leaving a few of the
dead fronds may provide the new growth with shade. So far that hasn’t
helped.
The tree is in the east side of the house
and gets morning sun. It is shaded by the house to the west and a large
palo verde tree on the south side of the house.
Any help would be a life-saver. My
other palms seem to be thriving, but this little guy is sick.
A. It looks like a windmill palm.
What I'm looking at looks exactly like a lack of water. I hope you are not
watering every day. You should give plants like this a long burst of water and
then hold off before you water again. In the summer this might be 2 or 3 days
apart. In the winter this could be a a week to 10 days apart.
Windmill Palm and Drought
Windmill Palm will have leaf scorch a
little bit in our climate but not that much. If that exposure is on the south
or west side of the house it's probably a bad location for it because of the
heat reflected off of the house and also the rock below the palm. That location
can be very hot.
What Todo
You can get some of that leaf scorch to
disappear by adding more drip emitters around the palm and making sure that it
gets enough water. I am guessing that your palm should receive about 15 gallons
each time it's watered. I would have at least 4 drip emitters under that palm,
located about 18 inches from the trunk. The amount of water depends on how many
minutes the drip operates. Let's say you have it watering for 60 minutes. Then
you would need for drip emitters that are 4 gallons per hour located under the
palm tree. If your system is on for 30 minutes then I would have 6 drip
emitters under the canopy and these are the 5 gallon per hour.
Another alternative is to not use drip
emitters but a coil of drip tubing circling the tree. .Let's again say
you are running it for 60 minutes. This tubing would be connected to your
irrigation supply line and be about 15 feet long. The tubing would have
emitters embedded in the tubing 1 foot apart and they would be 1 gallon per
hour emitters. If you are watering for 30 minutes, then use a coil 30 feet long
circling the Palm multiple times. The tubing would be put under the rock. In
any regard, the problem appears to be not enough water is being applied.
Excellent advice! People tend to not leave their drip irrigation systems on long enough for each station. They don't realize that it takes a while for those emitters to deliver the water the plants need. That's why it's important to have the drip systems separate stations from lines that have pop up sprayers or bubblers on them. I'd also tell this person asking the question that they should indeed leave the dying and dead leaves on the palm tree. As the leaves die, the plant draws nutrients from them for use elsewhere in the plant. Removing leaves that are still green robs the plant of nutrients and of photosynthetic area. Palms dont' have very many green leaves on them to begin with, so each leaf is important. I'd also leave the plants around the base of the palm. In fact, I'd rather see trees, even palms, growing in a bed full of other plants than to be marooned in a quarry of bare rocks like that. A 'living mulch' of other plants protects the soil and the roots within it from getting so hot and dried out. As long as this person follows your irrigation advice for the tree, there will be plenty of water for this tree and a bed full of lantana and other plants. You almost never see one plant growing by itself out in nature or even in 'untended' in-town yards, not even in the desert climate. It almost always has a community of other plants growing around it.
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