Gold Coast Gardener

March 12, 2006

By Gene Joyner, Extension Agent
Palm Beach County Cooperative Extension Service

Area palms are slowly recovering from the effects of last fall’s hurricane, but it still will be another year before palms get back to their original healthy beautiful condition. If you’re trying to speed up palm recovery, the best thing you can do is fertilize lightly but frequently the remainder of this year.

Many retail garden centers have good quality palm fertilizers and these can be applied every other month to help speed palm recovery. Palms put out replacement fronds at a very slow rate particularly following stress such as what they received from the hurricane.

In most palms replacement fronds even under normal conditions only appear every 6 to 8 weeks during the warm months and only about every 2 months during the cool months. If they’ve been badly damaged by the storms, this interval could be lengthened to only one every 2 ½ to 3 months. This means for palms to replace a great number of fronds, it’s going to take several years of growth barring any additional storm damage.

If you have fronds that still look bad on palms, particularly green fronds, it’s best to leave them alone. Green fronds are manufacturing food that the palm badly needs for it’s survival and rushing in and cutting off broken or damaged green fronds just to make the palm look better isn’t really healthy and it actually would probably be slowing it down.

If fronds are yellowed or brown and are obviously not helping things, they can be safely removed, however. Many nurseries have replacement palms available, too, so if you have palms that were snapped off or destroyed you can still find palms and fairly large ones in some cases at your favorite large retail landscape company or nursery.

Remember when palms are put in often they need to be staked or braced until they root in which might take 2 to 4 months or even longer. Short palms, of course, won’t need staking, but they do need regular irrigation and light fertilization.
Since we are coming up on our really dry time of year, you may need to irrigate palms in the landscape a little more regularly to keep them in good shape.

If you have questions about the care of palms in your landscape, you can get some free advice from the Palm Beach County Extension office and you can also pick up publications on palms at the Extension office as well. Dial 233-1750 in the north and central county area for advice or 276-1260 in the south county.