Palm Plant Health Care: Abiotic, Biotic Stress Culture and Management

Summary: Culture and management involve abiotic cultural, mechanical and weather and biotic disease, nutrient and pest stress treatments in palm plant health care.

biotic stress of a mature conk of Ganoderma zonatum at base of palm tree: Edward L. Barnard, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Bugwood.org, CC BY 3.0, via Forestry Images

Palm plant health care applies abiotic and biotic stress treatment, fertilization, propagation and transplanting to palm trees and adjusts them to species-specific needs, according to an article in Arborist News October 2017.

The article Palms: Woody Giants of the Monocots Part II: Culture and Management broaches most palms' propagation by seed and date palms vegetatively by plantlet offshoots. It calls for counterbalanced cutting all fronds off sabal palms, whose new roots come from trunk bases, not from regenerated severed roots like most palm trees. Success demands doing transplanting when growing seasons begin, matching original growing depths, moisturizing soils, mulching and staking for six to eight months or until roots re-establish. The Southeast three or four times annually and Texas and the West twice or thrice yearly expect palm-formulated, slow-release nitrogen fertilizers with magnesium, micronutrients and potassium.

Macronutrient-poor soils furnish magnesium, nitrogen and potassium deficiencies whereas micronutrient deficiencies follow from micronutrient-sufficient soils with high calcium and pH levels and from non-formulated, standard fertilizers.

Magnesium, nitrogen and potassium deficiencies respectively generate chlorotic (yellowed) lower, older frond leaflet tips, chlorosis on all fronds and translucent-spotted, yellow-orange, black-flecked lower, older frond leaflets. Six- to 8-inch (15.24- to 20.32-centimeter) granular-applied and liquid-injected and 18- to 20-inch (45.72- to 50.80-centimeter) liquid-injected fertilizer treatment circles around trunks help halt macronutrient deficiencies. Treatments include magnesium sulfate against magnesium deficiencies, manganese sulfate against manganese-deficient new fronds' curled stunting into frizzle tops and Solubor against boron-deficient crowns' deformed, twisted epinasty. Pests such as crown-feeding borers, frond-preying palm leaf skeletonizers and sap-sipping aphids, leafhoppers, mites and scale join nutrient deficiencies as biotic palm plant health care concerns.

Skeletonizers keep palm damage cosmetic whereas giant palm borers, palmetto weevils as strong-flying borers of central growing buds and South American palm weevils kill stressed plants.

Bacteria-like, leafhopper-transmitted, planthopper-transported mycoplasmas leave date palms with lethal yellowing vascular disease and date, sabal and windmill palms with frond-reddening, spear leaf-dropping Texas phoenix palm decline. The fungal pathogen Ganoderma zonatum menaces southeastern palms with basal stem rot of vascular bundles and woody tissues and manifests spore-producing conks and wilted lower fronds. Lopsided wilting of fronds into half-brown, half-green leaflets numbers among initial symptoms of Fusarium wilt, whose fungal pathogen necrotizes palm tree vascular tissue into slow deaths.

Cool, rainy weather occasions palm plant health care concerns over pink rot's cooked pink salmon-colored spores at frond bases and over sudden crown drop's premonitory lean.

Graphiola leaf spot prompts hairlike spore-bearing bumps on date palm leaflets, unperniciously unlike Thielaviopsis rot's broken, internally decaying trunks with brown, foul-smelling blood and crown diebacks.

Diamond-shaped fruiting bodies qualify as namesake hallmarks of diamond scale disease in California fan palms queued, away from their desert homelands, along fungal pathogen-friendly, humid coasts. Abiotic cultural, mechanical and weather stresses realize bicycle chain-, climbing spur-, spray irrigation-, string trimmer- and tiki carving-eroded trunks and freeze-, lightning- and salt spray-killed canopies. The abiotic stress of water imbalances shows up as trunks constricted into hour-glass profiles from drought and under-watering and trunks vertically cracked from downpours and over-watering.

The Davey Institute technical advisors Leonard Burkhart, Jr., and A. D. Ali track and treat palm plant health care for the West and the South-Southeast regions.

Coconut palms (Cocos nucifera Linnaeus) infected with Candidatus Phytoplasma palmae PLY, the bacterial parasitic causal agent of Texas Phoenix palm decline, display reddish-brown leaves: USDA Forest Service - Region 8 - Southern, USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org, CC BY 3.0, via Forestry Images

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

biotic stress of a mature conk of Ganoderma zonatum at base of palm tree: Edward L. Barnard, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Bugwood.org, CC BY 3.0, via Forestry Images @ https://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=4823065

Coconut palms (Cocos nucifera Linnaeus) infected with Candidatus Phytoplasma palmae PLY, the bacterial parasitic causal agent of Texas Phoenix palm decline, display reddish-brown leaves: USDA Forest Service - Region 8 - Southern, USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org, CC BY 3.0, via Forestry Images @ https://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=1504006

For further information:

Ali, A. D.; and Burkhart, Leonard Jr. August 2017. "Palms: Woody Giants of the Monocots, Part I: Identification and Pruning." Arborist News 26(4): 12-20.

Burkhart, Jr., Leonard; and Ali, A.D. October 2017. "Palms: Woody Giants of the Monocots Part II: Culture and Management." Arborist News 26(5): 12-19.

Craft, Paul; Robert Lee Riffle; Scott Zona. 2003. The Encyclopedia of Cultivated Palms. Second edition. Portland OR: Timber Press.

Gilman, Ed. 2011. An Illustrated Guide to Pruning. Third Edition. Boston MA: Cengage.

Hayes, Ed. 2001. Evaluating Tree Defects. Revised, Special Edition. Rochester MN: Safe Trees.

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