Canary Island date palm sick?

[Fdpjr]

We moved into our house three years ago (South Florida) and have two Canary Island Palms one is doing incredible in the other one in the past couple months has been showing signs of dying.

Lawn care professional recommended a type of palm fertilizer to put around it that I have been doing but I’ve noticed the stocks are yellowing and the tree is retaining a lot of water. The top is also easy to pull apart like its shedding.

The palm on the other side of the yard is doing great foliage is full and not yellowing of any kinds

 

Any assistance would be greatly appreciate!!

[Merlyn]

@Fdpjr welcome to PalmTalk!  Your Canary Island Date Palm (aka CIDP or Phoenix Canariensis) looks pretty good overall, a couple of comments:

• Magnesium deficiencies are really common in Phoenix palms in Florida.  You'll see yellowed older fronds as it grows new ones.  The palm is basically "eating" the old fronds to power new growth.  I typically add ~2 handfuls of Mangesium Sulfate granular to all my Phoenix once or twice a year.  That's in addition to a "palm" type fertilizer that has 3-5% or so Magnesium.  Probably that's the yellowing that you have seen.  Here's a UFL fact sheet on it: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/EP266
• The palm is overtrimmed, meaning you should leave the old fronds on there longer.  Tell your landscaper to not cut off anything above horizontal.  Cutting fronds off early is an easy entry point for fungi and bacteria, and it robs the palm of nutrients (like Magnesium) that it can steal from older fronds. 
• Make sure the landscaper is cleaning his saws or loppers between palms, because it's really really really easy to transfer diseases from one palm to another.  I use rubbing alcohol after I finish a palm, before I move to the next one.
• The loose part you describe is *probably* the old frond bases, usually called "boots."  After the fronds are cut off the old bases slowly disintegrate/rot off and fall away.  Some palms, like CIDP, will hold onto them for a long time.  In dry climates they'll hang around for decades.  In FL they start rotting almost immediately.  The upper bulged part of the trunk will eventually look like the lower part.  As long as there's a solid trunk underneath the old boots, it's just cosmetic.  If you brush off the rotting boots and there's a big soft fungus-ey mush instead of trunk, then that's definitely a problem!
• A good "palm" fertilizer is PalmGain or Florikan 8-2-12.  These are timed release with all the minor nutrients like Magnesium, Manganese, Iron, Zinc, Boron, etc.  If you only have 1 or 2 palms then they are not too pricey.  I tend to use Sunniland 6-1-8 on my ~300 inground palms.  In fact I have 150lb of it on the back porch ready to spread out.  The recommended dose is 1.5lb of 8-2-12 per 100sqft of palm canopy, 4x per year, sprinkled evenly under the canopy area.  For a ~12-15' diameter CIDP that's 115-175sqft, so 1.7-2.6lb per palm of 8-2-12.  Using Sunniland 6-1-8 is lower concentration by 33%...so roughly 2.25-3.5lb per palm is a good ballpark.

[Fdpjr]

Awesome! Thank you for taking time to educate me. Ill try what you recommend and see how it goes!