Good morning community! I’m new here and I wouldn’t be but I’m just realizing something like this exists!

6 years ago a purchased a home in Palm city Florida with essentially no landscape. I put together a plan and sourced everything I needed here locally. Again I was a new at anything palms and I ended up with Alexander’s and Christmas palms. I planted 7 Alexander’s and 4 Christmas palms in our front yard bed (the bed it huge). And for the first few years everything was great especially as all of the landscape and grown cover grew in. I was on top of the world looking at the landscape! Come about a year ago I started loosing Alexander’s rapidly! I’ve now lost 5 of the 7 while the Christmas palms remain steady but now they’re starting to fall off too. Last night I came home from work and saw the fifth Alexander’s crown drop and a Christmas next to it suffering. I should also mention I’m not home a ton during the day so seeing the palms health has been not exactly easy to see. Anyway the palm trunks always to me look fine. I start getting a Wilty/ frizzly looking palm leaf but I think by then I’m too late. Usually a few days later the crown drops. I’ll attach some photos so yall can see! I pulled this one apart last night and found there was some decay almost and small black bugs.

so essentially I’m asking for advice to save the rest of the trees I have and in the future what I should replant and what mistakes I made that I could change to have healthy long living palms.

I appreciate any and all input and knowledge the community has to offer!

Thank yall!

Looks like a nasty case of boron deficiency to me. I have no idea how you would treat it, but maybe @Merlynwould know.

Good luck, and welcome to Palmtalk!

@Rtwilson8 welcome to Palmtalk! As @JLM mentioned, a Boron deficiency is a possibility. Transient or long-term deficiency does cause some bent crowns and distorted new growth. "Hook leaf" and "accordion leaf" are some of the early signs. It can kill a palm, but generally just makes it grow ugly and slow. You can see some photos and a good description here:

Ask IFAS - Powered by EDIS

ENH1012/EP264: Boron Deficiency in Palms

Losing a bunch of them to a disease quickly sounds like it might be something like Thielaviopsis. That's a disease generally in the upper trunk, and is easily spread by pruning tools and into any open wounds. I had some Christmas palms years ago and they caught it after a bad freeze. Over the summer they eventually quit growing and the top fell off one. When I cut them down the top part of the trunk was a dry-ish brown fungal mess inside:

Sometimes the top half will look brown and rotted, but the lower part of the trunk is still white inside. This happened to me with some Queens a while back. This is about 3 feet below the crown on a ~15' tall queen, with discolored brown splotches. Another 2 feet down and it looked pristine white/tan in the trunk:

Thielaviopsis can sometimes cause the upper trunk to "bleed" liquid/sap down the side of the trunk. If you saw "bleeding" or the top few feet disintegrated inside, then Thielaviopsis is a likely culprit: https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/PP143

Another possibility is a bud rot, usually caused by Phytophthora. That can fairly quickly kill a palm, and can cause the top to just fall off on crownshafted palms like Christmas, Kings, Bottles, Spindles, etc. Bud rots are curable in some cases. You'd also see screwed up new fronds, with visible damage and really slow growth, if at all. A bud rot usually smells like the inside of a McDonald's dumpster during a nice hot summer. If there's a bud rot you'd be able to tell... :D https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/PP144

The last common disease is Ganoderma, a rot of the lower trunk. It's also incurable and fatal, and sometimes shows a mushroom conk on the side near ground level. https://idtools.org/palm_symptoms/index.cfm?packageID=1111&entityID=3320

Let us know if any of the above seem to fit your palm problems.

Have you been fertilizing? This past winter was brutal for palms even in SFL. Any weakness could be fatal after the extreme cold. My first thought was boron deficiency like @JLM but I have to agree with @Merlyn that disease is also likely since you are losing many palms. Do you have any before/after pictures which could show a trend?

Thanks everyone for the help and suggestions! I’m going to spray existing area with stergo mx - and then after a week or so maybe try a palm fertilizer. I was told earlier in the year I needed epson salt so I did that but nothing else. I feel terrible that I keep loosing these things especially if it’s on me.

Also - should I pull the root balls of previous trees I lost?

@Rtwilson8 I hadn't heard of Stergo MX before, but it's active ingredient is mefenoxam. It's probably a good systemic for Phytophthora bud rots, but I haven't tried it myself. If you suspect a bud rot, some common suggestions here are hydrogen peroxide, Daconil, anything copper-based, and Mancozeb. These are all done as a crown drench, i.e. directly pouring some into the crown by hand. I have generally had good luck with H2O2 followed by Daconil.

For the old stumps, I usually cut out as much as feasible. Obviously you can't cut out every root, but getting the majority of them near the trunk will help avoid any fungal or bacterial spread in the soil. Some fungi like Ganoderma can live for decades in the soil and infect future plantings. Eric at Leu Gardens said they had to quit planting palms in a big area at the botanical gardens, and switched that area to growing rare cycads. I use a reciprocating saw and 12" carbide blade to cut out old roots. A sharp shovel works too. It's tedious and annoyingly difficult to cut palm roots. 🤣

@Merlyn Seriously thank you for all of the information. You are incredibly knowledgeable and I so much appreciate it!

Here’s photos from the cut today - does this look normal or tell any info?

@Rtwilson8 it does look a bit splotchy, but that can also happen after a few minutes of air exposure. I just cut down a triple Foxtail last night. It was 100% defoliated in February's record freeze, and just never recovered. Here's a classic Thielaviopsis symptom, rust colored bleeding from the trunk:

And a cut section of trunk with random dark splotches around the perimeter. It should be consistent pale off-white, like most of the middle. This one is infected, but it hasn't progressed too far yet. It's still d-e-d, but just not as visually obvious what killed it:

The smaller of the three was really bad. This is about 2-3ft above ground level and ~5ft below the top of the crownshaft:

And near ground level on the same palm. Normally with a Thielaviopsis infection it'll start looking more clean white near the bottom. This one looks just as bad. It may be that it's just been dead for a couple of months, or that it's actually got a Ganoderma infection.

I could take a sample and send it to the local State AG department for analysis, but I'm just going to take out as much of the rootball as possible. I probably will NOT plant another palm in this spot, just in case. Thielaviopsis is floating around in the air all the time, but Ganoderma can stay resident in the soil for decades. I'll probably plant an Encephalartos Whitelockii here, or divide the Bambusa Textilis "Ladyfinger" from next to it. If you decide to take a sample, I think either the Gainesville IFAS/UFL lab tests them, or

https://agronomy.ifas.ufl.edu/media/agronomyifasufledu/turfgrass-science/-rtd/rtd-pdfs/UFPDC-Form-Sample-Submission-General.pdf

Or halfway down this page the AG department will ID samples:

https://www.fdacs.gov/Agriculture-Industry/Pests-and-Diseases/Plant-Pests-and-Diseases/How-to-Submit-a-Sample-for-Identification

@Rtwilson8 as a reference, here's the lower trunk of one of the Foxtails I just cut out. It was pretty discolored a few feet above, but this cut was about 18" above ground level. The blade had a bunch of dirt on it near the top of the photo, and was getting hot enough to burn the tissue near the bottom. In person the lower trunk looked fairly clean and didn't smell weird. In the fact page they say, "The fungus often, but not always, produces volatile substances, specifically ethyl acetate and ethyl alcohol, which give the diseased tissue a fermented fruit odor." To me the obviously diseased upper sections smelled vaguely sweet/sour/sharp but fruity.

I'd be pretty comfortable saying this one had Thielaviopsis, but probably not Ganoderma.

Oh my , @Merlyn those were some beauties! Sorry for your loss on those. Harry