DIY Palm Tree Maintenance

When we moved from the large property in Vermont to the postage stamp in Florida, I thought my yard maintenance days were over. Our yard here is so small, we just let the crew do it that does the rest of the neighborhood rather than buying and maintaining the equipment.
Well, after doing some research on the beautiful palm trees here, I found out that they need occasional pruning.

This is supposedly some type of Date Palm. Apparently many types of these are edible and quite tasty. This tree has a lot of fruit already, not yet ripe.

Here you can see how some of the lower leaves turning yellow.
I initially thought not too big a deal to trim a "few leaves", but was surprised at what it turned into.

These little ones were not too bad, easy clipping with a pair of pruning shears. This is the before pic.

And here is the after pic. Just a little cleaner and keeping them out of the pool. An easy 2 trip carry of the cut branches to the pickup pile.

Then I went to the big trees. Those were not so easy! I had to use a big stepladder and this Electric EGO pole saw, basically a small chainsaw on a pole.
It did a great job cutting them after I sharpened the chain.

Definitely needed some thick leather gloves. The base of these leaves have giant thorns growing from them over 2 inches long! Very sharp.

I had to trim the very large tree in the first picture, then another clump of 4 trees. It was much more than I expected with somewhere around 75-125 branches cut. I lost count carrying them to the pile. Many of these were taller than I am and I could only drag about 4-5 of these at a time over the pile. Betty standing next to the pile looks small and she is 115 lbs!

Here you can see the base of some of these are as thick as your arm, and took some cutting, much like soft pine tree branches.

Here are the final results after a couple hours effort and a lot of sweat! My shirt was dripping wet, and not even over 80 degrees yet today. Glad I went out early morning.
The "After" pic from the first shot.

This is the other group of 4-5 bundled together.

General rule of thumb is to trim them to 10-2 position or 11-1 position. This allows the tree to stop sending all the nutrients to those huge lower branches and instead feed them to the top for new growth.

I've also followed up with some special Palm tree feeding regimen that provides three different type of nutrients over a 4-6 week period. That should hopefully get them all nice and healthy.

Next time though, I think I'll leave it to the Pro's lol.