Palm maintenance: how often your palms need cleaning, and why it matters

Palms look after themselves right up until they don't. A cocos palm left a couple of years carries a surprising amount of dead weight: browned fronds, flower stalks and seed pods that can add up to a couple of hundred kilos on a mature tree.

That build-up causes three real problems. Dead fronds come down in wind, seed pods feed rats and bats, and sprouting seeds litter gardens and gutters for months.

For most Redlands palms, one clean a year keeps everything tidy, and twice a year keeps them immaculate. Self-cleaning species like foxtails and Alexanders drop their own fronds and mostly just need seed stalks dealt with.

One thing we'll always say: don't let anyone talk you into shaving the trunk or cutting green fronds hard to make the palm 'tidy'. Over-pruning starves the palm, narrows the trunk and shortens its life. A good palm clean removes what's dead and leaves what's working.

And the eternal question: remove or maintain? A cocos palm cleaned yearly costs more over a decade than taking it out once. If you're done with the mess, removal is often the better spend, and we'll give you both numbers so you can decide.