On Fri, 3 Feb 2012 11:22:32 +0000, lindesay wrote:
I am a total novice and am trying to find out what's wrong with this
palm and what we can do to make it better. We don't even know what kind
it is either. Please can someone help? We have 3 of them and they all
look pretty much like this straggley with lots of brown bits.

I'm guessing this is indoors. The first thing I'd do is to unpot the palms
and wash all the soil off the roots, and repot in fresh soil in a clean pot
just barely big enough to contain the root ball. When the plant starts growing
again, you can repot into a larger pot. These plants look severely water
stressed to me.

See all that white stuff on the pot? Those are soil minerals, minerals from
the water, and fertilizer salts. They're acting just like a saline soil, and
even though you're watering the plants, they can't pick up enough soil moisture
because all the mineral salts are hogging the water. (Look up osmotic
pressure in a beginning biology textbook). I think that's most of what is
wrong here.

Whenever you start to see white or light beige crusts on soil or the pot, it's
time to repot into a clean pot with fresh soil or flood-irrigate the pots
until you've washed out the excess mineral content; that takes a *lot* of
water.

Old clay pots can be cleaned up for reuse by scrubbing them with a stiff
bristle brush, and rinsing in copious amounts of clean water. Disinfect by
soaking the pot in weak sodium hypochlorite solution (chlorine bleach) for
several hours, then rinsing well again and drying till no trace of chlorine
smell remains.
http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/hortn...994/clean.html