Droopy Palm Tree

[matt-sj]

I have a palm tree in San Jose, CA that's getting increasingly droopy over the past few weeks/months. The tree was installed in the summer of 2022 & the guy I got it from said that it was a hybrid canary/pygmy palm that was approximately 12-15 years old. Recently I made some changes to the watering and I'm trying to decide if they are the cause of the droop.

The first change was to reconfigure the drip lines. Before the change, I had 2x 1/2gal drippers at the top of the trunk, a ring of 10x 0.6gal drippers around the base, and three 36" watering stakes, each with a 2 gal dripper. This configuration was run every three days for 180 minutes. I made two changes to the configuration: adding 6 more drippers to the ring at the base to extend the diameter (it was pretty tight before, with less than a foot between the ring & the trunk), and rotating the drip stakes 60 degrees around the tree to accommodate additional stakes for adjacent fruit trees, two of which are also close to the palm. I also switched the stakes to a different drip line with other stakes that water the adjacent fruit trees. In the new setup, the drippers at the top & bottom of the tree run for 180 minutes 2x a week, and the stakes run 1x a week for 240 minutes. The original total was 91 gallons a week, the new total was 87.6 gallons a week.

I made this change back in mid December, where here in San Jose, CA it's just starting to transition from warm weather to the cooler rainy season. A couple weeks ago when I saw the tree was getting a little droopy I increased the time on the drippers to 200 minutes & 3x a week, for a total of 130 gallons a week.

When planting the palm, we added a 3" PVC drainage tube next to the root ball to verify the water level at the bottom of the tree. The guy that sold it to me said that if there was ever standing water in the tube that I should back off watering it, and otherwise it could take however much I wanted to give it. In the 1.5 years that I've had the tree I've never seen water in the tube. When making the change back in mid December, I was concerned about it not getting enough water so I used that tube to water the tree from the bottom. I had the hose on full blast for many minutes and it took as much water as I could put down there - and it was dry again the next morning. I should note that at the bottom of the root ball is 6-12" of concrete sand (like they use to set pavers). We had some extra on-hand the day we planted it and the installer said that it would be good for drainage.

At the same time as these changes in mid December, I also trimmed a row of low hanging fronds from the bottom, gave the canopy and trunk a good soaking, and fertilized it. So now I'm trying to figure out which of my moves is causing it to be overly droopy. My theories are the following: 

1. The roots grew to find the old drip lines, and when I moved them it left all of that new root growth dry. It will take some time for the roots to re-grow and find the newly moved drip lines and stakes.

2. Watering from the bottom was a mistake. Maybe it washed away some of that sand down there, creating caverns or causing other issues, or maybe it's just water-logged and rotting the roots from the bottom.

3. It's over-watered. By adding more drip lines & stakes when I'm supposed to be scaling back watering for the cool season, I'm leaving it too wet, and the weight of the extra water is what's making the fronds droopy.

4. It's just the cool season and nothing is actually wrong. It'll do this every winter because it's cooler and there's less sun. I have a vague recollection of a similar issue last year, and I think I added the drip stakes in the early spring about a year ago to address that.

5. Something else that I'm not even thinking of?

Thanks in advance for the help!

-Matt