what to do with last years palm fronds

And so palm trees are a niggling like family unit here in Southern California.

Of grade we beloved them. They are woven into our lives like freeways, infusing our skylines with a willowy grace. Simply like most loved ones, they're frequently a royal pain in the … compost. Because they don't. Compost, that is.

"Palm stuff merely never breaks downwards," said Manuel Gomez, superintendent for the city of Los Angeles' Section of Solid Waste material Resources.

Which is kind of the problem, considering every bit every SoCal resident knows, palm copse shed, and nosotros're not talking gentle fluffs of fur. Those glistening leaves on high plow into huge withered fronds when they fall to the ground, with thorns, messy seeds and enough heft to suspension a windshield or flatten a passerby.

And when we have the sort of Santa Ana winds we've only had, those hulking fronds litter sidewalks, roads, roofs and yards, dangling precariously from wires and trees like withered ornaments on a sorry Christmas tree.

Most SoCal municipalities volition pick upward piles of fronds for complimentary at least once or twice a twelvemonth, if residents request the service and put them in a pile.

But then what, La La Land? We can yank out our lawns, bulldoze electric cars and compost till the cows come home, but how are we going to keep mountains of palm fronds from filling our dumps?

The state's goal is to keep all organic affair out of landfills, "but palm fronds are super tough, in every single manner," said Robert Horowitz, an organics unit supervisor at CalRecycle, the state agency that oversees all things waste-related.

"On the one hand, they're kind of an astonishing material … you could retrofit disrepair-out embankment umbrellas with palm fronds and they would probably concluding forever. But they're also chipper killers. They damage grinding machines considering they're just besides fibrous."

Seeds are another large problem, says Gomez. About green waste facilities brand mulches and soil amendments, such every bit the city's TOPGRO products, which it distributes free to gardeners and farmers. But when they tried to add together palm waste, users rebelled.

"Palms have seeds that do not die," Gomez said. "Even if they're composted for a full 60 days, we impale everything else just the palm seeds. People want to nourish their soil. They don't want to grow palms."

Then what to do? It's complicated.

Dead fronds fly off a tall Mexican Fan Palm during high winds in Northridge in Dec, 1996

(Irfan Khan)

First, some history

Riverside was really the first SoCal metropolis to use palms equally street trees, when it planted a double row of tall, skinny Mexican fan palms forth its famous Victoria Avenue in the 1920s, said Robert Filiar, urban forester manager for the city of Riverside. The 85-square-mile city now has more than 150,000 street trees, he said, including 25,000 palms.

Divide and save

If your waste visitor allows it, ane or 2 palm fronds can be crammed in your light-green bin (wear gloves to avert their thorns!). But for a pile, call your city hall to get them carted for free. If yous mix them with other yard trimmings and drive them to the dump, exist prepared to pay well-nigh double the light-green waste rates. Rates vary, simply it costs a minimum of $37 to dump one thousand trimmings in the green waste product facility at the Scholl Canyon Landfill nigh Glendale. If fronds are mixed in, you lot'll be sent to the landfill, where the starting base fee is $58, said John Chung, supervising engineer for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Commune.

Fronds are a bigger headache for professionals. Westward Coast Arborists, for instance, contracts with more than than 200 cities in California to trim municipal trees, said Andy Trotter, vice president of field operations. Palm fronds make up but a small percentage of their overall waste, but their disposal "is the near expensive office of our waste product stream." That's considering the company chips about of its nonpalm branches and dumps them at composting sites for free or very low toll. Landfills, on the other hand, charge $35 to $50 a ton for dumping palm fronds, Trotter said, and trucks typically carry iii to 10 tons.

Talk about invasive

Palms don't need much encouragement to grow — just a fiddling moisture and they're off, said Keith Condon, deputy forester for the Los Angeles County Fire Department. "They're very invasive, especially in riparian areas, and they can really increase the fire danger in those areas, because they ignite pretty readily. Embers that blow from a high source tend to travel further, so imagine palm fronds on fire, bravado through the air, and landing on somebody's roof."

The familiar row of tall skinny palms plow into giant sparklers during a fire, sending embers flight hither in the Lilac Fire in Bonsall in December, 2017

(Gina Ferazzi)

Trim from higher up, never below

It's safest to use a boom truck to trim palm trees from above, says Condon. Every year, one or ii people are killed or seriously injured by trying to trim a skirt of fronds from beneath, he said. "People climb upwardly the tree with a chainsaw and beginning to cut those lower fronds off, and the weight causes the fronds to collapse effectually them. One frond isn't that heavy, but when yous accept hundreds, potentially with bird nests or rat nests within them, that creates a lot of weight and people basically get crushed and tin can't breathe."

A (paltry) couple of options

Dried palm frond stalks make corking kindling (if you take the patience to strip off the leaves and cutting them into smaller sticks). But palm grower Jim Parks has made a business out of chipping fronds and mixing them with dates to create livestock feed. Parks said he got the idea when he saw cows nibbling on palm fronds. Now his business, Palm Silage, has a patent-pending grinding plant in Phoenix and another almost his home in Thermal, near Coachella. He wants to install more effectually Los Angeles, but many trimmers still brand the drive to Thermal, he said, because he charges just $50 a truckload for fronds, versus the $150 to $500 the aforementioned trucks would pay for dumping in a landfill.

The process could alter the lives of poor farmers all over the world, he said, using unwanted palm fronds to feed livestock in water-starved lands.

And perchance rehabilitate a pesky icon here at habitation.

Abode@latimes.com

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Source: https://www.latimes.com/home/la-hm-ga-what-to-do-with-fallen-palm-fronds-20181103-story.html

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