Palm Trees

Baseball Spring Training starts in a couple weeks. The Phoenix area now hosts all 15 major league teams that go west for spring. My suburb has the San Diego Padres and the Seattle Mariners. In a effort to have more people (visitors or locals) spend more money here, our town is sprucing up the area next to the stadium. They have installed over a dozen mature palm trees along the main street between the stadium and a concentration of restaurants (several with bars) on the other side. I think eventually they want to replace the street paving with cobbles to encourage people to walk over to the stadium after dinner or lunch, but that's not going to happen this year. Although the trees have been in place for several months they haven't unwrapped them yet. The top fronds are bound straight upward in burlap for easier and safer transport. (I've seen them left like this in places before. It may have something to do with encouraging them to root.) I presume they will cut the tops loose before the baseball starts and the crowds come.

Palms aren't exactly rare here. My neighbor has three in his front yard. Several occupants back the owner of that house planted five or six palms in the front yard that were maybe two-foot tall to spruce the place up for sale. He worked for the state highway department and pulled them out of a wash somewhere along the highways. The next owner had the good sense to tear out the two or three that were planted too close the house and the fence. The three that are left are a nice looking group.

There are palms native to Arizona, but they occur naturally very rarely. My neighbor's palms are Mexican Fan Palms one of several varieties of palm that will grow here. While they aren't native they certainly will sprout from seed here, which is why the earlier neighbor was able to find plenty of them off in a wash in the desert somewhere.

The weather is nice here in February, but it is also prime weed season. So while folks in the East of the US are struggling with snow and cold, I'm struggling with weeds. It good exercise to clean out the gravel (I think I have mentioned there aren't many grass yards left in the neighborhood) by hand, and it tends to keep the place looking a little nicer than those places that are sprayed about as frequently as I weed. Personally I don't like using weed spray anywhere near plants I want to keep. The stuff is supposed to be safe for ornamental plants, but what they consider ornamental and what are ornamentals here in the desert are different things. At any rate my neighbors palm trees were officially mature last season because this February for the first time I've had to pull dozens of baby palm shoots out of my front yard.