Fast Growing Cold Hardy Palm || Trachycarpus Fortunei Tesan

Oh yeah, that's backwards. It's mirroring everything. That's not the intention. Hey, what's up garden friends? Jeff here. Sorry to put a tripod. I'm sorry. Hanging out in the growth space. Looked at some palm trees. Gonna flip you around. Have a look. Don't look at my nose. Weird. The tesson. Right there. Trachycarpus fortunae tesson. I potted some of these guys up last spring. So it would have been spring of 2025. I got these beauties in from Plant Delights. They had something they were offering. They said they were vigorous, and I was like, yeah, I'd like to give these a try. And I've really been impressed with these. Let's talk about them. It's winter, and it's a good time to do your research because if you're trying to plant cold hardy palms, you want to do that as soon as you can in the springtime so that they have the entire year to go ahead and root themselves out. Gives them more time to get some establishing done before they have to take on their first winter. Any plant that's marginal. So, you know, where I live, crepe myrtles are kind of iffy. You want to plant those in the springtime, which is tricky because nobody sells them till summer when they're in flower, but you get my point, right? So anytime I'm talking about cold hardy palms, you want to plant them up as soon as you can. So I remembered that we should probably talk about these things while people are trying to plan out what type of things they might want to experiment with in the garden. And that had me looking over here at the Trachycarpus fortunae tesson. I was really just looking at all the windmills out here. I have just your regular fortunae right there, just like the cheap ones in that orange plastic pot. They're like 30 bucks around here. And there are lots of different, I don't want to say variants, but ones that have different parentage, which is okay. A variant with palms that usually goes more by seed selection, right? And we're not necessarily calling it a variety, but you are calling it a variety. It's just a little different. The idea here is that if you get the seed from a parent plant that has withstood some really, really, really harsh winters, then that one's gonna be more cold hardy. So you have your Trachycarpus fortunae, which is just your standard windmill palm. And then you have, like, your Trachycarpus fortunae bulgaria. So there were a couple that survived some horrible winter out in Bulgaria, and now the seed from those palms is around all kinds of places, and they're supposed to be more cold hardy. I have grown them in Bulgaria. I didn't really find it to be more cold hardy, but, you know, I could try again. Maybe I just had a bad bunch of them. I don't know, because some of y'all just warned me that they're super cold hardy. Maybe they are. The Tessin is similar to that. So this is a Trachycarpus fortunae. Do you want to see a big windmill palm first? I mean, if you're watching this video, you probably already know about the windmills and everything, but I'll show you. There we go. There's my big guy. This one I got in a five-gallon container, I don't know, like eight to ten years ago, something like that. Now it's in a 32-inch pot, and it's very tall. This one has grown very well for me. It's in a container. I don't do them in the ground anymore. It's just too risky. You never know when we're gonna have one of those winters where we just have ice storms and power outages. I don't have anywhere to put a generator. I used to have all kinds of pin-dos and windmills in the ground. I don't do those anymore. It's just sable miners and needles for me now. I have some other types of sables in the ground, but you get what I mean. They're great palms. Whoa. Nice big hairy trunks on them, and they're super cold hardy. As far as your trunk palms go, about as cold hardy as you can get. And you also have like your, uh, what is it, the princeps, Trachycarpus princeps, which is not as cold hardy, but has a really pretty nice frond on it. They all have fan-shaped fronds. And then another one that's more common would be like the Vagranus, which I think has been reclassified into a Fortunii, but I don't remember. Also pretty cold hardy. They're all pretty cold hardy, but the Fortunii is, you know, that's, that's top tier as far as cold hardiness goes for a trunk palm tree. Sometimes they grow a little bit slower, and I have noticed that like that one out there, that's pretty tall. I have one, I got it at the same size, it's still in my garage right now, and it's like, I don't know, four and a half feet tall. It's been growing like a snail. Sometimes you just have situations like that where things just vary. And that's what's going on here with the Tessin, with the Bulgaria. We see this a lot with Sable Palmetto right now, Sable Mexicana too a little bit, and all the Sable Miners. We're trying to source them from plants that have withstood a lot of cold in hopes that we're getting more cold tolerant seedlings. The Tessin right here is supposed to be a Trachycarpus Fortunii that grows quicker than your regular windmill palm. It's supposed to have a much thicker trunk on it, a really thick woolly trunk on it, and stay smaller, going to about 30 feet. Oh, where I live, a windmill palm's not gonna hit 30 feet. It's just not happening. I'm in 6b, 7a. You're not gonna do that outdoors. You could, but you're gonna be building greenhouses over it. Kind of like, you know, certain Magnolias, like the Little Gem Magnolia. You can grow them here, but you don't often see them taller than maybe 15 to 20 feet because every decade or so we have a horrible cold that comes through and knocks them in half, if not down to the ground. Kind of get that with the windmill palms. Or like the giant Washingtonias that you see in California. Huge Mexican and California fan palms there because, because, you know why? They don't have hurricanes going through and knocking them down like you do in Florida. So they're able to get a lot taller. They can get tall in Florida, you just don't see them as often as big there. So similar situation here, right? It's just, you know, genetic variation potentially. My observation in the one year now, almost one year that I've had these guys, is that they have been very quick growers. So these showed up in, I believe they were in four inch containers, and they're about half the size. They've doubled their size in one year, that was with minimal effort on my part. I could have done more with them. They were all strapped leaves and now they're all pushing out all these nice fan prongs on there. You know, that can take a while sometimes when you're growing a palm seedling. I'm mostly encouraged by just seeing the mature leaves already on them, which with a windmill palm, when you have about this much trunk on them, that's generally when you would start to see a fan shaped leaf on them. Usually when they're about this size. For me, that usually takes about a year and a half to two years. Sometimes two to three years if I've started it from seed, but if I've gotten one that's a seedling with some strap leaves on it, usually it takes a year and a half to two years. So these are about, I'd say, you know, a good 60... what was I gonna say? 60 percent? No, six months ahead of the game at least compared to the others. And they have been cold hard. Now, I don't let my windmill palms take extreme colds when they're this size. I like for them to grow up and get bigger, and as they're growing, I let them take a little bit more cold every single year. We're in a very cheap plastic-y greenhouse here. It's not meant to stay very warm in this space. Ideally, I'll be able to keep it in the 50s throughout winter, but chances are we're probably going to have some drops where I can't keep this space above like 30 to 35, and that's nothing for a windmill palm. I don't have anything in here that I don't think can handle brief, very brief dips into the upper 20s or lower 30s. In the spindles. As long as it's brief, they can take it. And yeah, this must be an update on these plants and then just, you know, talking about them because I think they're awesome. So here are those three. The one over here didn't put on quite as much size but also wasn't getting quite as much light as the other two, right? So you can see how that... Oh, we got some bird poop in there. Yeah, well that happens. These were outside all year, so nature's gonna happen to them. But still, even though it didn't get as much light, it still put on a good amount of size. These are gonna be ready to bump up. I'm gonna just take them right up to a 10-inch container this spring. Once things are warmer outside and it seems like they're gonna push out some roots, that'll be a good time to do that. And this one right here even got a little curve to it, and that's because where I had these set over here, they were in a sheltered position. Because they're smaller, smaller palms, I don't really like to stick them into the full sun. It can just be harder on them. So I had them over there where it sheltered, and you can see where the sun was, right? There was a lot of sun on this one, then a couple feet down where this one was, less sun, and this one was much more into the shade. Really just cute palms, aren't they? I like them. You know, windmill palms also... I don't want to talk about this. I think I've talked about it in a video before. Windmill palms actually make pretty decent houseplants, too. So if that was something where you just wanted them to grow indoors, I'd give them a try. Oh, and they're supposed to have a shorter, more blunt leaf tip on them. Time will tell with that. You can see these aren't fully matured fan fronds on these yet. I keep saying fronds, fronds. See how they dangle at the end? That's pretty common with a lot of your tracheocarpus. You may have noticed that on the big one that I have outside there. They have a really big solid fan base, and then the tips dangle, which I think looks nice. I enjoy that, but it will be interesting to see how this looks with that shorter, more rigid leaf tip on it. You can actually kind of see it on these, but that's also not atypical when they're this size from the look like that. I mean, these over here look loose and floppy, so who knows? And there's probably going to be a variety from seed to seed. These are seed grown plants, right? So there's gonna be some variation with what you get with them, but overall the theme is that they grow faster, they stay smaller, they have a thicker, more hairy trunk. So if you're into that woolly trunk, these are really going to deliver on that, and reportedly have survived winters, their parents did, of, I believe it said, minus four degrees Fahrenheit. That's pretty awesome. I believe that was in Spain. I think that's where the parent plants of these are from. Faster growing is what got me. Being extra cold hardy, of course, is awesome, but faster growing is excellent, because when it comes to the cold hardy palms, a lot of the ones that we try and grow tend to be slow. Needle palms grow like freaking snails. Sable minor, it kind of depends. Sable palmetto, forget about it. If you don't live someplace where you have warm temperatures year round, you're looking at decades until you have something with a good trunk on them. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next two or three years, these little guys have outgrown some of the ones that I've already had for a few years that are up in these five-gallon containers. I would imagine in about three years, they should be that big, if not bigger, because they're really cruising, and that'll just keep going, keep bumping them up into a larger container. They'll be able to take more sun this year, this summer. I'll have them out into more sunlight, and I just give them a well-drained organically rich potting mix, and I throw some control release, uh, continuous release palm fertilizer in with them, and when I repot them, I do use a root stimulator, just the initial watering. Well, I usually flush the soil, so I do a watering, and then I'll go through and just give them a sip of a root stimulator, just to help establish them more quickly into their container. Standard plant stuff. I don't do anything special with them. With windmill palms, you typically don't need to. It's one of the reasons windmill palms are so great, and why I thought it would be fun to go ahead and just give that one-year update on these guys. They have put on a good amount of size for being seedlings in just one year with minimal care. I repotted them, did everything I told you about when an application of continuous release, the root stimulator. They may have gotten a liquid fertilizer maybe a couple of times during the summer, and, uh, they were in a position where they weren't getting a ton of light. They were getting enough, you know, probably a good five to seven hours of direct morning sun, and then filtered light throughout the rest of the day. Want more stout growth? Don't forget, you need light. So if your fronds are going to be far apart on the trunk, that means that they're reaching for the light, right? And you tend to end up with a more slender trunk that way. There's nothing wrong with that, but typically, the thicker your trunk, the more cold hardy you are because, well, it's just the more insulation around the heart of the palm, right? Yeah, that's just extras. Hey, hope everybody's doing well. What have you been doing in your gardens? Some cold hardy palms you've been trying? Have you tried other seed types of tracheocarpus? Let us know. Or the sables, or any of them. Just anything you've noticed where you've been trying things from different parentage and seeing how they've been doing. I've been impressed with these so far. One year in the grand scheme of things is nothing. Really got to grow these for a good 10 years before you can say anything solid about them. That's why I also have three of them was because I wanted to make sure that I don't just end up having one that's either really good or really bad. I want to be able to compare them. Another reason to make sure that they're getting about the same amount of light next year. And by the way, they were getting the same amount of light initially, but then mid to late summer, you know, the earth shifts, the sun changes. I live on a hill and there's big trees. So around that time, the light just changes. And I usually move things around, but I just forgot about them. And they were fine. They didn't care. Just perhaps slowed down some of the growth on one of them. That's all right. It'll catch up. All right. As always, and most importantly, everybody, keep on growing. Bye.