Cat palm crisis! Please help

[slaphappy]

The lower fronds of my beloved cat palm are turning yellow with brown tips. Even some of the upper fronds now have brown tips too and I’m very worried. I have been keeping the soil moist, watering whenever the top feels dry as instructed (which is pretty much every day now that the heat in my apartment is on all the time—the surface of the soil dries out very quickly). I mist the plant regularly and use a humidifier most days. It sits in a south-facing window and gets lotsss of bright sunlight. There might be slight drafts, but the apartment is 68 degrees. No signs of pests. The water in my building is very hard (there would be white deposits on the leaves after misting) so I got a super luxe filter which seems to effectively remove metals (zero white residue when I mist now).

I love this plant would really appreciate your help diagnosing what I’m doing wrong!

 

[Marck]

Greetings, welcome to the Forums.

Perhaps re-pot your Cat Palm (Chamaedorea cataractarum) into a larger container, and also use that opportunity to check the subsurface roots and soil drainage conditions. Eventually the oldest fronds on a palm will senesce and turn brown, but you will want to eventually see new growth replacing this loss. However, the new growth might not happen until Spring or Summer when it is warmer and brighter.

Another possibility is that in Winter. with the heat running, the soil surface is drying faster than the subsurface? I'm not sure about that though. It is a big plant in a small pot, so it might need the frequent watering.

 

[cpp gardener]

If it's a recent purchase, then it is adjusting to the new conditions and losing old leaves is normal. When you water it you need to thoroughly SOAK it. You will probably only need to do this once a week or 2. A light watering of the surface is not enough to keep the plant going and the bulb waterer is too small to be of much help. You can stop misting it, that does nothing for the plant. Instead, crank up the humidifier and use it most of the time - day and night preferably.