No offense to Jim who started the palm and cycad thread, but even though palms and cycads are very common companion plants, I think cycads deserve their own thread.
Cycads and cycad type plants are the oldest living seed bearing plants still on earth, going back 250 million years. They predate palms by around 125 million years. Even though the most common cycads in cultivation are called "sago palm" and "cardboard palm", palms but cycads and palms are actually at the complete opposite sides of the plant classification chart. Palms are flowering plants, or angiosperms, and cycads are cone bearing plants, or gymnosperms.
Cycads and palms grow completely different. Palms have a continuous growth pattern, where they are constantly producing a new leaf as the most recent leaf is just finishing up. Cycads have an episodic growth pattern where they produce a new flush of leaves and then store up energy until the time that they can produce another group of new leaves. This means that your whole strategy on cultivation is going to be different if you want to grow palms and cycads properly. As an example, you want to use a fertilizer that had a constant, even release when growing a palm. When using a fertilizer to force cycads to grow a new flush of leaves, you want a high nitrogen fertilizer that releases quickly, and then weans off until the next application.
I'll go ahead and finish this post up, and then get things started with some pictures. Tom
