If they only yellow at this time of the year, that's usually older leaves preparing to drop so new leaves can form.

If they are staying yellowish year-round, they're probably grown in a soil pH that is higher than they prefer, and the alkalinity of the soil is causing them to have iron chlorosis. Do you know your soil pH there where the hollies are planted? Also, do you fertilize them? Espoma has a good organic fertilizer for hollies called Holly-Tone.

It looks like this and I often see it at Wal-Mart or Home Depot:

Holly-Tone

The Holly-Tone probably won't help much with the iron chlorosis issue if you're growing your hollies in strongly alkaline soil. For that, you'd need something like one of the Ironite products.

Hope this helps,

Dawn

Yeah, they are yellow and extremely thin year-round. The soil ph isn’t too awful high. It’s a 7.5-7.8 I believe. I’d rather see a bit lower but I didn’t feel like this should be the problem. I didn’t know if iron chlorosis could cause them to be so thin like they are, I thought that would just be yellowing.

Your soil is fairly alkaline, and I know alkaline soil pretty well because my soil tests around 8.2. Hollies would thrive in a more acidic soil, something with a pH anywhere from 4.5 to 6.0 Some hollies can do okay, but not necessarily great, in soil with a pH up to 7.0. I grow Burford and Dwarf Burford hollies in my alkaline soil and they are happy in it and are very robust and healthy---our Burford hollies are about 12-15' tall and 6-8' wide, for example. We have amended the heck out of our soil---we amended the area where we planted the Dwarf Burfords for almost 10 years and grew annuals in it every year until we finally got it to where it had a decent pH and drained well. It started out as dense red clay. The good thing about red clay is that it is highly nutritious but when the pH is too high the plants cannot take up some nutrients well, so we had to fix the soil before we could plant the hollies. Do you, by chance, have extremely sandy or rocky soil? Hollies grown in those soils, especially at a higher pH level, can have trouble absorbing nutrients. That might explain the poor growth.

I didn’t realize that they liked it so acidic. We have been trying to get the pH down a bit on this property. We have top dressed with peat moss once and have added sulfur to the surface once. The problem is we haven’t done it with enough consistency to make an impact, and the pH of the water is around 7.5 I believe.

The soil is a sandy loam surprisingly. It came, however, from a pasture type area that was just grassy land for probably most of history. We tested the soil years back because I was disappointed with how the landscape was doing. I don’t remember much about the results but that the pH was higher than I wanted. I still have the results filed away somewhere.