When to Fertilize your Young Trees in the Spring

 Rick in Canton asks, ‘I put in a number of Arborvitae last year. They’ve got good sunlight most of the day, but they’re about a foot and a half tall. I’m just wondering what kind of fertilizer should I do now coming into spring?’

The best thing with new plants like that is to feed them, but you’re not going to want to do this till probably the first week of April. But around the first week of April, and we’ll talk a lot more about it as we get to that time, you want to use that all season fertilizer.

For a plant a foot and a half tall, you’re probably only going to use about two or three scoops around the base of the plant. It’ll get mixed into the mulch, just take the fingertips or the tip of a rake and just kind of scratch it into the soil so it makes good soil contact, and then you can mulch over top of that when you’re doing your spring mulching.

It’s our Rohr’s Nursery all-season fertilizer. It’s really well balanced too, it’s got a lot of iron in it, manganese which will cause the evergreen plants specifically to stay a rich green. We talk a lot about iron, and I think a lot of people understand iron is what makes plants green. It’s what gives a real rich dark green leaf, but what we don’t talk about is manganese. Manganese is one of the micronutrients in fertilizers. It’s super important that it be present and be present in a high enough amount, because if manganese isn’t present, the plant won’t absorb the iron. 

Our fertilizer has been formulated to have those micronutrients that may or may not exist in your soil. Like multivitamin, it has ingredients for the iron to work, and that’s why we have our fertilizer blended for us just perfect so that it’s going to work for everybody every time.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).