Jdog- Congrats on the baby, sorry to hear about your tree. That's a great way to memorialize a big event, however it would have been smarter to wait until the spring to plant it. At a 6 ft. tall, you most likely bought at a nursery, and they will usually have a warranty. However, in Nov. I'm going to guess it was heavily discounted, and possibly not under warranty at the Disc. price. Check with the nursery. If you happened to find one that large at one of the big box stores, exercise the warranty, they will take anything back no matter what you paid for it. I would call the nursery where you got it and inquire about what to do, or have them come look at it. November might have been pushing it a little bit. Depends on the year, and how late in Nov. it was. I try not to plant anything after Oct. 31 in west central Ohio. From my experience though, once a conifer starts dropping needles at greater rates than normal, there is almost nothing you can do to bring it back. For conifers to dry is better than to wet, though neither is good. Someone with more expertise may be able to give you some better advise then me, but that's my experiences for what it's worth. Eliot P.S. It's never to late to plant another one, and you can have the baby out there with you for the planting too. Would be kind of neat to have a plaque or rock engraved or something that you can sit in front of it with the name/date etc. I've done that for a couple of trees before.

David, unfortunately my recent checks about a month ago weren't helpful in identifying this fungal pathogen, so it continues to devastate trees and shrubs. Not just blue spruce trees are affected, but so are maple trees and oaks, and people around here are having many of them cut down. Just last month my two neighbors had 5 of these large trees cut down. Mountain ash trees are dying too. And I'd say that 50% of the white pines in this area (southern New Hampshire) are either dead or in decline from this disease. I don't spray mine since I consider them somewhat of a weed, and mine are slowly and continuously losing needles. I expect them to die within a few years. The good news is that this year I've kept up spraying with Mancozeb every two weeks since May 1st. Every tree and shrub I've sprayed (where my spray can reach the foliage) is very healthy. I'm now also working on my grown son's 4 dying spruce trees to see if I can restart growth on the now bare trunk and on other branches. But don't try a "ground drench" with Propiconazole - I tried that last year and it killed off beneficial ground bacteria, harming the trees & shrubs. Fortunately, they're recovering this year with fertilizer and spraying. Norway spruce and linden trees seem to resist this disease best.

no conifer has needles on the inside .... all needles are shed in 1 to 3 years .... i am thinking you are just noticing it more due to its size ... this is normal .. and it can be increased in drought .... many of the local picea pungens get ratty looking as they age .... suffering a host of problems .... when the tips get brown you have problems ... and i cant really tell what the problem is with the tips 25 feet off the ground.. as i suppose you couldn't even get a picture if you wanted ... try the link .... and see if any of the pix look like your problem ... short of giving it water.. there isn't much more to do .... is there any way to give it a good long.. DEEP soak .... it doesn't have to be that much water.. it just needs to get down to the roots ... in my world... the cost of 2 years of spraying.. plus the health consequences... you have to have this done professionally .. would be better spent on removing and replacing the tree ... preferably with something that would not be susceptible to this disease ... its everywhere.. be done with it.. but i live in a cruel world .. lol .. whatever you decide ... i wish you .... good luck ken Here is a link that might be useful: kemper site

In my opinion, any nursery offering the standard commercial form of this species in the Piedmonts and plains south of the Mason-Dixon or Ohio River valley (which is all that is ever offered; nobody yet has a special resistant clone or hybrid) should be shunned. Trees should NOT be 3 to 10 year annuals. The last time I went back to my childhood neighborhood in Northern Virginia, I noticed that all of the old blue spruces were either dead or horribly sick looking. Even in the suburbs of Philadelphia, many of them do not look good although due to the generally higher levels of horticultural stewardship there they at least get removed if they look awful. In the highland towns of central PA you can still find ones that look OK - although they are not always trouble free even there - anywhere summer averages stay in the low 80s. If I were willing to be a more public persona I'd go on some kind of crusade to reform American residential landscape planting practices. I'm sick of seeing hideous, sick or weedy trees in suburban lots. There's no FDA-equivalent PTA (plants and trees administration LOL) to say "hey, this plant causes long term problems, don't use it in your area" and apparently, a complete lack of nurseries having any gumption to tell people "I"m not going to sell that, it doesn't do well here, here's an alternative". Maybe horticulture needs to be tought in schools as a part of basic home economics...I mean, really basic, like, how not to get into credit card debt. "If you notice a tree looks like crap in 95% of the yards in your area, don't plant it." How hard is that for people to understand? (But that's why I compare to the FDA, since most people do not have the science education to understand Rx drugs. Apparently it IS hard for most people to understand. So it's mostly an indictment of the in-it-for-the-quick-money nursery and landscaping industries. Of course, I don't actually think there should be a "PTA", it would probably just be a revolving door with Picea pungens pushers in "big nurse" - the wholesale nursery industry!) I haven't actually lived in a residential area in the UK for many years (I took a summer semester there once), but if I use the more recent memory of visiting the admittedly somewhat posh town of Rye, England...I now think to myself, if this had been an American town, 1/3 of the trees would look sick or ill-suited to the climate. In other words, part of the picturesque quality was merely the avoidance of horticultural disgust by not having to look at sickly or ill-planted trees. Just taking Cecil County as an example, no, obviously you will never have a English-style gardening culture here as you do in tony pockets of the US like Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. That's not what I'm asking for. Just wave a magic wand and get rid of: blue spruce, white pine, bradford pear and leyland cypress, and it would look A LOT better around here.