I've planted 30 or 40 blue spruce trees of the same approximate size as yours on my own property over the past 8 years or so. They have had about a 60 or 70% survival rate. One thing I never do is uproot a spruce that appears dead, because they can remarkably come back to life after losing all their needles. Sunshine is good, but small seedlings/saplings do much better planted amidst overgrown meadow grass or weeds to shield them from too much sunshine while they are small, and also the mulch from unmowed plants is very beneficial. Good drainage is important, so the slope you chose sounds like a good choice. Seedlings that spring up near a mother tree receive nutrients from the parent through its root system, so a single seedling (or even a number of seedling trees) planted alone without its/their parent will always be at a disadvantage. If your tree doesn't make it, I'd recommend planting several new small trees in the same area next so you have a better chance of getting a survivor. Good luck! Don't give up on the tree yet.

If there is no bud extension by now I suspect it's in trouble. Another month or so will tell the story. Make sure it's mulched and watch your water. Keep it moist but don't drown it. I had a Cedrus libani 'Pendula' b&b that did the same thing. The buds were there but not extending. When it started dropping needles I dug it up. It had one large tap root cut off short and very few of the small hair like feeder roots that supply the plant with nutrients. These are especially important to have in a b&b dug conifer. If the ball was broken these tear off and your plant is doomed. Hopefully this is not you case. Dave

For me cutting off the ends of branches on a Norway spruce or a blue spruce would disfigure the tree, perhaps permanently. One of the beauties of a spruce tree is the sweeping branches reaching outward. If these are cut back, causing the branch to fork, it takes away from this effect, and could result later on in these forked branches crossing each other. I was once driving along with a friend and pointed out an astonishingly beautiful Norway spruce tree with wonderful weeping branchlets. This person told me she thought the tree was ugly, and added that she did not like trees that had any space between the branches. So, beauty may be in the eye of the beholder. If you want a dense tree with no space between the branches maybe some other kind of conifer would be better for you. --Spruce

Just a note about the trees you may find at the "big box" stores: Don't make any assumptions that they are bad--they may be a bit careless about what they buy and sell to the public, but they don't make any special efforts to always offer terrible trees. Before you pay a lot for some tree, check out your local Walmart, Home Depot, etc. This year here in Winchester, VA the local Walmart had really, really top quality green giants--better than any of the regular nurseries around here had for two to four times the price. I bought some and the root systems were beautiful. And the same Walmart had Colorado spruce that were just sold as seedlings. Some obviously were, but there were two mixed in that had color and form as good as any I have ever seen, including Hoopsi--2 1/2 footers for $24. I wonder if these were really seedlings, or if somehow some special blue cultivars got mixed in by mistake. I have loads of blue spruce, or I would have walked away with those beauties. As for the growth rate for blue spruce in good soil in the Northeast and central Atlantic states--18" per year would be a good average. Vigorous strains on very good soils can beat that. But they may not achieve that growth rate for several years after planting, if they are small and/or have some transplant shock. --Spruce