I will pay attention to the soil more than just watering it on a schedule-my soil isn't clay and I didn't plant it so I'm unsure if an amending hole was done. The wind has been crazy here for the last two weeks, so yes with the rain has come some powerful winds (hailed once too) plus I'm in a new housing development so there isn't much blockage right now. It leafed out great, I thought yeah I'm a good green thumb for a first timer, and then it rained and froze one night, but I was unsure about that being the problem. All my neighbors trees don't look like this so I thought I did something to,cause it. The trunk is bound to a bamboo stick, and if can tell you it's needed-the tree would have broke without it bc of the crazy wind. Thanks for your help on this-not sure what to do :)

watering is an art.. NOT a science... no such thing as a schedule in the art world ... water when the tree needs water .... insert finger.. or dig a small hole to find out if water.. moving through your soil .. in your yard.. in your climate.. is getting to the rootball ... you need to provide water.. for 2 or 3 years.. to all the roots that were cut off for transplant ... superficial watering of the surface.. will insure death ... put the hose on trickle... for an hour.. go dig a small hole.. and see how deep the water got.... if it did not get down the two or three feet of the rootball size.. water for another hour.. go dig another hole .... all this digging.. outside the rootball is not going to harm the rootball.. since it was just planted.. do NOT dig within the rootball ... just next to it ... i am talking hand trowel... not shovel .... once you determine how long it takes to get water down there .... turn off the water.. and put the hose away ... and do NOT water again.. until your finger.. inserted to the second knuckle.. under the mulch i hope you applied.. indicates that the soil is dry or hot .... as much as the roots need water.. they also need air ... do NOT drown the thing with too much love .... good luck ken

Really all anybody who has not visited the site can offer is a range of general possibilities. Maybe this, maybe that. Try to figure out what might be different about the site conditions where the poorish one is. Different soil? Different care, such as it maybe being skipped when the others were mulched or fertilized?

Unless you say otherwise, I'm presuming that you want these to be single leader, straight trunked trees ...? And that when they're full grown, they'll be many tens of feet tall ... 50', 60', 70', etc....? And that they'll have a canopy whose bottom will clear the ground by at least 10' or more ...? If all that is true, then every branch that exists now will not exist in the finished tree. Relative to that, their only truly important function now is to capture sunlight to feed the main tree, especially the trunk and root system. Only the trunk and roots will exist and therefore, it is the important thing to focus on. A main thing to watch out for is the development of competing trunks that originate during the first several years of the tree's life. Any branch that has vigor and whose direction of growth becomes more vertical than 45*, poses a danger of becoming a competing trunk. I see such a branch in the first picture, coming off of the trunk toward the right, beginning lower down. (Some other pictures have similar situations.) This is nothing to fear or necessarily want to get rid of immediately, because it has a proper role for a while as one of the tree's food factories. But before it gets too large, it must go. If you adopt a general practice of removing the lower branches from a tree as it grows, whatever problems they could potentially bring would be gone as well, resolving the problem of having more than one trunk for example. (BTW, once you get within the adult tree canopy itself, I don't think it much matters that there are multiple trunks. They're not compromising the looks of the tree anyway.) A person can obsess about all kinds of details about plants & their maintenance, but what I find is that doing so tends to get in the way of maintaining trees at all. People don't know when "the best time" to prune them is, so they figure that NEVER is super safe time! In a very general sense, I like to prune woody plants (trees and shrubs) in late winter/early spring BEFORE the new spring growth occurs. But that time could really be extended to anytime in the fall after the plant has gone dormant, which is a huge window of pruning opportunity. Most people don't want to prune in the winter because they think it's not the best look and it's not going to be cured until the plant grows again. If pruned in early spring, the growth happens right afterward and fixes everything. There are some big advantages to pruning in the winter: it's not too hot ... and it can be an unhurried time when there are not other yard chores demanding attention. [Here, I must mention that there are two main divisions of bloom when it comes to woody plants: those that bloom on new wood (current year's growth) and those that bloom on old (last year's growth.) Don't prune plants that bloom on old wood after they've set bed (which is often not long after they bloom.) If you prune them in fall, winter or early spring, you'll be cutting off all their flowers for the current year. Plants that bloom on new wood are more forgiving and pruning anytime from fall to spring usually works ... but just once per year. If you don't care about the flowers of a tree or shrub you can prune anytime. Another thing, the main reason the annual pruning of most woody plants occurs sometime during dormancy is because the spring flush of growth will be forced to put all of its oomph into whatever of the plant remains. If one waited until after the flush of growth, and then pruned a lot of the plant away, they're only going to get a smaller portion of it back. Back to pruning off lower branches, my rule of thumb is to remove all branches that emanate below the middle of the tree's total height ... the lower 50%. That leaves you with half the tree looking normal and half of it is trunk. What happens right afterward is that the tree grows taller and branches more. Within a couple of months of branches being only at the top 50% of the tree turns into them being in the top 60% or even more. If It's a good year, and the tree has water and fertilizer, it could easily be back to a ratio of 70/30 by season's end. The net effect is massaging the tree into upward growth, while inadvertently fixing branching errors along the way.