Ah, Dave, I think we are talking about different kinds of things here. I would have done exactly what you have done with your Omorica pendula. Yes! But this Mission blue thing is quite a different kind of tree, I think. I see them often in local nurseries, and they are growing exactly like the species Colorado Blue spruce--strong, vigorous upright growers with strong leaders. My assumption here is that this Mission blue spruce in question will grow exactly like a seedling (species) blue spruce--I will bet its origin is from a seedling, and although it is grafted as a cultivar, it will grow just like a seedling spruce, My understanding here is that the one that we are talking about has long since established a leader and that impulse to grow and replace this leader is very, very strong. If you have a regular seedling blue spruce there is little or nothing one can do to defeat this strong impulse to grow from a single, occasionally double, leader. I have had some of my spruces lose their leaders to weevils several years in a row and each time by the end of the season in which the leader was lost, a new one was growing. You just can't keep these things down! In this case, leave the thing alone. With many other kinds of cultivars, especially "pendula" varieties, they are much more likely to need some help. If they are young grafts, many, if not most, must be staked for a period of time. And if you saw my previous post on the subject, sometimes they need to be staked for a frustratingly long period of time. And if once a leader is finally established and then lost, I would guess some more staking will be in order. In this case, if I understand the description by the original poster here, the leader was not realy even completely lost--just snipped off somewhere above the point that the year's growth started. It will re-grow even "easier than pie." --Spruce P.S. Forgive me if I an going overboard here trying to avoid a misunderatanding. You are one of the most knowlegeable conifer people in this forum. I wish I knew half as much as you do.

Did the tree have weeping branchlets? Weeping a lot? I am not sure I can remember all the spruces I have seen and the bark color, so maybe this is not a positive ID for NS, but reddish, and very finely flaking reddish bark is typical of some NS trees at the age yours was, and is usually--maybe almost always--paired with a weeping habit. As for the foliage, there is a range of color variation in NS that I would not call exactly blue, but which one time caused a forester up here to confuse the more whitish colored NS with white spruce. Ah, the trees we have seen and "lost," or at least can't get back to see very easily. I remember one very remarkable NS tree I saw a few years ago--before I became interested in special cultivars. You won't believe this NS tree. It was in the back yard of a rural home where there was a country auction. The tree was very, very broadly pyramidal, and here is the amazing partthe side branches were very, very large and extended very much parallel to the ground with no sweep. This tree was probably about 28 inches in diameter, and the lower limbs that stretched out so amazingly horizontal were really, really thick and longthey must have been 8 inches, maybe one to two 10 inches in diameter. And they stretched outward for what must have been 20 feet or more. Can you picture this? It is hard, I know. I never saw anything like it before or since--nothing like it in a NS or any other tree, for that matter. Now where is this tree? I wish I knew. It was somewhere on a small back road north of US Route 40 where it crosses the line from MD into PA. Now that seems precise enough, but I could drive all those rural roads for a week and maybe not get back to that spot. Well, there are other special NS trees I have seen and think should be graftedmaybe I will find some excuse later to describe a couple more. --Spruce P.S. I am at my timberland now and spent the day thinning in my NS groves. Im back!! I havent felt so strong in a long time. I thought of you and your new NS groves. One day they will tower like minemaybe even more so. My spirit played and danced in the tops of these towering trees today, gliding among the high curtains of wonderful green weeping foliage!!

Another thing, you don't want to trap the cat and have it confined in the trap for several days. I would only try to trap the cat on the day before you can bring it into the vet. So not at all on a Saturday, but Sunday afternoon or evening would be better because then the animal is only confined overnight. Keep him or her covered and quiet. It may take a few days of putting out food before she goes into the trap. If you can place it where you can watch it's better. Then you'll know who is going in there. Pick the food up before dark, though, unless the cat only comes after dark. If that is the case you may catch a raccoon overnight and be careful releasing that. You may even catch a different cat. That is another dilemma! It happened to me, and I also caught a raccoon by accident when I was trapping at night. It's interesting that some cats only show up at night, and even in the middle of the night, and some come to eat during the day. My female feral (I named her Fanny) comes during the day.

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.