bought a tree on sunday. blue spruce. i understand spruce trees tend to lose needles faster than firs…
i believe the nursery cut the tree fresh, and the tree was put in water within 30 minutes of getting cut, so i don’t think it’s an issue of the tree stump being unable to draw up water
so, basically the tree doesn’t take up the water and the limbs are looking a bit more dry than when we first bought them. however, i spilt some water on the tree stand (there’s a lip where it collects) and it hasn’t evaporated much, either - so maybe the room is humid enough where there won’t be much evaporation?
do I need to worry? is there anything i can do to make it suck up some water?
If you’re not certain when it was cut, then I suggest recut an inch off the bottom of the tree to ensure it not sealed itself. My experience has been that trees suck up water at an appreciable rate (i.e., need more water daily).
That’s not really practicable, though. Can it just be that it doesn’t need that much water? I mean most trees in the wild don’t stand in 2 quarts of water and soak up that much every day, do they?
Is it taking up any water? I mean, if you fill the tree stand to the top with water, and then check the next day, has the level gone down at all? If not, you need to cut a slice off the bottom as has already been suggested. It might not slurp up the entire 2 quarts in one day, but it should be drinking at least a little bit. Ours typically drink the most in the first couple days (maybe half a tree stand worth of water) and then after that we just have to top off the water on a daily basis. But there’s noticeable change every day.
it sucked up alot of water the first couple of hours it was home. but since then, it’s pretty much stopped (ok, it’s noticeable drop, but i don’t know if that’s environmental evaporation or tree uptake)
[aside] They don’t stand in water, but they do soak up huge amounts of water from the soil and put it into the air. Large deciduous trees transpire a few hundred gallons of water per day; a half-gallon per day seems like the right order of magnitude for a six- or eight-foot conifer. [/aside]
This, combined with your description of dryness, is worrisome. One thing that can happen is that the tree takes up so much water that its bottom ends up sitting in air, at which point it will seal up. If this happened with your tree, it will need to be recut, or perhaps drilled as mentioned above.
