Question
Hi, again.  I'm the fellow on a steep slope on the western fringe of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia who wrote you a couple of weeks ago.

I'd appreciate your counsel on how I should fertilize my trees now that spring is arriving.  My concerns are the two obvious ones:  I want to take good care of the trees, and I want to minimize the expense of doing so.

I've got probably two or three dozen tress to which I could reasonably give fertilizer, most of them more than twenty years old and at least a half-foot in diameter.

They range from crab apple to smoke trees to redbud to pear to hawthorne to hemlock to willow.

What would you suggest I use, with those two goals of mine in mind.

Thank you for your counsel.

Answer
The 10-10-10 fertilizer would be the best for the money. It is an all around general fertilizer. Use 1 lb per inch of trunk diameter scattered around the trees and watered in good. IF you wait just before a rain storm you do not have to water. This will improve the overall health of the trees.