With humans, the food in your refrigerator and pantry can often be a reflection of your health.

With trees, the same is true. A trees mouth is its roots, and your trees can only eat what is in the soil surrounding its roots.

Trees require certain essential elements to function and grow. An essential element, or nutrient, is a chemical constituent that is involved in the metabolism of the tree or that is necessary for the tree to complete its life cycle. For trees growing in forested sites, these elements are usually present in sufficient quantities in the soil and are recycled from fallen foliage.

Landscape trees or urban trees, however, may be growing in modified soils or environments that do not contain a sufficient amount of available essential elements required for satisfactory growth and development. Nutrient-rich topsoil may have been removed during construction or may deteriorate over time.

Nutrient cycling can be limited due to the removal of fallen foliage, which in turn will limit the population and activity of earthworms and soil organisms that help to break down those fallen materials.

Therefore, it may be necessary to fertilize or to adjust the soil structure, biology, and chemistry to increase available nutrients in urban soils. Fertilizing trees can increase growth, reduce susceptibility to certain diseases and insect pests, and, under certain circumstances, help reverse declining health.

However, if the fertilizer is neither needed nor applied wisely, it may not benefit the tree at all—and may even adversely affect the tree and the environment.

At Brown’s Tree Care we practice what is called “prescription fertilization”, based on element analysis. We use our portable mini laboratory to analysis your soil and foliage on site.

For those times when increased growth is beneficial, we can add fertilizer using the liquid injection fertilization method, the foliar application method or microinjection implant method (if soil applications techniques are foliar application techniques are impractical or ineffective).

With our mini lab we can examine your trees foliage for signs of disease, and check the levels of certain macronutrients to compare results with soil test results, to find out whether are not your trees are taking up the levels of macronutrients that exist in the your soil.

We are able to also test on site: pH, Nitrogen, Potassium, Phosphorus, Humus, Magnesium, Calcium, Sulfate, Aluminum, Chloride, Iron, and Manganese.