 Today, we are going to be talking about fertilizing pine trees. Now, our pine trees are going to be just like any other crop. Fertilizing them when needed is going to increase growth, increase yield, increase tree health, and give you an overall better and healthier pine stand. So, there are two main tools for taking soil samples, a soil probe and a regular garden shovel. The soil probes are a little bit smaller, they're lighter, and you can take samples faster and that can be helpful when you're taking samples across large areas. But if you don't have a soil probe, a shovel will yield similar results. So, other equipment you will need includes a five-gallon bucket and one soil test box per sample. These soil test boxes are available at every county extension office here in Alabama. We recommend taking one sample per ten acres and also taking separate samples for different vegetation types and different soil types. Once you have your fertilizer results, the next step is to determine how much fertilizer and which type to apply per acre. One helpful tool is the Auburn Fertilizer Calculator. For this example, we'll use the recommendations from the middle and south fields, which were 40 pounds of nitrogen and 90 pounds of phosphorus. The only issue with only selecting one fertilizer type is that you're often going to have a surplus. You can further cut costs by hand calculating rates for two or more fertilizer types. Two fertilizers that are commonly used in forestry are DAP and ammonium nitrate. These are two fertilizers that would also help us fulfill our soil test recommendations of 40 pounds of nitrogen and 90 pounds of phosphorus. When doing these calculations, you first want to look at the highest recommendation. In this case, it's 90 pounds of phosphorus. We take 90 pounds of phosphorus, divide that by 46 percent, which is the phosphorus amount in DAP, which gives us about 196 pounds of DAP per acre. The next step is to find out how much nitrogen we need. We'll take the 196 pounds of DAP, multiply that by the 18 percent nitrogen that is in DAP, which gives us 35 pounds. That's how much nitrogen we are applying per acre. However, our soil test recommendations are calling for 40 pounds of nitrogen per acre. The last step will be to take the 5 pounds that are needed of nitrogen, divide that by the 34 percent from our ammonium nitrate, which gives us 15 pounds. So using 196 pounds of DAP per acre and 15 pounds of ammonium nitrate per acre will fulfill our soil nutrient needs and cut costs in the long run.