Hey everyone!

So I'm a new gardener - I've had pots of plants before on my windowsills and such, but I've never really done anything big. About two months back, I got a nice little evergreen tree (I happened to have kept the tag, so I can tell you with absolute confidence that it is a Holmstrup Arbovitae :) ) and I took it home. It's pretty young - about a year old, and 3' high. Unfortunately, I was unable to plant it right when I got back - I have a balcony, not a garden, so I had to leave it in it's nursery pot for a couple weeks while I hunted around for a big enough pot for it.

I finally got the pot, added potting soil, and got my tree out of it's nursery pot to find that it was rather rootbound (alright, it was very rootbound... I'm sorry, tree! :( ) I'm not incredibly good at dealing with rootbound plants - I never know how much to take off. Should I just slash the sides? Should I be a beast and rip it until it looks like a ball instead of a pot? I was pretty thorough with this guy, because the circling roots had become pretty tangled, but I never saw the taproot, so I'm assuming it's in there somewhere. I put it into the new pot and watered the crazy out of it.

It's been about a month since then, and I'm starting to get pretty worried about it. The tips of the needles/leaves are light brown (the stuff close to the trunk is still green), and it's not getting better. I stick my finger into the soil every so often and water it when I think it's dryish, so it's been every week or half-week, depending on the weather. I think I've fed/fertilized it once. It was green and growing all the time it was in the nursery pot, but now it's visibly unhappy.

I didn't stake it, but it's in a pot and there's wind, so I tie it loosely to the balcony rails.

Is there anything I can do to help it? D: It's such a nice little tree, and it's really not doing well. I'm not an incredible gardener - sometimes my plants survive, sometimes they don't - and I would hate to lose it. I've heard all sorts of things from "root fertilizer" to "water it with some sugar" to "just be patient". What can I do to save my tree?