What are your watering times and how often? I'm going to take a wild guess and say you bought it from moon valley nursery hence the "moon juice" fertilizer they sold you. Ditch that fertilizer and go to Home Depot and buy Arizonas best citrus food and start feeding your mandarin with that per the label. Mandarins have a difficult time in our climate, they do not like the heat in the summers from what I can tell. It looks to me like you have some twig die back that could have been caused by the rootstock that your tree is grafted to. I'd also call the nursery and find out what rootstock your tree is grafted to, that'll help us further diagnose and assist with the right watering and fertilizer regime for you to follow. Stop using their fertilizer, your leaves look like they have been fertilized with an "organic type" of fertilizer, my trees don't like the organic ferts and do much better with the Arizonas best synthetics.

Evan

Well, being professionally planted last October you would expect it to be making new and healthy growth by now. It is a pretty big tree, so it surely experienced transplant shock. It looks to be under watered and under fed.Organic fertilizers are famously weak; and you have to put a mountain of it.

I agree your climate is not overly friendly for mandarins.

We are watering it every other day at around 8 am. It is getting about 2 gallons per watering. We will def try out the az best food and yes we got it from moon valley. Thank you both for the advice.