After the Tree Planting, Summer Crews Take Over

By: Karenna Tankersley

At the end of a tree planting, we have a lot to be proud of. Between the work of our partners, volunteers and staff, 50-100 new trees end up in the ground at a single event. What you may not know, though, is that for KIB and those trees, it’s just the beginning.

A young tree in Indianapolis in July is working against heat, compacted soil, and the occasional car door or weed wacker. It needs water. It needs mulch that hasn’t been piled like a volcano against the trunk. It needs someone to check the stakes and make sure the trunk isn’t being girdled. It needs all of that, reliably, for the first two summers of its life, before it can do any of the things we planted it to do.

That’s where KIB’s summer work is right now.

The post-planting crew

Youth Tree Team and Urban Naturalists are the two paid summer programs carrying KIB’s field work from June through August. Both programs put young people, many of them from Indianapolis neighborhoods, into the work of urban forestry and habitat restoration. They learn what a city looks like from the inside of its green infrastructure, and they leave with field skills most people never get a chance to develop.

The two crews split the work. Youth Tree Team handles the bulk of in-season maintenance, watering roughly 1,300 trees a week, mulching each planting, staking trees that have started to lean, and pruning suckers or broken branches. Urban Naturalists run the final planting check: structural pruning, removing stakes and trunk guards once a tree can stand on its own, and collecting data on each tree’s caliper and health status before it gets handed off to the city. KIB’s Community Forestry team layers on top of that with scheduled site checks, pruning, staking, and tree health records at two weeks post-planting, at the end of the season, and at least twice during the summer for spring projects.

By the time a young tree leaves KIB’s three years of care, it’s been watered through its first summers, pruned for structure, freed from its supports, and inventoried. It’s set up to survive on its own.

This summer, those crews have been at sites across Indianapolis: Garfield Park, Millersville, Fountain Square, the Near Eastside corridors where planting happened in April and May. They walk routes. They check trees. They note what’s struggling and what’s already shading the sidewalk below it.

The paid labor is part of the point. This isn’t volunteerism for its own sake. It’s workforce development inside an environmental program, producing people who understand urban forestry and a city that gets greener as they learn.

What the work looks like on the ground

Watering a young tree in July takes more than one pass.

A newly planted tree’s roots are still working to establish themselves in the surrounding soil, and until they do, the tree can’t access moisture the way an established tree can. That means regular watering, right at the base, slowly enough for the water to penetrate rather than run off.

Mulch extends that moisture and keeps the soil temperature lower, which matters when the surface temperature of an Indianapolis sidewalk in August can push past 120 degrees. The mulch ring needs to be three to four inches deep, pulled back from the trunk, and wide enough to cover the root zone. Done wrong, it can do more harm than good.

Monitoring is the part nobody sees. A crew member walking a planting and checking stakes, trunk guard installation, and general tree condition is doing work that no sensor or aerial photo can replace. The tree that’s about to fail looks fine until it doesn’t. A crew member who’s walked that site multiple times through the summer picks up on the small changes that signal a tree in trouble.

Why it matters in July specifically

The trees KIB planted in spring 2025 are now a year into their establishment. The trees planted in spring 2026 are in their first summer. Both cohorts are at a critical point.

In 2025, KIB planted 3,491 trees across Indianapolis. Some level of tree mortality in urban settings is unavoidable: transplant shock is real, and site conditions and species selection matter. The reason KIB’s survival rate runs so much higher than what most contractors or other orgs see is the maintenance work happening right now: watering, mulching, pruning, monitoring, all the way through the three-year care window.

A mature tree on an Indianapolis block drops the surface temperature underneath it by 10 to 20 degrees. It intercepts stormwater. It pulls particulates out of the air. It does all of that because somebody watered it during a July heat wave five years ago.

That’s what this month’s field work is actually for.

How neighbors can help

KIB’s crews can’t be on every block every week. If you see a KIB tree in your neighborhood that’s struggling, leaning hard after a storm, missing mulch, sitting in a dry tree well, or hit by a mower, tell us. Neighbor reports are one of the most useful inputs we get, because they show us where to prioritize maintenance outside our scheduled routes.

One note on scope: KIB can respond to requests for a tree check within a tree’s three-year maintenance window. After that, the tree is handed off to the city, and reports about older trees are best directed to Indy DPW.

You don’t need to be on Youth Tree Team or Urban Naturalists to think like them. Take a look at the trees on your block. If something looks wrong, send a note. 

The long arc

KIB has been serving Indianapolis for 50 years. The canopy that shades downtown today was planted by crews and volunteers who did the same post-planting work that Youth Tree Team and Urban Naturalists are doing this summer.

The planting day is the beginning. The care work is what makes it real.

Categories: Community Forestry, Trees and Native Habitats, Urban Naturalists, Youth Tree Team