By Sam Elliott
More than 50 volunteers gathered to plant as many new trees and shrubs at a Geist-area conservation easement March 25 with the goal of re-naturalizing the area and adding biodiversity to the habitat with native trees and plants.
Mud Creek Conservancy has been protecting the seven-acre patch of land since previous owners Bob and Barb Biesterfield purchased the land in 2007 and put it under easement with MCC.
“A conservation easement means that the owner gives the development rights to Mud Creek Conservancy,” MCC board member Earl Simon said. “The owner still owns the property, but can no longer build on it. There’s a list of restrictions of what you can and cannot do, with the idea being to conserve it as much in its natural state as you can.”
Mud Creek Conservancy has amassed 35 acres across six sites along Mud Creek since the organization was first founded in 1996.
“The Mud Creek Conservancy was an offshoot of the Sargent Road Association, which is a local group that became very concerned with development here in the valley. We always call it ‘the valley,’ which is basically Sargent Road from 96th to Fall Creek Road,” Simon said. “As that grew, there were some of us that were members of the SRA that became very concerned about conserving some of the property here. Frank Smietana was the father or originator of the conservancy because he was the first person to donate property that’s a couple of easements off 86th Street at Mud Creek. That started it and it just started snowballing from there where we now have 35 acres under conservation.”
Next-door neighbors Jeff and Carmen Ton, who have lived on Sargent Road for five years, purchased the Biesterfield’s property last year and have maintained the land’s easement as Jeff is also a MCC board member.
At one time in the past, the land was forested to make room for a popcorn farm. Now, through a MCC partnership with Earth Charter Indiana and Indianapolis-based Salesforce, the land near the creek has received 25 new trees and as many large shrubs.
“We were doing a survey of our membership a couple months ago just to kind of get a feel for what they care about, “ Earth Charter Indiana executive director Jim Poyser said. “Part of thanking them for that was we promised to plant trees.”
Salesforce provided the funds to purchase the trees and shrubs and the company’s solution architect Sam Parsons, with Salesforce’s Earthforce team, brought 50 volunteers for plenty of tree-planting manpower.
“We looked for native trees, so I selected trees that work well around a creek side for planting. They all came from a local nursery where they collect local seeds,” said Jerome Delbridge, an arborist with Treeo Tree Service and ECI volunteer. “We have some serviceberry, some oaks that grow well in wet areas, some understory trees that grow well in wet areas — it’s a broad selection.
“Some of them are prairie shrubs so they’ll get to be 10 feet tall, others like the oaks will get to be 60 to 80 feet tall and 80 feet wide,” he added. “Sycamores will get to be 100 feet tall and hopefully they’ll live for over 100 years.”
Local groups looking to conserve land
Mud Creek Conservancy: “We don’t use the land. It’s conservation,” Simon said. “Some people might ask, ‘Where are the trails?’ There aren’t any. It’s totally undeveloped … We leave the property in its natural state, except for some of the things we do with the invasive species. That’s the idea behind conservation. You kind of leave it alone.”
“We’ve done a lot in the past with scout troops and Eagle Scouts that have projects to do,” Jeff Ton added. “As you walk out here, you’ll see a lot of bird houses and duck houses that the scouts have put in. School groups have been out, too, so that’s kind of our education part to help people connect with the nature, but the idea is to increase the biodiversity throughout, which is one of the reason we’re doing the natural tree plantings and getting rid of the invasive species.”
More: MudCreekConservancy.org
Earth Charter Indiana: Earth Charter Indiana is a state-wide non-profit organization based on the Earth Charter,” Poyser said. “The Earth Charter is a document and blueprint that was crafted in the late ’90s and early 2000s. It’s basically a paradigm shift where we’re looking at all the challenges — poverty and racism, some problems in our political landscape like a lack of transparency — all within the context of climate change. We can’t solve these things in silos. We have to connect all the dots and make connections and solve problems with a lot of different kinds of people, and that’s what the Earth Charter’s about.”
More: EarthCharterIndiana.org
