Each year, Berks Nature plants around 1,000 native trees and shrubs across Berks County. To accomplish this feat, we are joined by a veritable army of volunteers – from students, to community residents, to those very special members of the Berks Nature team: our Ambassadors and watershed association volunteers.
But what happens to all of these young trees after their roots are tenderly buried in the soil of their new homes?
Terry Folk, a member of the Maiden Creek Watershed Association (MCWA), sought to answer this very question.
Volunteers from the Maiden Creek Watershed Association (MCWA) planting trees at the Maidencreek Community Park.
Berks Nature’s Land and Conservation Department has long preached a message of tree growing, as opposed to tree planting. Tree planting does not guarantee a forest; newly planted trees face threats in the way of competition from other plants, damage from animals like voles or deer, even vandalism! According to the Vermont division of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS), 75% is the expected or aspired survival rate for newly planted streamside forests.
But helping young trees grow, especially when your annual planting rate exceeds 1,000 trees per year, is a big job! One that requires tree inspections and remediation: we call this tree stewardship and as valuable as this practice is, Berks Nature was struggling to keep up.
Terry, now retired, spent his career managing teams and various projects; that mind for process and delegation quickly saw an opportunity to improve Berks Nature’s tree stewardship routine.
“You spend this time, money, effort and resources but that’s just the beginning!” explained Terry, “You have to nurture the trees, give them the best chance for survival,” so that they grow up to provide that impressive suite of ecosystem services for which we aspire.
Trees sequester carbon (which helps mitigate climate change), support natural processes like the water cycle and soil formation, and, when growing alongside waterways, improve water quality by filtering out pollutants. Streamside forests also mitigate flooding, an increasingly valuable service in Berks County.
But trees can only provide these wonderful benefits if they survive into adulthood.
After receiving enthusiastic approval from Berks Nature, Terry set to create a new, structured approach to managing tree plantings. This tree stewardship process included a schedule for visiting tree plantings, a standardized set of activities to complete at each visit, a supply list for tree stewards, and a data collection form.
Terry collaborated with Brooke Leister, Land Protection Specialist at Berks Nature, to package this information into a clearly organized spreadsheet that any member of the MCWA could access.
The new tree stewardship procedure launched in 2025 as a pilot program in the Maiden Creek watershed, where MCWA members have split up the responsibility of stewarding the watershed’s six tree planting sites.
So far, the MCWA is on track to hit their goal of visiting the majority of these tree planting sites three times this year. During these visits, MCWA volunteers have removed competitive weeds, replaced tree tubes to shield the saplings, cut dead growth back to allow new stem growth, and identified erosion that threated to destabilize young tree roots.
Proof of the popular adage, “What gets measured, gets done.”
Terry and Beckey Seel, Berks Nature’s Volunteer Engagement Manager, have high hopes to apply this tree stewardship approach to the other three watershed associations that Berks Nature supports, bringing the same rigor and care to hundreds more trees.
When Terry retired, he set a few goals for himself in this new chapter of life: to travel more, to work with children, and to help nature. As grateful as Berks Nature is to have Terry’s fresh approach applied to their tree stewardship, Terry too feels fortunate to collaborate with an organization that has allowed a big piece of his retirement dreams come true.
Together, we are both eager to see not just more trees planted, but more trees grow into tomorrow’s forests.
Members of the MCWA practice their tree stewardship skills as a group.