If you are one of the thousands of farmers and landowners who looks forward to receiving a free tree seedling in the Natural Resources Districts building during Husker Harvest Days every fall, this year you were disappointed.

Without an in-person HHD, the NRDs had to find a place to plant those 3,500 Colorado blue spruce trees that normally would have been distributed during the show.

Don’t worry. Those NRD trees went to a good home. On Sept. 29, the Middle Niobrara NRD took 1,750 HHD trees to host a tree planting day with the Valentine, Neb., middle school.

Normally, this planting event would have taken place in late April as part of an annual Arbor Day celebration. COVID-19 postponed the Arbor Day festivities this year, so the Middle Niobrara NRD hosted its planting event in the fall.

About 150 middle school students in grades 5-8 planted 1,200 trees in 90 minutes around Valentine, along the Cowboy Trail and north of the community where the 2007 wildfires had burned a large portion of wooded land.

Digging wasn’t easy, NRD officials said, but with help from adult volunteers, most of the 1,750 trees were planted and later watered by the Middle Niobrara NRD tanker truck.

The remainder of the trees went to Upper Niobrara White NRD in Chadron, Neb. While officials there were planning a planting event for this fall, extreme drought in the region left survivability of the seedlings in question.

The plan is for the trees to be held through the winter and planted next spring, to give them a better chance at survival. One of the Upper Niobrara White NRD tree planting crews, along with students from Chadron State College, will plant the trees in 2021 as part of what is known as The Big Event, a student-led, community service day tradition that began at CSC in 2013 — involving more than 400 CSC students, faculty and staff at job sites around Chadron.

Learn more about the free tree program at HHD or the conservation tree program at your local NRD by visiting nrdtrees.org.