Is a norway spruce a good tree to plant in Indiana?
Norway Spruce can work here, with caveats. Not native — no spruce is native to Indiana — but by far the best-adapted spruce for the state and the standard recommendation to replace failing blue spruce. Common in older farm windbreaks, church and school plantings, and as a farmstead screen, where the 1950s-70s plantings are now full-size trees.
What you'd be signing up to clean up
It drops the largest cones of any spruce grown here — 4-6 inch cylinders that come down by the hundreds in a heavy year, murder on mower blades and bare feet. Otherwise it is steady fine needle litter building a thick acidic mat under the skirt that smothers whatever turf was there.
Where to keep it away from
Shallow and broadly spreading, which is why it wants mulch instead of turf mowed to the trunk, though those wide laterals are also why it is noted as unusually wind-firm. In a subdivision the practical consequence is that the root plate lifts and cracks an adjacent sidewalk or drive edge long before it ever bothers a sewer lateral, and the surface root mat makes growing grass underneath a lost cause.
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