- [Narrator] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by The Montana Department of Agriculture, The MSU Extension Service, The MSU Ag Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture, The Montana Wheat and Barley Committee, The Montana Bankers Association, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, The Gallatin Gardeners Club, and The Rocky Mountain Certified Crop Advisor Program.

(cheerful music) - Good evening and welcome to "Montana Ag Live" brought to you from the studios of KUSM at beautiful Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana.

My name is Nina Zidack, and I will be your moderator tonight.

We've got a great show, we've assembled a really good group of panelists.

You know the drill.

You can call in questions, and we'll all do the best that we can to answer them.

We're gonna be talking specifically about landscaping tonight.

Our special guest is Rebekah VanWieren who is a Landscape Design professor here at Montana State University.

So please be thinking of all of the questions that you have about your home landscape, and also about landscapes in your communities.

In the studio with me tonight is Laurie Kerzicnic.

Laurie is an insect diagnostician in the Schutter Diagnostic Lab here at MSU, and has all information about insects.

Coming into us from Zoom is Mary Burrows.

Mary Burrows is our cropland pathologist.

She also directs the Schutter Diagnostic Lab.

So she also has a lot of good information about what's coming into the clinic right now, and what are the issues at this time.

Tim Seipel is a cropland weed specialist at MSU.

So please come to Tim with all of your weed questions.

At home, if you're all familiar with this kind of hybrid model, we've got some phone answerers, that are taking questions at home.

We've got Nancy Blake and Uta McKelvy, who are both in our Plant Science and Plant Pathology Department.

And then Abbey Wenger will be compiling all of those questions together here in the studio and getting them to me.

And in addition, she'll be also taking questions from Facebook.

So if you happen to be streaming Facebook and watching the show on Facebook, please take the opportunity to ask questions through that format.

So now I just like to hand it over to Rebekah to talk a little bit about her program at MSU, both teaching and some of the work that she does professionally and in research in landscape design.

- Thank you, Nina.

I'm excited to be here.

I teach in the Landscape Design Program, which is housed in Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology Department.

We're part of the horticulture team and landscape design programs around the US are sort of 50-50, half of them are in agriculture and natural resources colleges and the other half of them tend to be in planning or architecture colleges.

So here at Montana State we are in the College of Agriculture.

I teach landscape design courses and studios that really run the gamut of all that we do.

So landscape designers and professional licensed landscape architects are generalists.

We know a little about a lot of different topics and we are really keen to bring on specialists in our projects whenever we need them.

So plant ecologists, soil scientists, water hydrologists, civil engineers, architecture folks, et cetera.

My own research, stepping back a little bit for teaching, our students are asked to do a lot.

So they have to learn about landscape design and different skills, going from park planning at a community or city scale and what that means and then all the way down to the very site scale, residential design or even the design of an individual planter.

So they have a lot to learn in their four years.

In terms of my own research, my approach to teaching and in my research is what under the umbrella called ecological landscape design.

And really my goal is to think about how the urban or community landscape can be leveraged for lots of different ecological values.

And so it's not just how to make beautiful landscapes but it's also, am I choosing plants or am I designing a landscape in a way that also where the critters are gonna be happy or how am I impacting?

Are the fish gonna be happy in the rivers and the watershed that I'm within?

Am I creating landscapes that are therapeutic for humans?

So what are all of the values that we can design to be a part of?

And so a current study that I'm working on is looking at how we can design stormwater management places that are designed in a soft landscape way.

So we're using the landscape to treat storm water and then I'm looking at what sorts of design, planting schemes do people prefer in those landscapes and are more likely to maintain?

Because maintenance is a big piece of ensuring the longevity of our landscapes in the urban condition.

- Okay, thank you, Rebekah.

Those bring up some really, really good points.

And I know a lot of our viewers are gonna be very, very interested in discussing those topics with you further.

Since I have Laurie in the studio with me, I'll ask her the first question.

This is a question that came in from Highwood and they're wondering when they should be putting out their wasp traps.

- Oh yeah, that's a great question.

And I have had a lot of questions this week about and last week about when to put out wasp traps and this is the time to put the wasp traps out and I just wanted to mention this.

These are traps that they capture western yellowjackets only.

So these are not gonna trap other things like bald-faced hornets and European paper wasps.

There are a lot of different traps but they're different brands.

And basically it doesn't matter what brand and there's a lure that you get that, not promoting any brand here but there's lure that you get that actually kind of squeeze it onto a cotton ball and you put it inside this trap here and this will trap the queens really early and will prevent them from establishing any nests.

So they do, I think a lot of people are worried about wasps in general, but the only one that's really aggressive is the western yellowjacket, and they do have a very good beneficial role in the environment.

And they will feed on a lot of pest insects early on and they do a little bit of pollination but they're kind of weak pollinators but we have a bald-faced hornet that's mostly black and it has a white markings on its abdomen.

And then we have the European paper wasp and then we have the western yellowjackets and we have a lot of other solitary wasps but mostly if you get these traps out to trap your western yellowjackets you'll cut down on a lot of your queens and a lot of the nests that might be forming in the yard.

- Right, they may be beneficial but not necessarily to you (laughs).

- Yeah, so the western yellowjacket gets really aggressive later in the season when they are going after scavenging for a lot of sweet foods.

- Right, exactly any picnic or barbecue they are the uninvited guests.

- That's right.

- So Tim, a question from Dawson County, this person has heard about some new pigweeds, Palmer amaranth and possibly water hemp that might be in Montana.

When and where should they be looking for these weeds?

- Well, that's a great question.

So pigweeds, they're amaranth species and they're pretty common weeds in Montana.

We have red root pigweed and tumble pigweed and prostrate pigweed but there's two species from the Midwest United States waterhemp and Palmer amaranth.

And they both have been moving sort of north and west toward Montana for a number of years.

And they've been found in North Dakota the last few years.

The seeds of Palmer amaranth were put on the restricted weed seed list last year.

And there's been one instance of waterhemp found in Roosevelt county in 2020.

So the species, they look a lot like a redroot pigweed and you should be going out to scale once the weather starts to really get warm and we start to see our warm weeds emerge.

Look for some pigweed species if you can't identify them very well, talk to your local extension agent or your ag specialists and they can help you get them identified.

We'd really like to hear about them in my group so that we can try to prevent them from spreading as weeds.

The reason they're so troublesome is they're resistant to many, many modes of action of herbicides.

So for both of waterhemp and Palmer amaranth our group two herbicides and Roundup are not gonna kill them at all whatsoever.

So it'd be really great if we could prevent them from establishing in Montana.

- So just a question, and this always comes down to common names and how common names can be confusing.

Is water hemp related to hemp or cannabis?

- No, waterhemp is not at all related to hemp.

They're totally different families.

Water hemp is actually in the pigweed family.

It's like the quinoa family, the lamb's quarters family I think is what it's all called now.

And they look a lot like redroot pigweed.

We see it, they're commonly in our crop fields.

And they're hard to distinguish from red root pigweed but it's really important that we do.

- Okay, great, thank you, Mary, this is a question that came in from Conrad.

Their weed is yellow and the yellow color is uniform throughout the field.

Is this WSMV or wheat streak mosaic virus?

- Okay, they're referring to wheat streak mosaic virus which we had a really good, sorry, bad epidemic several years ago.

We had a drought last year.

I really doubt there is a high risk of wheat streak mosaic virus.

And since the pattern's uniform, I would go more towards a cold or a nitrogen explanation or maybe something else.

They can discuss it with their county agent but that uniform pattern indicates something that is not pathogenic in nature.

- Okay, thank you.

A question for Rebekah that came in, and this is a more plant-specific question.

They are wondering about their peonies and when is the best of best time of year to trim them, in the spring or in the fall?

- Hmm, for peonies, for all shrubs, you wanna think about when they are putting on flowers and most shrubs, for the most part, you're going to want to prune them in the fall and end even in the winter, but you'd like, the other thing you wanna think about is if they are putting on flowers on that year's growth.

So for example, a summer-flowering spirea, you would not want to prune.

You would wait to prune that and do that in the spring because the new flowers would be coming on that new growth that you're receiving.

So with peonies, you can go ahead and prune them in the fall.

- Yeah, that's what I would think too.

If you trim them down now, you would lose all those beautiful flowers and who would wanna do that.

So, Laurie, this is a question from Corvallis.

They let their polly peaches ripen on the tree last year and I'm not sure what polly peaches are, must be a type of peach.

When they cut into them, they were full of earwigs.

How can they prevent earwigs in their peaches?

- That's a tough question.

I think earwigs are kind of a secondary pest and they're kind of going after something that's maybe is wounded or slightly damaged.

So there might be maybe a little bit of hail wounds or something like that on there.

On your peach tree, you could try to wrap your tree with a corrugated cardboard and put some tangle foot, it's a sticky substance and that will keep the earwigs from coming up there.

And so that's a good way to trap that the earwigs but that's probably about all you can do just because they kind of hide in all these spots as you know (laughs).

- Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah.

I think I've mentioned multiple times about me and dahlias and earwigs.

So it's like (laughs), they're kind of the bane of my existence because I love to grow dahlias and earwigs love dahlias.

So yeah, they're a tough one.

So Tim, a question came in from Belgrade.

They have a garden that's full of purslane.

They keep tilling it and it keeps coming back.

They don't wanna use any chemicals where they're growing vegetables what can they do to control the weed?

- That's a pretty tough one.

Purslane is also called portulaca, I tend to call it portulaca, common purslane.

It's a hard garden weed, and I also have it in my garden and I have not successfully, I keep it under control, but I haven't eradicated it out of the garden.

So it's a warm season weed.

So it doesn't quite come up yet.

I just tilled my garden and got it prepped and now it's looking really nice and weed free but once the temperature starts to get really warmer and the days and nights get warmer, you'll start to see it emerge.

And what I use is a stirrup hoe usually and I just try to scrape it out and keep that purslane off the surface when you see it start to emerge.

If the plants get very large, they make seeds pretty quickly.

And that seed kind of sticks around for a long time.

You could try maybe using a plastic or a weed map to sort of keep it out.

I do have the worst problems with purslane in my tomatoes where I want them to be the hottest.

Hand weeding or maybe a weed matter plastic might help to keep it out and just try to wear that seed bank down and not let them produce seed.

- Yeah, yeah what I find with purslane it's the one weed that'll still keep bugging you even after everything else dries out and quits germinating.

And yeah, you've just got to keep at it, like hoeing it, about every three or four days it seems like to completely get rid of it, so... - And get the plants when they're small and easy to scrape out with the stirrup hoe or something like that.

- Exactly, exactly.

So we have a great question that came in on Facebook for Rebekah.

They have a huge lawn and they would like to make progress moving away from grass and into something else, an alternative to grass, and they wanna get out of that mowing cycle.

Do you have some suggestions?

- Yeah, so one of the things that I think is being advocated in a lot of arid, semi-arid climates, is to utilize landscapes that require or would tolerate drought conditions or less water use.

And I will say that anything you're converting to, so if you're converting your Kentucky bluegrass lawn or just turf grass lawn into a more ornamental study, ornamental gardens and drought tolerant, or drought resilient gardens, still require maintenance.

So it is a little bit of a paradigm shift in terms of that maintenance.

And so you're not mowing weekly but really keeping up on as the area is becoming established on weeding early on to minimize any sort of seed bank that you might have.

And also over time, thinking of pruning and dividing plants, all of those things are part of sort of that tier care idea.

When you're converting lawn, one of the things you need to also be aware of is removing, so you can remove lawn.

There's several different ways to convert that landscape.

So first is how are you gonna get rid of the turf grass?

So one, you can use a sod cutter.

You wanna make sure, all of that grass is spreading through rhizomes which is very hard to get rid of.

So one is sod cutter to get rid of that, there is some sheet mulching that people do to cover that grass but you have to cover it without getting any light on it.

So a lot of people add compost, an inch to three inches, layer down cardboard, more compost on top of that or a little soil.

However, that requires at least six months, if not more.

So, if you're thinking of doing that almost nine months to a year in our climate here to do that.

So I do recommend, if you're gonna go mechanical, to use a sod cutter.

You can also use chemical control to do that as well with a non-selective herbicide would be another third option.

And then after that is thinking of the design that you want and the goals you have.

So if one of them is the mowing but another goal is lower water use, you wanna really design the plants in zones.

So if you're thinking of converting to drip irrigation in those places, you think about those different areas or zones that have similar water needs.

And so I highly recommend looking at doing all drought tolerant plants in one area so that then that drip irrigation zone can be scheduled to water less, especially outside of the peak summer months.

And then from there, there's just a lot of different decisions that need to be made on the plants themselves.

And so when I'm designing plant species and selecting plant species, I have a huge spreadsheet open on my computer because there's so many different factors.

In Montana, one of the key factors I would think about is what your landscape is gonna look like through time and through time of a year.

And so you wanna, if you have all herbaceous material that you're going to prune or is going to be what does it look like in the winter?

And so a lot of times that woody plant material and coniferous plant material or leaving ornamental grasses up without pruning them until really early spring, thinking about where that plant structure can help provide interest and form in the winter.

So I'll hold off on any more other sort of suggestions on planting design as the night goes on for questions.

And Tim might have some other ideas for lawn conversion or thinking through that.

- Okay, thank you, Laurie, a question came in from Great Falls.

They have or they're seeing an insect the size of a quarter, seems to be some type of beetle has wings, dark brown color and they are pretty round in shape.

He notices them in the mornings wandering around in his porch.

They are not bothering him but he's wondering what they might be.

- Ooh, I'm wondering if that's, maybe those are may June beetles if they're brown and round and half an inch.

So I think that's what they said about a half an inch.

This is about the time of year where you would see may June beetles and they come to porch lights and they spend most of their time underground.

They're scarab beetle and they typically don't do too much damage to your lawn.

I wouldn't be very concerned about that, but if you turn your porch lights off that'll be a good way to keep them from coming around.

So I think everybody has a few of these around their yard but we don't have as much turf grass damage from a lot of scarab beetles, like other states.

But that would be my guess.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- Great, thank you.

So Tim, here's a kind of a crop land question.

They have canola that's bright yellow in certain parts of the leaves.

They're wondering, is this herbicide damage?

Is it frost?

What would cause these bright yellow leaves in canola?

- Yeah, it can be a number of different things.

And Mary alluded to it a little bit before.

It depends on what the pattern's like in the field.

When samples get sent to the Schutter Diagnostic Lab, we often go through a process, looking at, is it abiotic?

Is it related to nutrients?

Is it related to weather?

And the cold frost that we've had, sometimes frost damage can be really yellow, especially in wheat.

And then it could also be issues and problems with herbicide carry over.

This was a year that was very dry in the fall.

And so people put down pre-emergent herbicides and we rely on both time and warm weather to break it to chemically break down the herbicides but we also rely on microbes to break down the herbicides.

And so sometimes when the soil stays really cold, sometimes the amount of time needed for a herbicide to break down can be a bit longer.

So I would suggest they send it into the Schutter Diagnostic Lab for a diagnosis, and we can really find out more about it.

When you send in those samples, it's always good to include the herbicide history the nutrient history and a little bit about the weather conditions.

- [Laurie] And the roots, right?

Don't you need the roots too, or?

- Yes, and the roots.

They* can probably chime in on that.

- Okay, thank you.

So we've got a couple of questions that are coming in for Rebekah that I think are really timely.

They're asking about why aren't, this is from Helena, and they're asking, "Why aren't ignition-resistant plants being reckoned recommended more frequently for urban wild areas and the urban wild interface?"

And then also there was another question that came in.

Can you recommend some plants that are more fire resistant than others to incorporate into your landscape?

- Hmm, yeah, so really I think, so first of all, the acronym WUI, wild urban land interface is you may hear more and more throughout Montana as we experience more wildfire conditions.

And, I think, I'm not sure the first way you worded the question of why the ignition or plants that are less likely to ignite are being promoted.

There are programs that often comes from the nurseries and there are some specific breeders and programs I know out of Idaho but I haven't seen much in Montana specifically related to fire resistant and landscaping.

So I would anticipate that that is going to becoming more and more.

So, if you wanna do any searching for a wildfire resistant plant and landscaping, I would definitely do some searching in Idaho and look at those resources.

So in terms of that strategy for planting when you're in that geographic location it's really site specific.

And so the goal, the overall goal for that is to create a defensible space around a residence.

And so, if you think of that, what that means, the wild to urban land interface, it's sort of in our more that in between rural to urban.

And so those conditions often have detached single family residences in larger lot conditions.

So those residences tried to create a defensible space and that defensible space means that in increasing distances from the structure, you have different goals for your landscape design.

So closest to the home, you would try to remove and prune all dead material as often as possible on a yearly schedule from all of your material.

Lower the use of things like hanging plants that are very flammable.

As you move out to a bigger buffer from the house like six or 30 to 60 feet and beyond from the house radius, then you sort of look at things like when you do have larger trees they should still be spaced further apart rather than trees put space together, closer together, that then become more of a chance to become flammable in a way that creates the fly ash and things that can actually set the house on fire.

So that's the big goal.

In terms of specific plans, I don't have specific species recommendations offhand right now.

I'm happy to send the caller a list, a good list, but generally the strategy is utilizing species that have higher water content in their leaves versus that that don't.

And so when we get less water content in the leaves those are gonna be more flammable species.

And so just to give you one, I can think one perennial example, is using something like a penstemon instead of a Russian sage or sage, which would be dryer.

So that's sort of an overall goal.

And then I'll also, as you move from the house outward, you're also just sort of decreasing the amount of biomass closer to the structure.

So keeping things low to the ground, pruned to the ground and reducing the trees sort of as you're closer to the structure, great question.

- Hmm, yeah so as you're talking about plants with higher water content, I guess that brings to mind I know in zeroscaping you might use plants that use a lot less water, like the sages and things like that.

Do you wanna moderate or actually maybe increase the amount of watering that you want to do around your house if you're gonna be incorporating some of those plants, if you live in one of those areas?

- Yeah, so yeah, I think you bring up a good, good point of just when the plant's closer to your house and in that first sort of buffer zone five to 10 feet and then up to 30 feet, making sure that those are receiving the water that they need.

So for a lawn one inch of water per week and making sure that there's a good saturation there.

So that those, again, are going to decrease the flammability and amount.

But thinking of the site as a whole though and its context I would think of also, there's things that aren't related to plants that are also in the outdoor landscape, things like furniture on your patios or log piles.

If you have those within, a lot of people have those, in the first five feet, right?

Or 10 feet, those are things too that are plants-related that become part of that landscaping being strategy or thinking more holistically about not just the materials in your structure, but what's out of the structure that might impact that likelihood of something to start on fire.

- Okay yeah, those are all really, really good pointers.

Mary, a question came in from Belgrade.

They had some pretty severe winter kill on their raspberries.

They're wondering when do you think that might've happened?

Are other people experiencing that?

What's coming into the Schutter Lab on raspberries?

- Well, in my own garden this is the second year in a row I've lost my raspberry.

So it's really sad (laughs).

I think it's those spring freezes that just don't come back and I had a little bit of hope towards the bottom of my plants that I might get something but I think after this weather, it's done, and I hope next year we have a bumper crop.

- Yeah, I do too.

I've completely lost my raspberries this year too.

And they are really, really reluctant to even even come up.

And I've talked to a number of other people that have lost raspberries, so it was tough.

And I think maybe that cold weather that we had in October was also pretty hard on them because I don't know that they'd had the opportunity to go 100% dormant.

- This is the second year in a row though.

So I'm really disappointed (laughs).

- Yeah, yeah, it is disappointing.

So I just have a note here to talk a little bit about the "Montana Ag Live" newsletter.

So if you want some of these questions answered and if you would like to learn a little bit more about all of the things that we talk about visit Montanapbs.org/aglive and you can sign up for the newsletter and you can get these pointers directly into your inbox in your email.

So please take advantage of that.

Laurie, this is a question that came in from Helena.

The trunk of their Ash tree has several small holes.

What do you think those might be from?

And is that something that's gonna kill their Ash tree?

- Yeah, I have gotten a lot of questions about, I'm glad someone brought up that question too.

'Cause we've had, for the last few weeks, had a lot of questions about this.

We have a pest called the Western Ash bark beetle.

And so some of these holes you could see a horizontal line here.

This is a pest that's been established in our state for a very long time, but now that our Ash trees are each year getting more and more stressed we're starting to see more pressure from this pest.

So you can prune out this pest in a lot of the side branches and things of that sort.

But we've also seen, last year we saw a lot of woodpecker damage coming in, going after the immature stage and the larvae underneath the barks, they were stripping the bark and we did lose a lot of Ash trees last year.

So it really depends on the age of your Ash tree and how established it is and how bad that infestation is.

And mostly it's a secondary thing coming in because the trees are so stressed.

So there isn't very much you can do other than pruning.

You can do some preventive treatments on the trunk to keep further infestations from happening but I would just try to keep your Ash tree healthy and watered.

And we are having issues just in general with a lot of weather issues with our Ash trees and just stress from frost for many years.

And so it just depends.

- Well, since we're on the subject of Ash, Emerald Ash borer in the region in the Northern region of the US is become problematic in many states.

And I heard that there was a rumor out of Billings that maybe Emerald Ash borer had been found in Billings.

Is there any substance to that rumor?

- Yeah, so when we did the Emerald Ash borer special a few weeks ago, someone did call in and thought that they had Emerald Ash borer on their black Ash.

I think it was either last year or the year before.

And I did end up talking to the homeowner there and it wasn't confirmed.

They ended up calling the extension office and then it got routed to a person that maybe didn't know about how to confirm or to verify Emerald Ash borer.

So we couldn't say that that was Emerald Ash borer.

So it still has not been confirmed in the state and we appreciate that people are looking out for it but definitely that was not confirmed.

- Right, absolutely and that's one of those things especially in a situation like that, it's absolutely crucial that the samples get to the right people and pictures and as much information so that it can be diagnosed.

- Yeah, and you can contact me at any time.

You can send me pictures.

You can also follow up with your extension agent and bring in a sample or share pictures and we'll try to follow up with you on that too.

So typically the extension agents, if they don't know, the samples will come to me or you could contact me at the Schutter Lab or my phone number is 5704 or 99945704.

- Okay, thank you.

So, Tim, I know you're kind of a weed guy and your specialty is killing weeds.

And in many situations you use chemicals to kill those weeds.

A question came out on Facebook, what is the best way to establish an organic or chemical free lawn?

Do you have any pointers for that?

- I think, well, first, can we go back to the purslane question?

I forgot to say that purslane is actually an edible pot herb, so you can cook it and eat it.

So I will add that into the organic list of what we have going on.

So if you want to have an organic lawn and I think it's a longterm process, and you're not gonna have a dandelion, broadleaf, weed-free sort of pure Kentucky bluegrass lawn.

I think that's just really not very feasible quite often, because we rely on herbicides to keep your lawn dandelion-free in general.

So I think you can work the dandelions, take do you have to just go out there and do a lot of physically weeding.

Mow, keep the weeds from going to seed I have a weed, a little blue catchweed, I think they call it in Canada, asperugo.

It gets under my house.

And so I have to really keep it out and keep it from going to seed because it wants to always make a really weedy mess.

So I think it's a longterm process, lots of hand weeding, maintain a healthy watered lawn, and don't mow it too low, I think.

And you just have to work on it over time.

Does anyone else have any other pointers on the group for maintaining an organic lawn?

- That's tough.

- When you hand weed it to seed with grass seed, so that you place back some competitive plants.

- Yup, that's a good idea.

Keep it well aerated, I see people have bind weed problems, a lot of times when you get compaction in their soils.

- Yeah and I think having a nitrogen fixer in there, a clover or something like that to get the turf a little bit thicker so that other weeds such as dandelions won't be as likely to come in.

- Yup.

- Would be another thing.

- Oh, I was gonna add, those are all great suggestions and also there's a cultural expectation of how your lawn looks and sometimes it could mean talking with your neighbors and seeing yeah, what their expectations are and thinking that through so that maybe there can be more people on board with that aesthetic and diversity of plants.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

So a pointer just came in from MSU extension that there is a Mont guide on fire-resistant plants.

So for those of you that are interested in fire-resistant plants in your landscape, that'd be a great place to check that out.

So Mary, a question that came in from Lewistown, do you recommend foliar fungicide on tillering wheat?

- So we did several years of studies of that and it should be an a Mont guide on foliar diseases of wheat.

And there's also a publication from Andrew Friskop and I on implant health progress.

And generally in winter weeds, when the wheat is tillering when that fungicide would be applied, it does not provide an economic benefit because the risk of disease is very low.

That said, if you have a high yield potential wheat, people do put it on as protective.

And then in spring wheat, temperatures when spring wheat is tillering are much higher.

So we have more risk of plant disease and we do see at least some marginal benefits to it.

But again, you want that high yield potential wheat and you don't wanna use a half rate of a generic if you really want it to pay you wanna use a full rate of something that's effective against the pest you're targeting.

I generally don't recommend it in dry years when there's very, very low disease risk and in moderate or low yield potential wheat.

- Okay, thank you, Rebekah, we have a question that came in from Great Falls and this person, their landscape, they're located on kind of an exposed hill and the wind blows there, like crazy.

They're wondering about recommendations for shrubs in that very severe, zone-three-type growing area.

And they're also wondering what the best type of mulches that they can use in a shrub bed in that particular area.

- Hmm, yeah, great question and aside condition.

And so for shrubs in that condition, you might consider, it depends on how steep the slope is.

So it's very difficult to establish plans that when you get over a 33% slope, it's just a difficult location.

So I mean, there's some conditions where you might even think of building in a terrace or things like that that can help establish plants, within each of the terrace banks, but on the slope itself, I would recommend some shrub like dogwoods or willows or viburnums all of those would grow well but you might also combine it with some sort of cultivars of creeping junipers that have a large spreading, more irregular form, that can hold on to that soil.

Now, those are not gonna be a native juniper but the other shrubs would be.

And so those would be good for that condition.

And then you also wanna make sure that you are thinking about your plan for watering in those locations to get those established.

Also when you're dealing with those slopes, it depends on scale.

Sometimes you have a sloped area that's quite in a large space and so on those slopes, that's a great spot also to utilize bare root stock in the spring so that you can put in more plants more bang for your buck.

So it's gonna be a lot less expensive than putting in container plants and you can get more coverage of those areas.

Then in terms of mulching, the one thing I would think about, with I highly recommend mulch in terms of organic versus inorganic.

With organic mulch, you're just gonna wanna think through is if it's sloped too much it's going to run off when it rains or if you have overhead irrigation at all, it's gonna run off or blow, since they said it was quite windy.

So that might be it, although organic mulch helps build soil and can provide nutrients and hold on to water, this might be a spot where I would consider using a stone mulch, if the mulch is just going to run off anyway.

And you might also, one other shrub that's a great one for those spots is Gro-Low sumac.

It's a drought tolerant plant and it's a spreading, a fragrant sumac is another name for that and extremely hardy and loves like stress conditions.

- Okay, thank you.

A question came in for Rebekah too, from Bigfork, they would like to grow azalea is that possible in her area?

And would she have to cover it in the winter?

- So I've lived in Montana 10 years, but this might show that I am not a native Montana, and can you remind me where Bigfork is?

- It's on the edge of Flathead lake.

So it's one of the milder climates in the state.

- All right, I would have to look it up specifically, but if from a gut reaction, no.

Azaleas, rhododendrons, those are going be, I think, more zone six and up.

And so I know there's a little bit of a state that can be zone six, but I'm gonna say probably no, there can be little microclimates, you might find somewhere where it could be happy, but probably not.

- So go visit the South and Southern Midwest in the spring and get your azalea.

- Yeah.

- That's good (laughs).

Okay, this is a question for, I think it's probably best directed to Laurie, but Mary can almost always comment too.

This is from Hamilton.

All of their dwarf spruce trees are dead at the top, top six to 12 inches have brown needles and the needles are falling off, what is causing this?

- Top six inches?

Well, if it's just the terminal, it's probably the white pine weevil.

And if it's basically, if the leader, just looks like it's wilting - [Nina] Like a shepherd's crook, sometimes.

- Yeah, exactly that's what I would think that would be.

But if the whole top of the spruce all the needles are brown and it isn't just the leader, it could be a lot of different things.

It could be, we have a spruce, Ips bark beetle, that can cause that type of damage from top-down die back.

And we also have the Western spruce budworm that can cause that, and also the Douglas-fir tussock moth that can cause that.

So I'd be happy to look at pictures and maybe try to see if we might have to follow up with a sample but if you just email me at insects@montana.edu you can send me pictures that way.

And then I could see if we need a follow-up sample and I don't know if Mary has anything to add too.

- No, they could contact their county agent and get a site visit but I would probably start with the suggestions you made.

- Okay, great, thank you.

So, Tim, this is a question from Gold Creek which is near Drummond.

They have a groundwater-fed pond.

It's about a three-acre pond.

How do they get rid of the plants that are growing in the pond?

Algae, grasses, and various pond weeds.

They don't want to use chemicals.

So we're gonna stretch your aquatic weed control knowledge here (laughs).

- Yeah, I'm not very good at the aquatic stuff.

I was recently listening to things about some of the San Joaquin valley, California.

Quite shocking, we don't deal with so much in Montana.

I would say a very big rake would be what I would say.

You're gonna have to pull that stuff out and remove it.

I know there are herbicides that you can apply to the water that are fairly safe but I don't know much about those but I think you're gonna have to pull them out and sort of physically remove them from the bottom.

I do know they make rather large pond rakes.

- Is that a case where like more aeration would help, keep algae especially away?

- Yeah, I think if it's algae, I think the temperature of the water and the amount of nutrients in the water make a big difference.

For the aquatic plants that are growing in the bank or true aquatic plants, I'm not sure how temperature and nutrient status in the pond make a difference in that respect.

- Okay, thank you.

Here's a question for Rebekah and it's a little bit more kind of, I guess of the cold damage type-thing, from Helena and they have an eight-year-old Hackberry tree on their boulevard.

The leaves were just emerging before the cold snap and now the leaves are hanging.

Do you think they'll recover?

- Hmm, yeah, I'm not an expert in this.

So others chime in, chime in.

It's so hard to say usually, you know what I would say, it's like wait until even the next year and see what happens because sometimes they can get so stressed in that condition right now.

But it is sort of a waiting game.

I wouldn't give up yet, but you should know.

So one thing you can test in a month or so is taking some of the smaller branches towards where new growth would happen.

But if you do a scratch test, I mean it would take kind of middle of summer.

Even if it's not leafed out, you can do the scratch test, where you scratch just the outer layer.

And if it's green, then it is still living and if it's brown, then it has died.

So I would definitely wait and be patient.

And especially if you do the scratch test and it's still green, then you probably should wait until next year even to see what happens.

- Okay, thank you.

So, Laurie, this is a unique question.

This is a color from Lincoln and they are a vendor of fragrant waxes and the waxes are made from soy oil.

These attract yellowjackets.

She's wondering if there's anything that she can do in this small, like a market booth situation to deter the yellow jackets in that situation.

- Oh boy, that is a tough one.

I think that depends on the time of the year too.

So if you're doing the booth out in August when they are scavenging for kind of sweeter materials that would be tricky to try to control them.

They can come from a few miles away too.

So it's really hard to tell where the nest is.

So I don't know a really great way to trap them.

And you could try one of those traps that I showed earlier and you could hang that this one, I'll bring it back up again, but you could try one of these traps again just to hang it kind of maybe a little bit away from the booth, so they wouldn't be attracted to the booth and that'll take some of them away or maybe just some sort of lure that's similar to this trap too would maybe take them away from the booth but it is tricky to keep them to try to figure out where they're coming from.

- So, I have a memory of, we had a little work barbecue and the yellowjackets were absolutely just terrorizing us.

And one of the guys thought to actually take, we had gotten like a chicken from Costco, took the chicken carcass (laughs) and put it like 20 feet from where we were sitting and the yellow jackets, they all went to that food source and left us alone.

So I don't think you would want to do something like that at your booth.

(Laurie laughs) Maybe something that is like you said, a lure or something like that, that is more attractive to take them away from that.

- Yeah, that would be the goal is to try to find something more attractive than - For sure, for sure.

Here's a question for Tim that came in from Moore, this spring, early spring, they had a lot of dust and soil that blew into their fields from the roads and the disturbed areas.

Are there weeds seeds that would have traveled with that soil and with that dust?

- Yeah, there absolutely are.

And I actually did see it in the Judith Basin recently, I saw that someone at the edge of a road and you saw how the movement of soil off the sort of field road with dust and gravel had spread seeds into the edge of the field and they were all germinating already this time of year.

So when the wind blows and we have these big dust storms and dry spells, it's absolutely moving weed seeds from field to field and spots to spots.

- Yeah and I would imagine very good distances too.

So keep an eye out for noxious weeds that you may not have seen before, or... - Yeah, it's a good reason to manage the weeds in your pastures and ditches and fields too because in the fall they may be in the field but as the wind blows over the Chinook season they can often move pretty good distances.

- Yeah, for sure.

So thank you, Mary, from Dylan.

Their alfalfa has curling leaves and also there's some browning and pinching on the roots.

Do you have any idea what the cause might be of that symptom?

- There can be a few things.

It depends on the pattern in the field herbicide or residual herbicide but the pinching on the roots could be a root rot.

They'd wanna get a sample to their county agent or the Schutter Lab to get that checked out.

If it's irrigated alfalfa, it's been warm enough, it could be pythium or aphanomyces.

It could be fusarium could be a number of things, so they should give us a sample.

- Okay, great, thanks.

So we have just a couple of minutes left.

I'd like to give Rebekah the opportunity to discuss any landscape issues, anything that has come to mind that she might like to fill us in on before we come to the end of the show.

- Oh, thanks.

- Yeah, I was just sitting here thinking of last summer, everyone was just utilizing the outdoor environment so much more wherever we lived and even in Montana in the shoulder seasons and getting outside more because of COVID.

And so I just would challenge everyone to keep doing that and spread, I think this is a good time of year to think about what plants might need splitting and sharing those with neighbors or people that are building new gardens.

But otherwise I think, yeah, just this time, is sort of a sweet time when all the bulbs are just starting to come up and we get these little moments and excitements for summer.

I also would encourage people to find ways to just help care for our landscape.

I think a lot about a lot of it is sort of, we often say, there's an old saying that we still use, but it's like right plant, right place.

And it's all about picking the right plant for that appropriate site conditions.

But I was recently reading an article and just in terms of our urban environment and trees, we also have to be aware of really building and designing the right places for our plants to sustain and thrive over time.

Because otherwise those trees and our resources are really somewhat wasted in the longterm.

So sort of look for those moments to design the right place, the right space for long-term health of all of your plants.

And so that might be in soil building.

- Thank you, Rebecca.

- It might be getting your irrigation right, thanks.

- So, there will be no show next weekend, Memorial Day weekend, we have the weekend off and then the next show will be Sunday, June 6th.

And it will be on controlling vertebrae pests with Steven Vantassel.

- [Narrator] For more information and resources, visit Montanapbs.org/aglive.

(soft music) - [Narrator] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by The Montana Department of Agriculture, The MSU Extension Service, The MSU Ag Experiment Stations of The College of Agriculture, The Montana Wheat and Barley Committee, The Montana Bankers Association, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, The Gallatin Gardeners Club and The Rocky Mountain Certified Crop Advisor Program.

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