- [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 & Landscaping, the Galatin Gardeners Club, and the Rocky Mountain Certified Crop Advisor Program.

(upbeat country music) - Good evening, you are tuned to "Montana AG Live", coming to you from the studios of Montana State University (mumbles) USM here on MSU campus.

We're really glad to have you back.

And you'll probably notice tonight, we've at least new in the last couple of years.

We're all sitting here in the studios together, and we're so glad to have all of the panelists back with us this year and I hope you're gonna enjoy that as well.

We also hope to do this again this fall when we resume operation, and tonight I'd like to introduce our panelists.

We have Uta McKelvy, she's our extension plant pathologist.

So if you have any plant disease questions, Uta is the one to ask.

Next to Uta is Hayes Goosey, Hayes is our special guest tonight.

He's extension forage specialist here at the MSU campus.

So anything related to forage in the animal feeding and things like this, Hayes's the guy to ask at that question.

And next to Hayes is our old friend Jane Mangold been back here many, many times.

Invasive Plant Specialist here on campus.

So anything related to weeds and invasive plants, be sure to call that question in.

And next to Jane is Cheryl Moore-Gough.

Cheryl's has been on several times in the past.

She's our resident author who writes lots of books about gardens.

So have anything related to gardens tonight, Cheryl is gonna be the one to ask.

We have three phone operators tonight helping us: Bruce Lobel, Joe Brandenburg and Nikki Brandenburg.

So if you have questions, call them in and they'll send those up to me over the computer and we'll hopefully be able to answer all of your questions tonight 'cause you know this show depends on you sending us the questions so that we can answer them for you.

But before we get into questions, let's go over to Hayes.

And Hayes, tell us a little bit about what you do in your job.

- Sure, thanks for the invite.

Appreciate the opportunity to be here today.

So I'm the extension forage specialist with Montana State University and forages is a pretty big topic, pretty big area, but you can look at it I think in the best way of, if you grow it, bail it and feed it to livestock.

And in all of those aspects, that's how it fits into certainly into and areas of expertise so everything from plant selection, species selections, to seeding, grazing, cropping systems that may fit in with that harvest strategies and then carried into storage strategies for winter feed.

- Keeps you busy, huh?

- It does, it does.

There's yeah, there's one of me like in Montana, there's one of a lot of different specialists positions.

And so Montana's a big state and there's a lot of anchorage of hay produced in the state.

So it keeps you moving.

- Very good, well, if you've got any questions Hayes gonna answer tonight be sure to call those in.

So let's begin with Uta tonight.

A question here from Gilford, Montana says, my winter wheat is heading and I'm noticing bleached empty heads scattered across the field.

What is causing this?

And what can they do about it, if anything.

- Yeah, so I guess now that the weed is heading, this is about the time that we would see leached white heads.

And to be honest, there are a couple of reasons that I could think of just when it comes to diseases.

The short answer that I'm gonna shoot away right now is send in a sample to the Scutter diagnostic lab or hand it over to your local extension agent.

And they will probably have a look at it or send it to the Scutter lab.

The long answer now, following, there are many possible reasons.

So the tricky thing is when you see white bleached heads, often the cause for that might be at the root of the plant.

So you wanna check the roots often late season root rots, such as common root rot or fusarium root rot can cause tiller abortion, or just poorly developing heads later.

And they will then appear bleached and are poorly filled.

Another disease that can cause these heads is takal which is another disease that affects roots and the crown that you know is something we'd have to look for in a diagnostic lab to be sure.

Another thing that can cause white heads is fusarium head scalp or fusarium head blight.

So the one way you could differentiate between the crown and root rots and fusarium head blight would be that head blight typically causes partially bleached heads.

Whereas the crown and root rots typically cause the entire head to appear white.

So that is one way where we, where you could get a lead as to the difference.

And then there are abiotic reasons, for example, the cold weather that we had in May may have injured the heads that were developing and they could be partially bleached.

Another case we had in the diagnostic lab lately was that accidentally the developing heads were actually hit by glyphosate.

that was drifting from an adjacent field and then they look very much white too.

So it also really depends on the pattern that you see the field that can kind of give you hints and us as diagnosticians hints as to what is really causing it.

So there's no straightforward answers.

There is a couple of guesses that I could take, but the best way to be sure is to send it into the diagnostic lab.

- Okay, good pitch for the Scutter diagnostic.

- Send us more work.

- Okay, Hayes, for you.

Nitrate accumulation is a concern with cereal forages, but first of all, what are cereal forages?

And second, could you tell us about nitrates and why they're a concern and how can people get their hay tested?

- So cereal forages are typically annuals.

And so things like wheat, barley, triticale.

A lot of times people are probably more familiar with those as being grown for a grain crop, but they can also be grown as a forage and they fit well into drought years because of kind of plant biology.

They fit well, but nitrates accumulate in the plants based on uptake from the soil and any kind of a stress that's involved with that such as drought, or hay will actually stop the plant from processing the nitrates in the plant.

They process those to ammonium or to amino acids and then into plant proteins.

And when any kind of a stress stops that they accumulate the nitrates.

And then when that harvest, forage is harvested, it ends up the nitrates don't biodegrade.

So they stay accumulated in the forage and they're harvested and then they're fed to livestock.

And a lot, the concern is, is that when nitrate enters the rumen of an animal it's broke down to nitrite, which is a nitrogen with two oxygens.

And if there's an excessive amount of nitrate, there becomes an excessive amount of nitrite in the rumen and that doesn't get processed into micro, or into ammonia in the, in within the rumen.

And so it goes across into the bloodstream and then that binds the hemoglobin and makes what's called meth hemoglobin.

And essentially hemoglobin is what takes oxygen to the cells and so it reduces the ability of the livestock to actually get oxygen to their system.

And depending on the level and the amount that they accumulate, there can be everything from no symptoms, all the way up to acute symptoms and death.

The big concern in livestock industry is that certain accumulations will cause abortions in cattle and sheep.

And so that's the, so you always wanna get your forage tested, especially right now, Montana has, in most places, severe to or, moderate to fairly severe drought conditions.

And that's one of the main things associated with nitrate accumulations.

So have your hay tested, work with your local extension agent.

Now there's two different ways you can do it.

A quick test there's strip tests, which are a little more of value.

And then there's also, you can send those off to labs, but working with your county agents, you can always get ahold of me too, but I've been getting a lot of questions from county agents and from folks and so that's kind of the best way to go with that.

- So it's not hard to get your forage tested?

Enough labs around to test it?

- Yep, so we can get that.

We can do the agent can do the quick test.

You have to be a certified, because it contains particular compounds, You have to be certified to do that.

With a strip test, actually anybody can do we can get, We've got publication on the forages webpage on actually how to test with the strip test.

You can do it yourself, takes 30 minutes, save you a drive into town.

But if you're going there, the agent typically has the strip test too.

And then there are for the stored forages sending those off to a lab, they take a little bit longer amount of time.

So if you need an immediate response, you'd wanna look towards that strip test, but there's plenty of labs around and you can send forages.

We do it all the time and get all kinds of good information back.

- Okay, good.

Jane, for you from this is from Missoula.

What are my options for managing spotted knapweed, especially non-chemical options or are there any such things?

- Yeah, there are, there's actually good options for spotted knapweed.

Spotted knapweed is kind of the poster child, noxious weed for Montana.

And there's been a lot of research done on different ways to manage it.

There are about a dozen biological control agents that are available for spotted knapweed.

A couple of them are particularly effective.

So that's a good option that does take time though.

And it's not a cure all it's gonna keep populations in check, but it won't completely get rid of it.

You can hand pull spotted knapweed.

The soil is getting a little dry, but you can hand pull it.

At this point in the season, I would recommend mowing it.

There's been research done here at Montana State University that showed if you mow it at about the time of flowering, when it's bud stage to early flower, a single mowing will take that plant down.

It won't produce any seeds this year and it doesn't have enough resources to grow back and still flower, produce seed this year.

So mowing would be a good option at this point in the season.

There's also targeted grazing, which is another option.

That's probably a little more involved.

I'm not sure what the situation is for this caller, but yeah, lots of great options for spotted knapweed actually.

- Okay, good.

Cheryl, we had a question come in today from on the phones from Fishtail.

How long can you apply diet automation service to cabbage?

And why would you be applying diet automation it through the cabbage?

- A lot of people like to use diet automation for a lot of crazy reasons, Don.

If you do use it, you'll need to reapply it after you water, but it doesn't degrade very quickly and stays pretty much where you put it otherwise.

- Does it do any good?

- Some people think it does and other people may not.

I know that it is very effective against slugs because it scrapes their body because they're very soft bodied, but I've heard people using it against flea beetles.

And I'm not sure that that's effective.

I haven't had it in my garden.

I haven't used it in my garden, but I know there are people who swear by it.

- Okay, Uta question from Wolf Point, says my lentil field shows patches where the plants appear yellow.

When I look at individual plants, the upper leaves show whitish lesions on the leaf tips and leaflets are skinny and the plant seems to be losing foliage.

Could this be a disease or maybe it related to heat or the drought?

- Right, well, you know, it could be a disease.

Again, the diagnostic lab could provide an answer.

There is a disease that is called stemphylium blight.

And as the name suggests this causes the lentil plants to blight.

So the first symptoms would be actually bleaching or lesions on the lentil plants.

And what's characteristic about this disease is that it would actually start at the upper part of the plant and then move downwards.

And so it can lead to these skinny lentil leaflets and it can lead to defoliation.

So then you have almost bare and lentil plants.

So that is, it could possibly be a disease.

There are other reasons that could cause this bleaching.

As I mentioned before, we had this cold snap in late May, and as a result of that, we have seen a couple of crops that have been affected where just the parts of the plant that were exposed to these cold temperatures got essentially cold burned and fallen off and so if that wasn't too severe, the plant should grow out of that.

Another reason that could cause these bleaching leaflets, is leaf tips is herbicide damage.

So again, herbicides might be in the ground and with moisture be uprooted or released and taken up by the plant or it may drift in from an application nearby and that can in some cases also cause those kind of burn, but I will admit I'm not a specialist on herbicides.

So I don't know which group of herbicides can cause these kinds of symptoms.

But we do have an expert in the lab who can provide more expertise on that.

- Uta, is it true that lentils are just, they're kind of sensitive to a lot of different like environmental conditions or they're kind of, they seem kind of wimpy when it comes to just, you know, they kind of get injured easily is that true?

- I mean, I agree with you.

They seem a little bit finicky, but I honestly I don't know for sure.

I think in terms of environmental conditions, you wanna make sure that you select a variety that has been maybe bred for the Montana environment so that it will be decently adapted to the conditions we typically observe in Montana.

But I don't know in terms of herbicide injury, I think if you find the right or wrong herbicides, a lot of plants can get damaged.

- Yeah, thank you.

- Thank you.

- Okay, Hayes back to you about the nitrate issue.

- Yeah.

- We talk about the problem in cereal forages.

What are the advantages of cereal forages versus say alfafa or any other forage crop.

- Yeah, no, that's a great question.

So the advantages of those are eventually your alfalfa field or any perennial field becomes kinda overrun with weeds.

It's less productive and you wanna renovate that field.

Annuals fit into that in terms of how they, you can, it opens up another spectrum of herbicides you can use, you're going from a dicot to a monocot.

It also allows a lot of times forage grasses that you may put in with alfalfa allows the decomposition.

Some of those are sod forming grasses.

So it allows for the decomposition of your perennials a lot of times have root and crown rot diseases associated with those rotating out, taking that host plant out they're specific to the alfalfa and those grasses.

So rotating those out and going to annual takes that host out of the field.

And so it decreases the overall load of those fungi and the bacteria in the soils.

They're great in drought years, which we're experiencing around the state.

It's a little too late to see them now, but if we continue in the next Spring and you have folks that are out there, if they have a field that they're thinking of rotating, renovating, taken out of alfalfa, there's winter wheat, that can, it can be seeded this fall with right soil moisture.

They're great because they fit the water, the precipitation pattern real well in the state and the spring barleys fit in well with that too.

They can also be grazed.

It takes some native, take some pressure off the native range for an extra couple of weeks, allows those plants to get a little more mature, build up some more reserves so they can tolerate a little more grazing in there, but the annuals fit in well because just different reproductive strategy, the perennials, their strategy is to build reserves and to even go dormant and wait for conditions to improve.

The annuals the only way that they make it to next year is by producing seed.

So the way they do that is to produce foliage and foliage, and then we cut it before it gets so mature that it's for seed the plant doesn't know that, but we, so you take advantage of that and build as much biomass as you can.

And so there's been quite a bit of work over the years, various places, some central ag research center, and showing in times of drought that though you'll get upwards of a ton, a ton and a half more forage per acre with a cereal production rather than a perennial, just simply because those perennials are shutting down and trying to keep those reserves where the annuals are trying to build forage trying to build biomass for photosynthesis.

And then we cut them for hay.

So the advantage is there.

- Good Jane, you've got something to show to us here.

What is it?

- Yeah, I brought a show and tell tonight, I have to say that right now there's so many weeds flowering, and I had a hard time, like just picking one to bring tonight, but I brought this one because I often see it in people's flower gardens.

And I think it just volunteers in the flower garden, it's very pretty, it smells really nice and they tend to, tend it then as a wildflower, but this is actually something called Dame's rocket, D-A-M-E-'S it's looking kind of wilty, but this is a biennial or annual mustard.

And it has these pretty purple flowers.

Sometimes they're white or pinkish and, And it's got four petals.

Now, I'm sorry you probably can't see these petals very well because they're wilting so quickly, but it looks a lot like flax.

And I think sometimes it's confused as flax, but flax has five petals.

This Dame's rocket, as a mustard, has four petals, and you can also see that it really doesn't have much of a root system.

This plant was like four feet tall, so I have it bent up here, but I just easily pulled this out of the ground.

It has a very shallow root system.

And this plant is not on the Montana noxious weed list, but it is on some other state noxious weed list, especially in the Midwest, the upper Midwest and into the north Eastern part of the country.

And it seems to be kind of increasing in Montana.

I've watched it for a lot of years.

I seem to get, you know, a few calls about it every year, and it can be kind of invasive in kind of wet, wetter areas or kind of where you have draws.

And I just encourage people to, you know, if you do have this on your property, just go out there, pull it, bag it and get rid of it.

It's not a species we, it can become pretty thick and kind of start moving into areas and kind of decrease the biodiversity of areas.

So it is very pretty, it does smell really nice, but it's really not something you wanna have around at long-term.

- As a gardener, would this ever invade my garden?

Doesn't sound like it.

- Probably not like a vegetable garden where you're you know, maybe working up the soil every year, but it, definitely, I see it in people's flower, like perennial flower beds.

Yeah.

- Okay.

- Okay, Cheryl, we've had a couple of questions come in here.

One that says their lilac Boston's were nipped by a late freeze and they're pretty non existent.

Can they be cut back or should they wait till later in the season?

- Okay, so lilacs should be pruned immediately after they flower, or the buds are killed by the late frost mother nature wasn't too kind to assist here.

And so we've been dealing with a lot of yard and garden problems, but for your lilacs, you need to prune them now.

Don't let them try to put out more flower buds.

The flower buds that are formed this year will bloom next year.

And so you want to give that plant lots of time during this season to build those flower blossoms or buds for next year.

So general rule of thumb, those flowering shrubs that bloom with or lilacs you prune them immediately after they flower.

- Okay.

- Can I ask a follow-up question for Cheryl there's the Japanese lilac I think it is that's blossoming right now, at least in the Bozeman area.

Is that similar biology?

And do you need to trim those trees?

- You should trim the, now, you're talking about the Japanese syringa reticulata, which is the Japanese tree lilac, which is not the shrub.

- Okay, yeah.

I've seen more of the tree ones.

- Yeah, there's there's Korean lilacs.

There's Japanese lilacs, there's Chinese lilacs.

And essentially all of them need to be pruned immediately after they flower.

- Okay.

- It's not as important with a super mature bush and actually pretty difficult because they're so tall.

So removing those blossoms will keep that plant from going to seed and putting its energy into the seeds, which you don't really need anyway, and into producing the buds for next year.

- Okay.

- Okay, Uta from Richland.

I think my chick pea field, kabuli chickpeas, has ascochyta blight.

How can I be sure and what can they do to manage it?

- Right, ascochyta blight is not an uncommon disease in chickpea, I think it is fairly easy to diagnose because it will form these target shaped rings of fruiting bodies inside the 10 lesions on the foliage, but really it can cause symptoms also on the stems and the flowers and even the pods.

So if you see these characteristic target shaped lesions and you're sure that you have ascochyta blight, then for this crop year, a fungicide application may be warranted.

Now, one thing to know about ascochyta, the disease, is that it likes moisture.

So whenever we have a period where we have rain that increases sporulation and the pathogen to spread, that increases the risk of the disease to exacerbate and spread in your field.

So if we, you know, it looks pretty dry right now, but maybe locally, you may perceive some rain events and that might increase the risk for this disease.

So before canopy closure, you wanna apply a contact fungicide.

Chlorophenol is a very good mode of action that works with ascochyta, because it can occur everywhere on your crop, you wanna make sure you have good coverage, especially with the contact fungicides.

If your crop is advanced and now the canopy is closed, contact fungicides won't penetrate into So you'll need to resort to some other modes of actions.

So the DMI fungicides or the SDHI fungicides are good for that.

There's also the strobilurin fungicides, but I will caution you that we have seen ascochyta blight or the ascochyta pathogen strains that are resistant to strobilurins.

So if that is present in your area, you may apply a strobilurin fungicide, and you won't see any effect of it.

That's why I generally recommend applying SDHI or DMI fungicides.

It's a complex thing.

And I'm, you know, I admit here that I don't know all the product names that would be suitable.

So if you wanna discuss this further, give me a call or consult a plant pathology, extension plant pathology website.

And you will find more information there as to which fungicides might be suitable for ascochyta management this year.

- Okay, Hayes from Billings.

This caller has common rye in their pasture.

Is that a perennial or annual plant and would cutting or eradicate the plant?

Any suggestions to get rid of rye.

- So there's two types, there's actual perennial and annual ryes.

So without being, wouldn't be able to completely answer that question.

Cutting it, if they're definitely wanna eradicate it, I definitely would recommend some kind of a harvest so that you keep that plant from going to seed.

If they didn't seed it this Spring or last Fall, then if it's been in the field for several years, it's gonna be a perennial, unless they're letting it go to seed, and it's re you know, regerminating Sounds to me like it may be more of a perennial in which case the best, you've got several options, and it kind of depends on where you wanna go with that.

Herbicides are an option, glyphosate.

It is always an option for that.

There's also, if they have the equipment, there's also the option of working those fields.

It kind of depends on if they wanna go with more of a traditional, you can work the field.

There's no herbicides involved.

You can work that, but anytime you work a field, you'll lose soil moisture.

So timing becomes a lot more specific and getting good stands if they're going to seed back in to something.

The other option is with an herbicide application, but then they'll, to drill back into that they'll need access to a no-till drill.

And so though, but the no-till option, a lot of times you get much better, not necessarily always, but you get a lot of times, you'll get a better stand with that because of the forage that's still there in the field acts as a real nice shelter for plants to grow in.

So the two, that's the options I would recommend if they wanted to eradicate.

And again, if they didn't seed it it's most likely a perennial or if they didn't seed it here this Spring or last Fall, then it's most likely the perennial versions of it.

- One way they might be able to tell if they have perennial or annual is just see if they can pull it out of the ground at this point in this Summer.

Because those annual grasses should pull out of the ground.

- They're gonna have a much reduced root system.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

Yep, yep absolutely.

- Okay, Jane, this caller wanted you to repeat the name of that flowering plant that you showed us.

- Oh, yeah, it's a Dame's rocket, like, lady, like a Dame, Dame's rocket.

- Okay, and here's a follow up question on the knapweed.

Town ordinances won't allow us to have goats to help us with weed control.

Yet the deer are allowed to run and ruin our gardens.

Any advice on how to work with city leadership to help rectify this problem.

- Oh, wow.

- Is that too political?

- Seems like.

I don't know about and try and answer that question.

I feel like show up at some city council meetings and maybe talk to neighbors and try to get together and voice your concerns.

- Okay.

- Be part of the process.

Right?

- Right.

Cheryl, it looks to me like you have a show and tell here.

Why don't you tell us what it is and what you're doing with it?

- Okay, so, like I said, just a minute ago, Don, the mother nature hasn't been too kind to us in Montana this season.

We had late frost, we had high winds, we had high temperatures followed by cold, and now we're getting into a very, very hot season.

And so it's going to be very important that you water your garden, but it's also gonna be important that you water it properly.

We want to be sure that we watered the And so I've brought a couple of different soil probes.

This probe has two probes on it and they interact with each other and they will tell you, if they have moisture, the pH and the amount of light that is down here in the receptacles.

So you should know how deeply rooted your plant is and only water that deeply you don't need to water for hours and hours.

I'm on a Facebook group, Bozeman Gardeners, and someone was saying that they were drip watering their tomatoes every two hours.

And you don't need to do that.

And this'll tell you whether you're getting your water effectively to the roots.

For something that's a little bit deeper, more deeply rooted, we have these larger core producing probes that you can get down deeper later in the season when you have deeply rooted crops to make sure you're watering appropriately.

And it's really interesting if you have one of these probes and if you have a shallow rooted plant, and if it shows dry where those roots are, and you go down a little bit further and it's wet, then you probably watering too deeply.

So make sure you're helping conserve water.

That's really important, especially if you're paying the rates that some of us are paying for city water, but also because we're in a drought and we wanna be sure that we conserve as much water as we can.

- Cheryl, I have a question.

Where can I get these kind of probes?

- Good question, thank you Uta.

So just before the show, I Googled them because I've had these for years, literally, and they are available online.

This one particularly is $9.95 or something like that.

Very, very reasonable.

You can also get them with just one probe for moisture.

This is a little more excessive.

It's about $25.

But they are definitely available online and at hardware stores for sure this one.

- Thank you.

- I have a question for Cheryl too.

So we're heading into, you know, the hottest, driest part of the Summer.

Is there any rule of thumb kind of like how many inches of water you should put on per so many days for like vegetable garden versus lawn versus flower garden?

- Yeah, there's so many variables on that Jane.

It depends on the type of soil you have.

It depends on the plant that you're watering.

It just, there's just so many variables that you can't really say X number of inches, which is why you wanna be able to measure.

You could also do a pan evaporation test, in pan evaporation you would take like a 9 by 13, cake pan and put water in it and see how much is just evaporating out of that.

And that'll give you a good idea of how much moisture needs to be applied to the soil.

- Oh, okay, great.

- Okay, we're talking about water.

So here's a water question Hayes, with much of Montana experiencing various levels of drought.

Can you give us some basic recommendations for managing hayfields during this time?

- Sure, so most likely talk about perennial hay forages here.

And so again, kind of to go back to what I talk about, how the perennials, their strategy for to build up root reserves and if need be to then go dormant or at least less productive.

So the plant crown is really the important part of that system.

That's where the plant itself stores the carbohydrates, the sugars, so that when conditions are right and it does break dormancy and start to grow again, it has those root reserves so that it can, cause it doesn't start to photosynthesize enough to survive on its own until it's about 12 inches tall.

And so if you damage, so, when plants do start to grow back to make sure that to not harvest that until it's about 10 or 12, at least 10 or 12 inches tall, cause that's the amount of time it takes when it comes out of a dormancy it has a fairly, relatively high level of carbohydrates sugars in that plant crown.

And it uses those to produce the above ground biomass, the leaves that it then can use the photosynthesize to replace those structures.

So protect those plant crowns at all costs.

And so things you can do is don't harvest below four inches.

Don't graze your most productive fields during drought, try to have more sacrifice areas and those would be areas that are your least productive fields.

Those that are you're probably gonna renovate in the near future anyway.

Save those healthier, more productive fields for the hay production.

Utilize some of the grazing on some of the least productive fields.

Know your plants in the field.

Again, certain ones, most grasses are in that about two foot, two and a half foot.

Their root zone is kind of a mast in there, the perennials.

Some of them like the meadow brome and orchard grasses will have five foot root systems that are five feet into the soil and alfalfa and sainfoin, legume crops, typically are much deeper rooted as well.

So knowing those can help you identify how you can, the watering system, the irrigation system that you can use to benefit that themselves.

Look at soil samples.

Soil samples are about the cheapest insurance you can get.

And so, especially legumes, they're much more needy of phosphorus and potassium.

Those actually help to build the root system.

So whenever you actually set up alfalfa field, always try to fertilize, especially with things like potassium or phosphorous, that phosphorous is very immobile in the soil.

Potassium is a little more mobile.

So you can put down a two to four years of fertilizer with that planting so that you've got adequate amounts of it 'cause it does move so slow.

Whereas nitrogen moves very rapidly in the soil.

And so even in the drought year.

So we recommend that with those, the soil sample tells you what you've got in the soil and you may have adequate nitrate or nitrogen in the soil itself.

And so, but without that, without knowing that, you may inadvertently, since you're gonna have a grass component with a forage, alfalfa grass mix, wanna put down some nitrogen and get those grasses going, but you may have adequate amounts there.

And then what you've done is you've set yourself up for one nitrogen burn, but also for nitrate toxicity in the forage itself, just by having a high level of that.

And it can save you money as well, by not putting down so much nitrogen.

Cut those applications in half.

So if you're approaching a drought year, I know it's one more trip over the field itself, but apply only half of the nitrogen in the spring.

And then if it turns into a drought year and you end up harvesting maybe early or harvesting a yield goal, less than what you thought you were gonna get, you didn't overload the system with nitrogen.

You can always come back, given how mobile nitrogen is, you can always come back if conditions improve, you can always come down, put down that second application of nitrogen.

Good strategies for that, the irrigation itself.

If it's dry land, you kind of get what you got out of it, you know, in the Spring, when the Spring is there.

But if you have like a limited amount, maybe a water right, or a ditch right.

The getting that water on early to those plants and giving the best chance one to build that biomass build that root system, fill that root system as full as you can with water early and give those chance those plants the best chance they have at, one, at producing a crop, but two, at having the ability to, if things get worse, they've got the water to build that root system to survive through the drought itself.

So kind of general things to work in on that.

A lot of folks ask about grazing strategies on perennials and annuals.

There's a lot of questions coming in about allowing the livestock to harvest their own forage rather than bailing it, going through the process of, there are several steps, but whether you swath and graze the swath, so do you swath and you bail and you graze the bales, or do you just allow them cut off the swathing altogether in that system, and you just graze the fields.

So there's different strategies for each, but I'd recommend any of that.

Think about the, your most productive fields.

Sometimes to get through, you have to graze a little harder in these drought times and graze a little more intensely, but think of those places a little improved pastures, like with that contain non-native plants like crested wheat grass, or the some of the brooms that you can beat those up a lot more than you can your native ranges.

So utilize places like that.

You can always go back in and see that again, use an old Alfalfa field that you're gonna renovate anyway.

There'll probably be quite a few weeds out there, but weeds, a lot of times there are fairly good forage as well.

So think about it in terms of what you want the field to do, what your needs are for the livestock itself.

And just try to deploy some of those samples or those ideas to help that field survive as best you can.

- Lots of things to consider.

- Yeah.

- Wow.

Jane, let's see here.

Oh yeah, the caller has hoary alyssum problem.

What tips are there to get rid of it?

I've tried pulling it, cutting it and other things, but have had no luck.

- Well, I just happened to bring some hoary alyssum.

- Oh, I didn't know that.

- This was not a planted questions.

So this was one of the plants that I was like, oh, I can't help, but pull some of this.

Hoary alyssum another mustard.

It's a perennial that you can pull it.

There's several options for hoary alyssum I think the person was asking, what can I do?

I'm so excited about getting to show, my hoary alyssum they wanna know how to control it.

- Yeah.

- Right.

Well, you can pull it.

And if the soil is not too dry, you know, I just pulled these around Bozeman here before coming into the studio, you could also mow this at this point in time.

It is, you can see it's flowering.

It also is starting to produce some seed pods.

I don't know if those are showing up, but you could mow this at this point.

And I think you could stop seed production.

The other, another option for hoary alyssum is herbicides.

We actually did some work at Montana State where we worked with different noxious weed managers around Southwestern Montana and had them spray hoary alyssum about this time of its growth.

And we actually stopped viable seed production.

Even if you spray at this point in the season.

You can use products like 2, 4-D, you can use products that contain metsulfuron work well, you can also treat it spring you know, obviously treating it a little earlier than this would be better, but Spring or Fall, you can spray the rosettes.

So yeah, there's different options, you know, hand polling, mowing or herbicides.

And there is an extension, MSU extension publication that talks about all these different options for hoary alyssum.

So you can find that at the MSU extension store, or you could go to your local office and ask for a copy.

I should mention that one of the concerns with hoary alyssum is it is toxic to livestock.

So it's not a plant we wanna have around very much.

- Okay, Uta, this person started tomatoes inside where they grew well, she moved them to the greenhouse and within six weeks in new soil, they develop leaf curl.

She's wondering if it might be herbicide damage or a disease, any thoughts on that?

- So the person potted it in a different soil in the greenhouse, could be herbicide damage.

I mean, this is a guess at this point, we have seen several samples, specifically tomato, who have, you know, shown symptoms of herbicide damage after they were repotted.

Tomato seem to be very sensitive to herbicides in the soil.

So that's not unlikely.

I mean, they're probably viral diseases that cause some kind of leaf curling of tomatoes too.

I'd have to consult a book and probably some other specialists, again, hard to make diagnosis from afar.

But maybe Cheryl, you have a couple more thoughts on this.

- Well, I know that there are viruses that mimic herbicide damage for sure.

And any time you change soils, if you have recently gotten your soil, there's the potential for it to have been contaminated for sure.

But there are also some, abiotic issues that can cause leaf curl, specifically heat and dry can cause severely leaf curl on tomatoes.

And I'm seeing that on a couple of my tomato plants right now.

They're not in a greenhouse, they're out in the ground, but there's a lot of leaf curl issues.

And I think the best thing would be to get a sample into the clinic.

- Great.

- In our carton club hoop house, I just noticed this afternoon, some plants right near the north door are showing this very severe leaf curl.

I don't think it's herbicide it must be heat.

- It's probably the heat, yep.

- Okay, cause it does get up to, hate to tell you, but it's about 110 in there on Saturdays.

Okay, let's see from Helena, this caller has a 10 acre pasture with a monoculture of crested wheat graph.

She raises three head of cattle.

What native forage can be introduced to make a better pasture and more sustainable, especially considering the current drought issues?

They don't have a seed drill.

So they, so any new forage seed drill will have to be introduced by broadcasting.

- Sure, one of the ways to introduce new forage is, is to broadcast and then graze because that natural hoof faction will actually plant that seed in the soil itself.

Another option to speak with your local extension agent.

A lot of those have, they either have a seed drill or they have access to one.

And so that's somebody you can work with that you don't have to have the equipment to get that seated in with theirs.

If they're looking at doing away completely with the crested wheat grass, they'll wanna take care of that problem first because crested wheat grass is pretty competitive and it's going to out-compete any native that you put back into that system.

So then it comes down to, again, the, it's the herbicide versus the tillage.

Those are the best ways you're gonna have to do that.

And you can even till that and still graze it on top of that, and you may even have to spray it too, cause crested wheat grass is pretty tough stuff from that point there's a selection of native grasses to put in your blue bunch wheat ground.

I'm not sure exactly where they're from, but blue bunch wheat grass, you know, is a popular native species to put back in.

You're not gonna to be able to graze it as intensely as you will to crest it.

So if they're at a three cow maximum, they're gonna have to scale that back with that.

And so I'm not sure if they have irrigations or not with that, but those are pretty good forage to put into a system like that.

If they're looking for a little more, you know you can, you can look at some of the native, like milkvetch.

They're legume, not a particularly great forage, but they do accumulate or fixed nitrogen into the soil.

And so if they're looking for more of a sustainable system that would cut down on the amount of that, because anytime you have, even if they go back into a monoculture of just blue bunch wheat grass, they're still gonna have to fertilize because there's nothing fixing really fixing the social.

You'll see a decrease with that with time.

So that would be the kind of the short answer, maybe getting a little too long on the answer, but anyway, give me a call and if they need to, we can certainly go, come up with some other ideas or other species on things.

I can get a little better feel of what they want so.

- Okay, Jane, this person wants to, has rattlebox in their pasture.

Is that a threat?

And if so, is there anything they can do about it?

What in the world is rattlebox?

New one for me.

- I don't know a lot about rattlebox, but I do get questions about it.

It's a species, it's in the same family as like, Indian paintbrush.

So it has kind of a similar look.

It does, it can be a problem in some hay pastures and it tends to be kind of isolated scenarios where this shows up.

I think I probably, I don't know this for sure, maybe I shouldn't even say it, but I think it's called rattlebox because as the seeds, the seed pods dry it, those seeds rattle in there.

So it's, there's hardly any information on it.

Does it impact forage production?

I don't know if you have any experience with it, Hayes.

I don't think it does from what I've heard.

- It doesn't seem to, you don't get a lot of questions about it.

And in terms of this has taken over my field.

So I don't think that it, I think the places that it is or must be it's either, it's not that competitive.

It must be kind of an unknown part of the field itself.

- Yeah, and just anecdotally, I've heard where I think you can treat it with dicamba products, metsulphuron products, and then, anecdotally, fertilization helps like, so just, you know, taking good care of your forage so that it can be as competitive as possible.

- Yep, absolutely.

- But it's not necessarily, when it is a problem it seems very isolated.

- Yeah, definitely with any of the forages, keeping them healthy and fertilized and soil health and keeping them as competitive as you can will help with the weed issues for sure.

- Okay, Cheryl, this person wants to know about trimming Japanese lilacs.

What's a good time to do it versus regular lilacs?

- Right after they flower.

- Okay.

Simple answer, huh?

- Okay, well back to you, Jane, then.

This person has a very large leafy plants with pale yellow flowers that have purple veins in them.

What do you think this could be?

This came from Bozeman.

- Large and leafy with yellow pale yellow flowers.

Well, I have seen, if it's from Bozeman, I have seen black henbane flowering around town.

That's, it can be three, four feet tall, very big leafy plant, does have pale yellow flowers with purple veins.

I would suggest getting a sample to your local extension office.

And if the local agent can't ID that, we can get a sample or get photos into the Scutter diagnostic lab, but it could be black henbane, and that's not good because black henbane is poisonous and it is, it's not on the state noxious weed list, but it is on some county weed lists.

- Poisonous to everything.

- To everything, including humans.

- Not good then.

- Right.

- Okay, Hayes said this with time, alfalfa stands loose vigor and yields decrease.

Can producers just seed alfalfa directly back into the old field?

Or is there a rotation strategy that they should use?

- Yeah, no that's great.

I've been getting this question quite a bit and the answer is no.

And so alfalfa expresses auto toxicity.

In other words, older plants emit a toxin into the soil that kills younger plants.

So you need to rotate out of alfalfa.

We talked a little bit about what, how cereals fit into that as well, but rotating into, so the timeframe really is, we recommend two years, but that's not so much from the auto toxicity perspective, as much as it is from all the disease, the root rots, crown rots, the weeds associated with the alfalfa.

And that gives you two years.

And plus you, after, you know, 6, 7, 8 years of alfalfa, you've really got a bank in nitrogen there.

So you might as well go to a crop that can use that nitrogen.

And a couple of years of at least that first year, you may need to look at fertilize in that second year.

But so you wanna rotate out of alfalfa gives you those,people, I mean it, some of the research tells you on have you have to rotate out for a month, but Montana, we seed to such soil moisture is that unless it's irrigated, rotating, you don't have the option of waiting a month in the Spring to seed any kind of a dry land alfalfa.

So you need to wait at least a year.

And then I recommend waiting that second year, at least.

And that's just based on those, the needs of managing the field itself.

And so I'm an overall program they fit well, those annuals, they fit well into that.

So that's the, And it gives you a chance also, like I said, to clean up some of that seed bank, that weed seed bank that may be in the field.

So general, general kind of guidelines like that, but don't seed back into alfalfa and you need to kill the alfalfa, I mean that's it, before you actually seed back in there.

It needs time for the soil to process that toxin that's in there.

- Okay, Cheryl, this person says I'm a newcomer to Montana and need help with almost every aspect of caring for my yard and garden.

What are some resources you, that can help this person.

- Well, welcome to Montana where life is challenging if you are a yard and garden person.

There are a lot of resources that are available to you that are free.

And I suggest strongly that you familiarize yourself with the MSU extension service.

Specifically, your local county agent can be a tremendous help to you.

As Jane mentioned just a minute ago, online on the extension publications site, there's a store where there's lots of written material it's available for free download.

And I suggest you take advantage of it.

It's very well-organized.

You can go to the yard and garden section.

You can go to the animal section and read up and enjoy gardening.

- Gardening is kind of a challenge in Montana though, isn't it?

- It is indeed a challenge, but it's a fun challenge.

- Okay, we're kind of getting close to the end here.

Just a quick one for you.

Hayes, so why isn't pure alfalfa good for their horses?

- Sure, well it's an issue not being a real horse expert, but it's definitely an issue that you need different fiber structures in the diets and you can't replace fiber with protein.

And that's mainly what alfalfa does.

It's a different fiber.

If you think of a alfalfa stem for those, you've picked one up.

If you bend it and it snaps cause they have a different, I think if I remember, it's like cuboidal fiber structure, whereas a grass, if you pick up a grass, you bend it.

And it just bends with you.

And so horses and all livestock need that, that fiber as part of their diet.

And so you can't replace the general rule is you can't replace the grass fibers with the protein that's just in alfalfa.

- Okay, so I think that'll close it up for our questions tonight.

This is our last program of the Spring season if you will, we will be back next Fall.

First program will be on Sunday, September 12th.

I certainly wanna thank the panel for coming in tonight.

And all of those of you that called in your questions, we also wanna thank you.

Of course we couldn't exist without our sponsors that you saw earlier in the program.

And we also wanna thank the crew here in the studio that keep this program going.

So if you wanna see reruns of the program, we're on every Sunday morning at 11.

So check us out then.

Have a great Summer.

And we'll look forward to seeing you back in the studio next fall, goodnight.

- For more information and resources, visit montanapbs.org/aglive.

(upbeat country music) 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 Galatin Gardeners Club and the Rocky Mountain Certified Crop Advisor Program.

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