- 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.

(upbeat music) Good evening and welcome to Montana AG Live brought to you from the PBS Studio at Montana State University in beautiful Bozeman, Montana.

So my name is Nina Zidack.

I am the director of the Seed Potato Certification Program, and I'm gonna be monitoring the program tonight and in Montana AG Live, this is your opportunity to ask any question that you might have about your home or garden, or also about your agricultural operation.

We've assembled a great panel here tonight, and we're gonna have the opportunity to talk about those usual things and we're also gonna have a chance to learn a little bit more about Montana's most important work animal, which is the horse and the nutrition and research that is supporting nutritional aspects of horse management and also talk about everything else that we usually get the opportunity to visit with on Montana AG Live about our gardens and what's going on in our fields at this time of year.

So I'm gonna start off by introducing our panel.

On the far end, we have Mary Burrows who is a extension plant pathologist, and also serves as the associate director of the Montana AG Experiment Station.

We have Amanda Bradbery.

She is an equine nutritionist in the College of AGriculture Animal Science and she's gonna be talking to us today, again, like I said, our most important agricultural animal, which is, or work animal, which is the horse and also a very, very important animal for companionship and recreation.

So we have Laurie Kerzicnik, who is an insect diagnostician in the Scutter Disease Diagnostic Lab, and Abi Saeed, who is a horticulturalist here at MSU.

Answering phones tonight, we have Cheryl Bennett with us in the studio, and we also have Deanna Midland who is answering phones remotely, and she'll be sending them in to me in the studio so I can see them and get them out to the panel.

We also have questions coming in on Facebook.

So if you follow Montana AG Live on Facebook, just go ahead and put your question in there and we'll make sure that we get to it.

So, first of all, tonight, I would just like to go to Amanda and give her the opportunity to talk a little bit about her program here at MSU.

- Well, thank you.

First of all, I really appreciate the and answer some questions for all of you out there that may be wondering little things about your horses and how we can optimize their management.

But I am an Assistant Professor of Equine Science at Montana State University in the Department of Animal and Range Science.

I hold both the teaching and research appointment.

My research focuses primarily on nutrition and physiology, diving into growth and development and how we can increase performance longevity of these horses, whether they're being used for work on the ranch or they're show horses that we want to be able to show for a few years longer before we send them into the breeding herd or retire them to a new life.

- Okay, great.

Thank you, Amanda.

I'm sure we're gonna be coming to a lot more questions about horses.

So Abi, when should people quit watering their shrubs and trees in their lawn this fall?

- That's a good question.

I like to tell people to continue watering their trees and shrubs as long as you can until the ground freezes.

So if you've shut off your irrigation system and you have some tender Woody ornamentals, ones that struggled over the past couple of winters, I would say continue to hand water them once or twice a month until the ground freezes.

That'll set them up to survive winter or equip them with the best chances to survive winter.

- Can you also talk a little bit about where to water them?

- Yeah, that's a good question, where to water them.

So a lot of people think you just put the water right at the base of the trunk, but where most of the roots are is along the drip line.

So where you see the canopy of the tree, below it, the roots are gonna be kind of a mirror of what the top looks like and so applying that water around the drip line is gonna be the best way to get that moisture to your trees and shrubs.

- Great yeah.

And I think everybody is thinking about that right now.

We know we need to turn the water off, but it is so dang dry right now.

It's a kind of an interesting fall.

- [Abi] Yeah.

- So Laurie, this is a question from Bozeman.

The box elder bugs are really bad around their house this year.

Is there anything that they can do for them?

- Yes I actually brought some box elder bugs today.

I don't know if this will show up very well in the camera, but we've had a lot of questions about box elder bugs in the last couple of weeks.

And when we have a heavy seed year, the box elder bugs feed on the seeds of the female trees.

And so we've had a lot of box elder bugs this year, even starting into June.

So the best thing you could do is really just use a shot back to take care of them.

But you can also, if you can, they're resistant to a lot of insecticides, but you can use something like an insecticidal soap and you can catch them, usually on the south and southwest facing in any of the sunny areas.

So anything like that, first try to vacuum and then just remember if they do come inside that they do not reproduce indoors, which it might seem like they do, but they also stay in fabric.

So try not to smash them on any of your white curtains or anything like that.

So there's no real silver bullet to take care of them, but if you can catch a bunch of them with a contact insecticide, then that's something that will work.

But I use the shot back or just-- - And they're seasonal and they're annoying - They're seasonal.

- For a while and then they go away.

- Yup.

- So for Amanda, this is a question that came in from Bozeman.

Is it better for a horse with early arthritis to be in a pasture or in a stall?

- That's a great question and actually it's fairly complicated in the reasoning behind its answer, but it's always better to have horses turned out.

And particularly because of the way the joint functions, what arthritis is, is a degradation of the cartilage within the joint.

And when that cartilage degrades, there's really no way to reverse that.

All we can do is slow down the progression of that arthritis and make that horse comfortable.

So when an early onset osteoarthritis or early stages of osteoarthritis, it is good to have those horses out and moving, particularly because there's no vasculature within the joint itself.

So it relies very heavily on the exchange between the synovial fluid, which actually lubricates the joint and the vasculature outside and increasing movement can actually improve that exchange from vasculature to the synovial fluid itself.

And the synovial fluid is ultimately what feeds that cartilage.

And so we can remove the bad stuff more efficiently and bring in some good stuff more efficiently when there is encouraged movement.

So confinement housing does present some challenges from an arthritis perspective.

- So really horses are no different than people.

- Absolutely, very true.

- We need to get that little bit of arthritis.

- Exactly right.

- It's best to keep moving.

- Yes.

- So for Mary, so this person's carrot leaves are bushy, yellow and purple.

The roots have a lot of root hairs on them too.

Is this a nutrient issue or is this a disease?

- Well if it was a nutrient issue, all of the carrots would probably have it and they could get a soil test to figure it out.

There is a disease called Aster yellows that causes very similar symptoms.

And another diagnostic thing you can do is wash that carrot off.

And if it's bitter that is often associated with the Phytoplasmas and that's, comes some years it's bad, some years you won't see it and that's, can't do much about it, it's fine.

- Yeah and they're also kind of Woody and.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

So I have an interesting observation about and you can weigh in on it.

So I had quite a few that are actually blooming this year and they're a biennial and so they shouldn't bloom the first year that you see them.

But I'm just wondering if it was the stress, cause it was really, really cold.

And then it was really, really hot.

I mean, does that make sense to you guys?

- Maybe, the deer got mine a couple of times, so I'm not having that problem.

- Yeah, no, it's kind of weird, it's kind of weird.

And I had a couple of beets that also grew up, flew up flower stocks too.

So I'm thinking, I'm attributing it to stress.

We've all been under stress this year.

So Abi, is it too late to do fall fertilizer application for a lawn.

- It's actually not too late to do a fall fertilizer application for your lawn.

You can usually do your last application until about Columbus day.

You generally want to aim for about four weeks before the ground freezes.

So you can still apply your last fertilizer treatment in the next couple of weeks.

- Okay.

And I seem to remember kind of a rule of thumb that you can do through your fertilizer applications during the summer, but the most important one is in the fall.

- Absolutely yeah, that sets your turf up for a successful following spring.

- Great, great.

- Do you know too, if you have to apply an herbicide, is there a good time to do that?

And you supposed to do your lyser application first or your weed app?

- So it depends, but if you're doing a weed and feed, you can usually apply it together for pre-emergent for crab grass and things like that.

But yeah.

- [Laurie] Okay.

- Okay, Laurie, a question came in from Fort Benton.

They're still seeing grasshoppers out.

How long will they be around and what are they gonna be like next year?

- Yeah we've had another bad grasshopper year.

So grasshoppers will be out until we have a really hard frost.

We did have a hard frost, we had a frost, but it wasn't very hard frost.

So we'll probably see, we'll keep seeing grasshoppers until we have some really nasty conditions.

And it's really difficult to predict what's gonna happen next year.

So we kind of need to have perfect conditions when during egg hatch.

So if we're gonna have a bad grasshopper year, we need some wet conditions.

And then it has to dry out pretty quickly after that to allow some vegetation to grow.

But if it stays wet, what during egg hatch and keep staying wet for about a few weeks, then there's a fungus called Nosema that builds up that will actually kill a lot of the grasshoppers.

But if we have a heavy, heavy rain or wet season followed by dryness, then we're gonna have another bad grasshopper year.

- Yeah, hopefully we have a cold, wet spring, cold winter, and wet spring next year.

- Yep that's what we need to hope for.

- Yeah that is what we need to hope for.

A question came in for Amanda, from Bozeman, are there precautions in the percentages of clover and alfalfa hay to feed without harming horses?

- That's a really great question.

Alfalfa is a pretty standard forage that we feed horses, particularly up here in the Northern regions.

With clover in there, the biggest thing you have to be careful with is the potential for mold.

Mold is ultimately what causes the secondary effects of excess clover consumption.

And that mold comes from the clover's ability to dry out.

And if the clover doesn't have the ability to dry out and red clover being particularly one that doesn't dry out very fast, then that mold can present.

And your horse will end up with slobbers, which is usually the first characteristic sign of some type of mold in your clover.

They will literally dump slobber on you, which is not pleasant when you are trying to saddle them.

But then that can progress into much more serious concerns being that of bleeding.

Now, clover is an excellent source of forage.

It has great nutrient composition.

It is a legume so it's a little bit higher in the crude protein content, has a nice composition of vitamins as well.

So it is a high quality source of forage.

You just have to be very careful with that presentation of mold.

- Great so that brings up another question.

Maybe you and Mary can discuss this a little bit.

Are there any plant diseases that can affect horses?

- Well, I think mold, the mycotoxigenic molds and there can be a lot of them, isn't there like a endophyte in grass that can affect horses?

- Yes, there is and that's a really good point.

It presents in tall fescue most often, usually it's not an issue in most of our maintenance horses where that becomes an issue is in our third trimester, pregnant mares, as they get closer to that time of parturition and having their foal, it can actually cause late term abortion from that endophyte.

And the endophyte is basically, it causes abortion in late term.

And the mares will sometimes present with what we classically term as a red bag.

So the mare may actually go into normal signs of giving birth, but as those membranes don't break appropriately off the placenta, then you will actually present with a red bag.

And oftentimes the foal doesn't survive that.

They do make endophyte free tall fescue.

However, it tends to not be very palatable.

So I usually tell most producers to go with a different cool season grass for their pregnant mares rather than the classic I'll say.

- And then ergot would be the other one I'd probably work.

And then, I don't know I don't think that head scab has very much effect on horses or they just don't feed wheat to horses very much.

- Yeah, usually we don't feed a whole lot of wheat to horses, so it doesn't become much of an issue because wheat is not highly digestible in our horses.

So we tend to not use it very much, which is why that's not a huge concern.

- [Mary] Okay.

- So Mary, a question came that's a little bit more agronomic, but it might be something that you have some information on.

Is it too late to plant winter rye and Austrian field peas as a cover crop?

- That's a great question for probably Pirie Miller, agronomist or Pet Car at Moccasin.

They'd know the answer to that.

It probably depends on where you are too.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Would depend on where you are.

And also it's just so hard to predict the weather, you don't know exactly what it is.

- You need some moisture to get them up.

- Uh huh, yep, you sure do.

Another question from Great Falls for Abi.

They bought willow cuttings last spring and they did not transplant them.

They're wondering what to do with these cuttings so that they don't suffer from winter kill.

So they must have planted them in pots.

I'm thinking that they planted them in pots and they want to know how to maintain them over the winter?

- Okay.

If they haven't planted them yet, I would probably.

So they purchased them last year?

- Yeah, it says they bought willow cuttings last spring.

So I'm thinking that they must have basically just bought some the conservation type trees and potted them up.

- Yeah.

- I've done the same thing before, carried them through the winter, not getting around to doing anything with them.

- Yeah so in that case, I would probably wait if they are willing to wait another winter before planting them, because we could have a pretty, unpredictable fall with a freeze coming any time.

So I would probably keep them in the pots, make sure the pots are big enough, so they don't get root bound so that they have enough area in there and then plant it that following spring.

- Another thing that I've done is just taken them in the pots and then put them kind of like into a bank of soil and get soil around the roots because you don't want severe freezing around the roots.

And you just lift the pot on top of the surface.

- You could use some straw and stuff to help further insulate if you don't have snow.

- Right, right so, okay, great.

So Laurie this is from Kalispell.

They are experiencing tiny flies with iridescent wings that come out after the first frost, what are they and how do they deal with them?

- Ooh, I think some people have called this actually the little fairies.

(everyone laughing) Yeah I've actually had a couple of calls this week and we have several different types of wooly aphids that produce, they look like little fairies this time of year.

And most of them are going back to their winter hosts.

I've seen them on apple.

We also have the leaf curl ash aphid that produces that has the wing generation going back to going back to the ash to overwinter.

So at this point they will mate, and they'll lay eggs and that'll be the end of them.

But yeah, we see a huge clump of them kind of trying to move to the trees to overwinter.

So yeah, apple, ash, elm, you'll see those on all three trees.

So, they're cute little, especially cute under the microscope, they look like little, yeah.

They're blue and fairy like.

(everyone laughing) - So Amanda, a question came in from Missoula.

How do you judge the condition of a horse and whether a horse is too fat or too skinny or just right?

- Sure, that's a really excellent question.

And we have a system called the body condition scoring system that was developed by a gentleman by And he developed that as a way to assess fat cover by tactile assessment and actually putting our hands on the horse at certain locations that horses tend to deposit fat and that would be over the crest of their neck, right behind their shoulder, along their rib cage and right on top of their tail head.

And it's a scale of one to nine, one being very emaciated.

Hopefully we don't see many of those horses and nine being what we would consider morbidly obese.

And so you can run your hand down those different pieces on the horse's body.

So crest of the neck, right behind the shoulder, along the rib cage and on top of their tail head and assign each location a different score and then kind of take the average of that score.

And you can do it in your head.

What would be ideal for a performance So right there in the middle of that scale and a nice way to kind of separate and divide that scale into half is a horse has a body condition score of five or greater, you will not be able to see their ribs when they're standing in a normal standing position.

If they're below a five, then you will be able to see their ribcage and ribs protruding when they're just standing normally.

Now with that said, if they're standing kind of funky or turning their head or leaning in one direction, even a horse that's a body condition score of five may show some of that rib.

So that's where the tactile assessment really comes in nicely.

For our breeding stock.

We tend to want them to be a body condition score of six.

That way they just have a little bit more fat cover to go into that breeding season.

Late term gestation and early lactation are very demanding from a nutritional perspective.

So if for some reason we're failing to meet those requirements from a nutritional perspective, they have some additional stores that they can pull from.

So it's a one to nine scale, five to six being ideal.

- Okay, great thank you.

So Mary, this is a question that came in from Lewistown.

This spring, our garlic cloves were gray and empty and those planted last fall did not do well.

Should they get new seed garlic?

- Yeah and they'd probably also want to consider where they have it in their garden.

There's a number of storage molds.

So you probably just don't want to start with bad seed, start with some nice healthy cloves and then crop rotation I think is particularly important for a lot of those alliums, all the onions and the garlics.

And I have definitely seen poor performance in mine and I'm ready to move on, so.

- Yeah, there's some amazing garlic varieties out there now.

- Yeah my neighbor has, I think he's growing it commercially and he has them labeled with these beautiful steaks with all the names.

So I got to go visit.

- Yeah, yeah it's a fun crop to grow.

- [Mary] Yeah.

- So Abi, from Missoula, when is the best time to cut back raspberries and what is the best way to do it?

- So we have two different types of raspberries that we grow here in Montana.

The most common are our June bearing raspberries.

And then the other type are our everbearing or fall bearing raspberries.

And for the June bearing raspberries, anything, any of the floricanes that flowered and produced fruit this summer, or even if they didn't produce fruit, if they flowered this summer, those are gonna die off.

So you can cut those back or you can wait a little bit later, mark them.

And as long as you can keep track of which ones are the spent floricanes, you can cut those back usually a couple inches away from the ground.

Any time after they're done flowering.

For the everbearing ones and ones if you're not sure what type of raspberries you had, or if you had some frost damage where you didn't have any of your canes leaf out and you're not sure what's going on, I would wait until after the growing season has ended.

I like to prune my raspberries in the spring when I'm itching to get out into my garden and do something.

And so I'll usually mark the ones that have flowered and I'll usually cut them back and that, leaving those canes over winter also helps provide some habitat for a potential beneficial organisms as well.

So keeping track of the ones that have flowered and produced fruit, and you can cut them back anytime after that point.

- One thing that we've started doing, just because the canes tend to grow so tall, we'll cut everything back to about four, four and a half feet tall in the fall.

- [Laurie] So you can actually pick it.

- Well yeah, so you can actually pick it.

And then you also don't have these tall canes that are getting hammered by snow because they'll get so weighted down.

And then they're also more wind prone and everything.

And that makes it a lot more easier or a lot easier to manage when you actually do go to take the canes out too, to just have them topped off a little bit.

- Yeah.

- Mine in the spring, all the floricanes from the previous year or the bark is peeling and they're definitely dead.

- Yeah, it's easier to see.

- [Nina] They're usually mostly dead weight.

Yeah easier to see.

- And I've also heard or read lots of different recommendations, but that sometimes it is good to wait any way because sometimes only a percentage of the primocanes will actually survive anyway.

So.

- Yeah.

- [Mary] I'm just usually so tired in the fall.

- I know.

By the time you've cleaned up the garden.

You just don't want to get on your hands and knees and deal with those things.

- Absolutely.

- So a question actually came in for me, asking, is there a directory for seed potatoes in Montana and where they would get one?

And we actually do have a directory for garden seed potatoes.

So a lot of the different specialty varieties and that can be obtained from our program.

You can just call me with my contact information or call our office, which is 406-994-3150.

That'll get you to the potato lab.

And we also do distribute them to each county and extension.

So you can call your county extension agent and get those.

If by chance you are interested in commercial quantities of seed potatoes, definitely give us a call at the same number at our lab.

And we also have a website, montanaspud.org.

So all of our producers and the varieties of potatoes they raise and what they'll have available this year will be on our website, so.

- Do you have a new favorite yet?

- You know, there's a couple of new yellow yellows, so they have yellow flesh and yellow skin.

There's a new one called Arizona.

Our growers are constantly looking to from an agronomic standpoint replace Yukon gold because Yukon gold is a really, really low yielder, especially for the seed producer because it only produces a few tubers and then they get really, really large, fast.

So it's hard to get a good yield for seed.

And there are a lot of potatoes out there that really are just as good as Yukon gold, but people have Yukon gold in their mind and it's gotten such great consumer acceptance that people just really, really enjoy it.

So, but we're trying to educate people that there are really other really good yellow varieties.

Another one that's gotten to be pretty popular in Montana and in other areas is huckleberry gold and it has purple skin and yellow flesh.

And so that one's also very good to eat and kind of pretty too.

So, Laurie, looks like you've got some show and tells, could you give us a look?

- Yes, I'm gonna start with this one.

Cause I think it's ticking up everybody's face in the studio.

So this is, we've been getting a lot of wasp calls and this is the nest of a bald faced hornet.

And we have also had a lot of western yellow jackets, but this is one that you'll commonly see.

And at this time of year this is what they look like.

They're about the size of a basketball and this is their entrance hole right here, entrance and exit hole.

And a couple hard frosts will actually take care of these bald faced hornets.

And what's really, pest differs right now is the western yellow jacket.

And again, a couple of hard frosts will really help take care of those western yellow jackets.

But I've seen them up to even 8,000 feet and the nests are actually kind of hard to turn to see for the western yellow jacket.

So they will keep forging until these hard frosts happen.

So we'll see a lot of aggression with them.

So I just wanted to also have, wanted to mention these traps because a lot of people still have these out and they only trap the western yellow jacket.

They don't actually trap the bald faced hornet.

And you do have to replace, there's velor in here that you have to, it's a cotton ball and you add a little bit of velor to that to try to attract the western yellow jackets.

I think you need to do that once a month or change velor.

So you will be able to trap a few here but when you're talking about a western yellow jacket nest, it looks a lot like a ball faced hornet nest, you have hundreds to thousands of those wasps and you might be taking care of a little of the population, but not really taking care of the entire population.

- [Mary] Makes people feel better though.

- It does make you feel better, yeah, yeah.

- If it makes you feel better, go for it.

- And try not to squat it on.

It just makes them more aggressive, but they're going after a lot of sugary resources right now.

And so if they do become pass on your porch and things like that, but just wait for a couple of hard frosts.

- When's the best time to set up your western yellow jacket trap?

- Yeah, so this trap, I would try to get this out in probably, in Bozeman, I live in Bozeman.

I try to get mine out by Memorial day.

And it depends on where you live, maybe a couple of weeks before that, if you're in a warmer area, but you don't have to get 'em out too early.

But the whole purpose of getting these out early is to try to trap the queen.

So every queen you trap is one less nest that you're gonna have.

- Great, okay.

- Great.

Amanda, a question came in from Kalispell.

They have a Norwegian Fjord horse that has Cushing's disease.

What is the best diet to give that horse?

- Sure.

So a horse with Cushing's disease, Cushing's is also called pars pituitary intermedia dysfunction.

Which is basically a dysregulation of and often results in insulin resistance in those horses.

So the best thing for a horse that's insulin resistant is to not give them a diet that's high in starches and sugars.

And so anything that's high in fiber or higher in fats or a forage based diet is gonna be excellent.

Anything to avoid that spike in glucose that you tend to see after a meal, it's gonna result in insulin release, the insulin usually no longer has the capability to communicate with the muscle tissue or the liver tissue to actually take in that glucose.

And so you can end up with some significant metabolic issues that come along with that.

So anything for a horse with Cushing's, insulin resistance, equine metabolic syndrome, anything that's low in starches and sugars, and it may be listed on your feed tag as NSC, which is also known as non-structural carbohydrates.

So something lower in that concentration will be fine for that horse.

Most Cushing's horses can also do fine just on a hay or pasture only diet as well.

- So do they ever give horses insulin injections if they have something like Cushing's disease?

- That's a good question.

Not for Cushing's, and most horses never really cross over that threshold from insulin resistance, which is what we would call pre-diabetic.

They never really cross over that threshold into being truly diabetic.

So usually treating with insulin is not necessary.

Usually it's managed just dietarily, but there are some other treatments out there for Cushing's, for example, pergolide, which is meant to help the adrenal glands and stuff to kind of stave off the symptoms associated with that disease.

But there's nothing from a insulin regulatory perspective to give, but the pergolide is usually something that your veterinarian would prescribe for a horse with Cushing's.

- Okay, great thank you.

From Whitefish, Mary, these folks have tomatoes in a hoop house, and they've got black spots on both the leaves and the fruit.

Do you have any idea what might be causing the black spots?

- It could be a number of things.

It could be a fungal disease, if it's only the tip of the tomato it's usually, help me, out the calcium deficiency.

- [Nina] Blossom end rot.

- Blossom, thank you.

- Small spots, I mean there's bacteria speck, but I wouldn't expect that to come in a hoop house because you usually have a lot of holey watering.

- there's seed transmitters so.

- [Nina] Yeah, yeah, it could be bacteria.

- I used to have an heirloom variety they'd get that all the time and I'd bring it into AG Live every year cause it could be relied upon, but that would be kind of small spots and then come with a yellow halo around them and we can certainly just diagnose it in the clinic.

- Yeah, that would be great if you still have some of those leaves, send them into the clinic, because if it is caused by a pathogen, you can usually tease it out and.

- It's not hard to eat or anything, but if you're trying to sell it then people don't want it.

- And it can decrease the amount of time that you can store potatoes, tomatoes.

Everything's about potato.

(everyone laughing) Yeah, I mean, so, yeah it would be good to get to the bottom of it.

And also many of the varieties are resistant to plant diseases.

So if it's something that you think could be a problem in the future, just look for a variety that has resistance to that.

So Abi, another question from White Fish, what is the best lawn fertilizer to use?

- There are lots of lawn fertilizers.

You generally want to aim for about a certain amount of, you want to aim for about one pound of nitrogen per 1,000 square feet, about three or four times a year, depending on how often you get around to it, that most important time of year, again, being the fall fertilizing.

So any sort of fertilizer that has that one pound of actual nitrogen per 1,000 square feet on there is gonna be great for a lawn fertilizer.

So that's kind of the number that you're aiming for.

- Great, okay.

So for Laurie, a question about cabbages and other cold crops, this person has had problems with the cabbage worms.

They're wondering about BT products that they might be able to use for controlling those and if they're effective and how you use them?

- Yeah they're effective, BT products, BT stands for Bacillus thuringiensis, which is a bacterium and it's specific.

They have a strain that's specific to caterpillars, the kurstaki strain, which you could easily get at Home Depot or Ace or any of the local stores.

And they're best controlled in the earlier stages, the instars, the earlier instars of the caterpillars.

So once they've reached the later instars, they're a little bit harder to control.

So once you start seeing them, do a little scouting, and once you start seeing the caterpillars being active, that's the best time to control them.

- You have to apply it repeatedly.

So if it rains or you irrigate, you have to apply it again.

And that can be the hardest thing to keep up with.

- Yeah and contact is critical.

So if you're not reaching on with the BT, then it's not gonna work.

- When my cats start going after the white moths, I'm like, "Oh got to get the BT out."

- They look pretty when they're flying around.

But that's a sign that when you've got a white butterfly flying around that you've probably got the cabbage mafia.

- Okay, okay, great.

Okay.

Thank you, from Florence for Amanda.

I guess since we're talking about gardens, what can you feed your horse from a vegetable garden?

Are there any vegetables that maybe shouldn't be fed?

That would be a good first part of the question.

And then also they have bind weed wrapping around their pole beans that they wanted to feed them, wondering if that's a good idea or not?

- Sure so I tend to steer away from feeding horses most things from the garden.

Obviously carrots are a safe option and horses love them, but I tend to tell people to steer away from feeding them much out of their gardens, simply because you're gonna throw off their dietary balance.

But also if you start feeding them an excess out of the garden, you're giving them bundles of carrots a day, then you can actually end up with some digestive upset.

So we really want to be careful doing much of that.

A little carrot treat here and there is great.

Carrots are nice because they have quite a bit of vitamin A in them and they don't have a lot of sugars, but a lot of things that come out of our garden are pretty high in sugars.

And that's not usually something that we want to give to our horses, but that's why they really like it.

Apples are great, horses love them, but they're also very high in sugars.

So you just have to be quite careful.

Now, as far as the weed that's wrapping around, most horses, as long as they have something else to graze on a high quality forage or a pasture, then they're usually gonna stay away from those various types of weeds.

I'm not familiar with that specific weed, but Hayes Goosey is our forage extension specialist with the Department of Animal and Range Science.

And he'd be a great person that could potentially answer that question for you.

- Okay, okay great.

For Mary, another garden question from Helena, what can they do to prevent powdery mildew in their squash?

- Oh that's hard.

If you are growing it from seed or sometimes a seed, the labels at the garden center have a little PM and that means it's resistant to powdery mildew.

I don't know of any off the top of my head that are super resistant.

- It was interesting, this year I hardly got any powdery mildew in my squash and I do choose varieties that do say they have some powdery mildew resistance.

And I don't know if I just did a better job of selecting varieties or-- - It was kind of hot this year.

- It was hot this year.

- I didn't have a horrible issue this year, but you can also, if you don't overhead water, that'll help, do some cultural management, crop rotation.

I don't know how effective that is.

- Yeah, in a garden situation that's usually really.

- And I guess there are probably some copper sprays, they may have some, just check the label for what it's effective against.

- Usually by the time the powdery mildew comes in, it's really-- - The squash, yeah.

- Or actually you want the canopy to open up and kind of force it to ripen a little bit.

So I don't know that it's always such a bad thing, but I have seen it be pretty serious so.

From Great Falls, Abi, they have an amaryllis bulb that's five years old, it's bloomed four out of five years, this year it did not.

It is long and leafy and really healthy, but it has no bloom.

What should they do to rest it this year for blooming?

- That's a hard to say if it's, if it's been productive for the past few years, one thing that they might need to do is make sure that the soil has enough nutrients that would encourage that to bloom again.

So a soil test would probably be a good idea and there are resources that you can find that talk more about forcing blooms as well.

So if they have questions, they could look at extension resources that talk about how to force that bulb to flower.

But generally what I would do is if something's been productive for a few years and reduces that productivity is to make sure that those soil nutrients are sufficient to meet those needs for flowering.

- Okay, great.

Okay Laurie, from Billings, this person is wondering, do we have spotted lantern flies here?

- We do not have the spotted lantern fly here yet.

And this is, actually brought the spotted lantern fly with me today.

A sample of this.

We have had a couple of close calls or had some people actually call in some questions about spotted lantern fly recently.

And it is a pest that we're really scouting for.

It did make its way to Kansas in a student's insect collection at the state fair.

So we don't know, it's one of those insects that's, it's from China and we, it probably will make it here at some point.

And it's an excellent hitchhiker.

It will lay eggs on almost anything, but we're kind of scouting for it and worried about it for we've got hops and we've got some grapes and apples and it has a very wide host range and can cause quite a bit of damage.

So we are looking out for that, but no, we have not found it yet.

And if you have any suspected samples, you can contact your local extension agent or you can send me pictures or samples to the Scutter Diagnostic Lab.

- Okay.

So Amanda, a caller from Belt has a seven year old mare that really won't take to being bred and she has a crested neck.

Do you have any ideas to help her out on this?

First of all, can you tell us what a crested neck is?

And then second of all, what that might mean in terms of ability to breed?

- Sure, usually when people refer to a crested neck, they're talking about a large deposition of fat on the top line of their neck that actually creates this crest like appearance, as far as her inability to get bred could potentially be because she is overweight.

If we get beyond that body condition score of six to upwards of an eight plus then reproductive efficiency tends to go down.

But with that said, that may not be associated with her body condition.

It may be a breeding soundness issue.

So I would definitely contact your veterinarian and have them do a breeding soundness exam on that mare which typically encompasses ultrasound, potentially uterine biopsies to determine if there's anything from a reproductive standpoint that may be preventing her from taking and getting bred.

- Okay, great thank you.

So Mary, I know you're the wheat streak mosaic expert in the states.

So with the type of harvest we had, with the weather we're having right now, what do you think the outlook is for wheat streak mosaic developing this fall and into next spring?

- Pretty dismal for the virus on the mite.

- [Nina] That's good, that's one silver lining in this.

- Right, drought is not good for most plant diseases and wheat street.

We did get, I think, a sample or two into the clinic, but there are exceptions to the rule for sure.

And once we have disease shut down by drought, like it is now, we'd need two, three years of moisture to really get any sort of significant disease going.

- Okay, let's see.

So Abi, this is a caller from Bozeman.

They have a young apple tree that had split bark over the last winter.

Is there something that they can do to protect that from happening again this year?

- Yeah so some of our tender or thin barked Woody ornamentals have this injury that's called southwest injury or winter injury where it's usually on that side of the bark that is exposed to that sunlight.

And when you have warm sunny days in the winter, then you start to have that splitting of the bark because that moisture is gonna start to move around in that tree.

And so one way that you can reduce the likelihood of that happening or prevent it is you can use tree wraps around the base, around that trunk, or you can also use tree paints, latex based tree paints that you can apply.

That'll reduce that likelihood of that damage that could potentially kill your tree if it's extensive enough.

- Okay great.

- So I was in Utah this week and they had beaver damage on a lot of the plants and what they did was they mixed sand with latex paint.

So is that good for like voles and stuff too or?

- I don't know.

That might be a really good question for Jared Beaver, our vertebrate specialist, but yeah I don't know, I've never heard of that.

- They were painting the trees they wanted to save with latex paint mixed with sand.

- [Abi] Interesting.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- So Laurie, a call came in from Missoula and so they are bugged and they specifically say no pun intended, by earwigs in their corn, in their apricots, I specifically get very bugged about having them in my dahlias.

What can they do about earwigs?

- You can do a couple of things for earwigs.

Mostly you want to give them a place to hide other than your dahlias and your corn.

And some corrugated cardboard that's wettened a little bit, kind of damp kind of put that in the soil next to the plants, or you could do rolled up newspaper, something similar to that.

And then you could kind of make your own bait and you could use a tuna can or something like that with some oil and they will actually fall into that trap if you put it at soil line.

So those are, again, there's no silver bullet, but I mean, they do have a beneficial role too.

So they feed on soft body, things like insects, but getting rid of earwigs is very challenging.

Anything you could do to kind of reduce the moisture around your plants, but giving a place to hide is probably one of your best ways to get rid of them, but it's not gonna take care of them completely.

- I used to get them really bad on my lettuce, but then I thinned like every other lettuce plant to just try and open up that and reduce the moisture.

And that helped a lot.

- Air it out a little bit.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

Amanda, we have a caller from Townsend who is having trouble obtaining hay this year and they normally feed straight grass and just a small amount of oat supplement.

It's a young horse.

And they're wondering this year, the only hay that they've been able to source is straight alfalfa.

So what do they need to do to adjust their feeding plan with straight alfalfa when they've normally been feeding hay in the winter?

Or excuse me, grass hay in the winter.

- That's a very relevant question.

We're right now in the drought, it is hard to get hay right now.

And that's a big challenge.

If you're switching from an all grass hay to an alfalfa hay, if you haven't made that transition yet, make that transition slowly, kind of mix that alfalfa with the grass hay that you're running out of.

So that the horses can transition to that a little bit more easily.

Grass hay does have a different nutrient composition than most of our legume hays.

The legumes tend to be a little bit more nutrient dense.

So we want the GI to be able to adapt to that change in diet over time.

But if you are in a situation where you don't think you're gonna have enough long stem forage in the form of baled alfalfa or baled grass hay to get you through the winter, the minimum long stem forage requirement for horses is 1% of their body weight per day.

So for an 1,000 pound horse, that would be about 10 pounds per day.

Now with that said that 10 pounds of forage is not necessarily gonna meet their nutrient requirements.

However, you can fill that gap with hay cubes or alfalfa cubes that you can soak or something along those lines that can buffer that and maybe add in a commercially, a formulated grain ration, concentrate feed.

There are some great options out there, there's even some products called balancers or forage balancers.

You'll also hear them called ration balancers that tend to be higher in protein, vitamins and minerals.

Cause usually if we're feeding an all forage diet to horses, then those can sometimes be deficient if we have to cut back on the amount that we're feeding them, and those are usually supplements that only need to be fed at about one to two pounds per day.

So very low amounts, but as long as you're meeting that 1% body weight per day in long stem forage, you can typically fill the gap of their nutrient requirements with something else to try and conserve some of that long stem forage during a drought year.

- Okay, great thank you.

So, Mary, a great follow-up question on the powdery mildew on squash.

This grower from Hot Springs is wondering if neem oil is beneficial for powdery mildew?

- I don't know that off the top of my head.

I'd have to check the label.

- [Nina] I think it is actually labeled for powdery mildew, but I've never used it.

I've never used neem oil for anything.

- And that's another one you probably have to repeatedly.

If it is on the label for powdery mildew, then repeatedly applying it.

- [Nina] Right.

- And then also check for phytotoxicity before you spray it over everything, check it on a leaf or two.

So make sure it doesn't burn the plant.

- [Laurie] And don't spray when it's 95.

- Right.

- Exactly, any product that says oil in it definitely do not spray in the sunny heat of the day.

So, Abi, a question from Boulder, they noticed that there were several different types of plants for sale outside of a store while they were in Bozeman.

Some were ornamental kales, and there were some succulents.

Would you recommend buying and planting these now or keep them in the house from this point on?

- For the ornamental kales, I wouldn't plant them now.

Those are probably going to be better kept inside the house.

For the succulents, it would depend on what type of succulent it is.

But depending on when your first frost date is predicted or kind of what your weather is doing, I would probably err on the side of being cautious to keep them inside and then plant them the following year, just in case there wouldn't be enough time for those plants to become established and harden off before the cold comes in.

- Yeah and I think with ornamentals, it's kind of always, what is your expectation?

what kind of bang do you want for your buck?

At this point we could have another two weeks or we could have another month.

- Mm hmm.

- Yeah.

It's hard to know.

So Laurie, does the western yellow jacket hibernate in the nest and or do they return the following year?

For example, if I have yellow jackets in my soffits now, will they return the next year?

- That's a really great question.

And the answer is no, they abandon their nest every year.

So the queens now should be going to their overwintering sites if they have not already.

So they will abandon that nest and the workers will survive for a little bit longer until they run out of resources and then they might choose a nest close by, but it is, they will not return to that same nest so all the workers will eventually die within there.

So very good question.

And they will pick another location for sure.

- Okay, great.

Okay.

Amanda, a call that came or yeah, that came in from Kalispell.

They're wondering about how often a stable horse should be fed in the winter.

So they've heard some of their cohorts talking about feeding their horses snacks, and they're wondering how often does a horse really need to be fed if they're stabled?

- Sure.

One thing that we have done as a human society is train horses to be housed inside and we can manage that certainly, but it does take a little bit more of a laborious type circumstance.

But with that said, we want to try and mimic natural horse feeding behavior as much as we can, even if they're housed inside.

And most of what that looks like is giving that horse enough forage, enough long stem hay, to be able to make it from the time that you leave that day to the time that you're gonna come back at the next bout.

Horses are designed to be constant grazers.

So they don't actually have the shut-off system in their stomach to turn off hydrochloric acid production.

So if they go extended amounts of time without having the ability to graze and eat on something, then that's when you see digestive disorders present such as gastric ulcers, even colic sometimes.

You'll really see some behavioral issues and bad habits pop up if horses aren't able to maintain that natural feeding behavior, you'll see them start weaving in the stalls where they just rock back and forth on their front end.

They'll learn to crib, which is where they actually bite on with their top teeth to something and pull back.

And they'll actually take in air into their esophagus and windpipe, which sends an endorphin response.

So there's a number of issues that can come with not properly feeding, maintaining feeding management through housing horses inside.

As long as they have constant access to forage, then the decision of how you feed them their grain meals ultimately comes from how much you're feeding them and how much they require.

The stomach in a horse is actually fairly small relative to most monogastrics.

So a general rule is anything that's greater than five pounds shouldn't be fed in a meal and forage doesn't fall into that.

That's just a concentrate meal that they're gonna stand there and consume all in one bout because it's so yummy.

So anything greater than five pounds needs to be split into two different feedings, hopefully equally apart, 7:00 AM, 7:00 PM.

Obviously that's not always realistic for us and our schedules, but as close to that as we can get.

And the biggest thing is just staying consistent.

If you normally feed at 7:00 AM, try to always feed at 7:00 AM.

When horses start to anticipate and have to wait, then you can get some gastric upset issues that result from that and some pretty expansive behavioral issues too.

So feeding management is really important.

Always have hay.

- Okay, great.

Thank you, Amanda.

Mary, after a drought, do we need seed treatments next spring?

- Ah, yes.

I always recommend seed treatments.

Even though you didn't observe a lot of disease issues.

If we get a wet spring, don't worry Pythium and Aphanomyces are still there waiting.

This year I think we've had a lot of Physarum buildup in the soil because it likes those extreme temperatures and moisture fluctuations.

So yes, the diseases are always there.

- Okay, great.

Yes, ready to pounce.

So Amanda, we're getting towards the end.

Could you just take about a minute and cover anything that we either didn't get to or something that you would like to tell us about your program?

- Sure.

I think the biggest take home with managing any horse herd or even single horses is to keep it as simple as you can and keep forage the main piece of that horse's management scheme.

If they have constant access to forage or consistent access to forage, then you're gonna have an overall healthier horse.

The GI is hugely important to overall horse health.

And if we can keep those horses eating forage, then that's ideal.

And of course that's challenging this year with the level of drought that we have.

So if you are having to change your horse's diet to adapt to that drought scenario, just do that slowly.

General rule is about seven to 10 days to transition them to that diet.

And then they won't actually metabolically adapt for about another 21 days.

So just take your time and be patient in that transition.

As far as my program goes, we're always looking for horses to be donated to Montana state's program, whether that be horses for the equitation program.

So show horses that may not be showing at the same capacity as they were, or even if you have brood mares that you're looking to rehome and we're always open to that.

So please give us a call.

My number is 406-994-7689.

And we'll be happy to talk to you about that.

- Okay thank you, Amanda.

That was so interesting.

Thank you panel for being here tonight.

Thank you our sponsors.

And next week, Dr. John Dudley will be talking to us about school safety.

So see you next Sunday.

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

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