- [Woman] 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 Adviser Program.

(mellow acoustic guitar music) - Good evening, you are tuned to Montana AG Live originating tonight from the studios of KUSM on the very beautiful and dynamic campus of Montana State University and coming to you over the Montana public television system I'm Jack Riesselman, retired professor of plant pathology.

I'll be your host this evening.

We have an interesting program tonight but you need to make it even more interesting by providing questions for our esteemed panel members tonight.

Let me introduce the panel here this evening.

Way on my left is Bruce Maxwell.

Bruce is originally a weed scientist but now that he calls himself a fancy name, agroecologist, did I get that right?

- You got it right.

- Okay.

Our guests this evening, Bill Kleindl.

Bill is an interesting individual.

He works a lot with wetland systems and that's a really interesting topic.

If you have questions about wetlands this evening, hey, it's a good opportunity to find out the benefits of wetlands, and we're going to stress a little bit how they interact with agriculture.

Laurie Kerzicnik.

Laurie is our insect diagnostician.

We do have a few startup insect questions from previous weeks, but if you have some this evening, the phone number will soon be on the screen, call them in and we'll go with that.

An old friend sitting next to me tonight, Toby Day.

Toby is a horticulturist by trade.

He's been around here a lot of years.

We invited him back tonight because he hasn't shaved for the last month.

So it's always good to have you.

And answering the phones in the studios tonight, Nancy Blake.

Nancy's been here quite often.

Thank you for coming in Nancy.

And remote tonight will be Deanna Midland.

And if you have questions, start phoning them.

Before we go any further, Bill, tell us what you do here at Montana State University.

- Well, I've been involved in wetlands and river ecology since the early 1990s, late eighties.

I was a wetland consultant for a lot of years and then came back and got my PhD in 2014 and studied river dynamics and how humans and ecosystems interplay with each other, kind of a socio-ecological systems based around rivers and wetlands.

And most of my work is focused on, there's an executive order that came out in the early nineties called no net loss of ecosystem, functions and values.

And most of my work is trying to measure what our ecosystem wetland function and what our wetland values in terms of the services they provide to maintain human wellbeing.

So that's what keeps me busy pretty much.

- Yeah, I can believe that.

I've always been fascinated by wetlands and I, as you probably know, I like to hunt ducks.

I like to sit in the wetlands.

You know, are they important to agricultural production here in the state of Montana?

Is there a good relationship between wetlands and ag production?

- Well they're immensely important.

It depends on if you, let's say you have a confined feeding unit and you've got to deal with all the waste, then there's ways of integrating constructed wetlands into your bioswales and your lagoons to help reduce the nutrients and the fecal coliforms etc.

But if you don't have that and you just do irrigation, then you want to have wetlands filter out sediments.

They provide long base flow into the summer.

They help reduce impacts to pumps by getting rid of the suspended load in ditches and streams.

They provide an immense amount of habitat which keeps us busy with our hunting and fishing in Montana as well.

- And bird watching and everything- - And bird watching, let's not forget the bird watching.

- Yeah, wetlands are kind of unique.

We'll get back to, we have a couple of Facebook questions that have come in, but before I get there, Bruce, this one came in this evening and they would like to know what it takes moisture-wise to break the drought that we have here in Montana.

- Ooh.

- Yeah, good luck.

(laughs) - Yeah, that's a tough one.

Certainly because our patterns have changed in recent years to more fall precipitation than spring precipitation, you might've noticed that most of the state has not received much fall precipitation yet it looks like we're going to go right into winter.

We are seeing a prediction of higher precipitation in the winter.

Will that be enough, will be the question certainly.

It turns out that winter precipitation can help, probably do more for filling our aquifers and our groundwater, but not, but it takes a lot.

And the problem we're seeing is that with early snow melt, we're just losing that component of storage that helps do all this recharge because we get this big flush of water that goes out of the state and we don't get to use it.

So that's a big thing.

And then we get these really hot periods earlier in the summer than we've ever seen in the past, dries things out really rapidly.

So we've had a couple of cases like that here in the last few years and that's worrisome.

Hopefully we'll get a lot of spring rain following a good snow year and we could recover pretty well.

But if you've noticed that reservoirs and things are lower than they've ever been in most of Montana.

- A lot of the marshes that I'm familiar with.

Bill, relative to that are most of these wetlands groundwater charged or most of them from rain and snowfall?

- Well, let me, can I get to your question in a second?

Just follow up on what Bruce said.

- [Jack] Sure, absolutely.

- So when he talks about earlier snow melt in the spring, so if you can imagine how rivers rise and fall and it's a seasonal hydrograph, right?

We get a peak flow at the top of snow melt and then it goes down as the river goes back to its normal bed load or a bed fall and then below into its low flow.

As it goes down, it passes through something called a recruitment box for cottonwood.

So cottonwood seeds off, you know, and it seeds off right at the same time that that river is going back down again, right?

And cottonwoods have adapted to our seasonal snow melt conditions and if that hydrograph is moving further into the spring, it will go down and then the cottonwoods will drop their seeds and all those seeds will desiccate and will start moving from our cottonwood riparian forest into things like juniper forests because we're starting to lose that ability, that evolutionary, co-evolution relationship between snow melt and cottonwood seedlings and it's a really important part of- - Yeah, of repairing (indistinct).

- Russian olive's another one.

- Russian olives just jumps right in there, yeah, because they have a different recruitment window.

- And I have a question here from Russian olives that I'll get to in a minute, but Toby, let you answer this one.

It's a quick one.

When's a good time to separate rhubarb?

- To separate rhubarb?

That's a good question because I have never actually separated rhubarb.

I would say right now, it'd probably be a fine time.

You could also do it in the spring, I mean, it's pretty hardy.

Just make sure that you have, so they kind of have these underground nodules, rhizomes I would guess.

You want to make sure that you have three or four on those when you separate those so that you have a good, robust plant.

I've seen too many times where people take too small of a piece of rhubarb and it usually dries out and desiccates so make sure you have a pretty good size.

- All right, and while you're at, this question did come in from Townsend last week, I jotted it down.

They would also know the best time to separate peonies.

- Peonies can be done in the fall, also.

I don't think there'd be a problem doing it in the spring.

The biggest thing about peonies is make sure that they're planted at the right level.

If they're too high, they'll dry out.

If they're too low, they simply won't flower.

So whatever the level was that you've taken those plants and you're dividing them, you make sure that it's at the same level.

I got a lot of questions back in the day about why my peonies aren't flowering after I separated them.

It's really because you planted them too deep.

- [Bruce] Do you mulch them as well?

- If you mulch them, you can actually cause them to stop flowering.

So yeah, you want to make sure that you're not mulching them too deep.

- Okay, this is one for Laurie and I like this one here cause I don't know anything about it, but here we go.

Susan from Whitehall, it's a question for Laurie.

How can we note the difference between a marmorated stinkbug versus a regular stinkbug?

- Ah, that's a very good question.

So she's talking about the brown marmorated stink bug, which is we haven't, primarily the stinkbug is an invasive pest and it has spotted antennae and it also has six spots on its last segment called its abdomen.

And it also doesn't have rough, the second segment called the thorax doesn't have rough edges.

But basically if you look for the spotted antennae and then the six white spots along the abdomen, that's a brown marmorated stinkbug and they are here.

They've been confirmed in Billings and in the Flathead Valley and expect them to be all throughout the state.

- Why are they called stinkbugs?

- I should know the answer to that question but I really don't.

(laughs) I don't know what the stink factor is.

(laughs) - Okay, I'm just curious, I've never figured that one out.

- Is there a thing called a stink factor?

- I, well, I just kind of made that up.

(everyone laughs) They're probably going to slap me.

- Why are we concerned about this new stinkbug?

- The stinkbug has been a really bad pest on the Atlantic coast, especially for apples.

So it is pretty, it has piercing, sucking mouth parts.

So it's really ruined a lot of the apples.

And as it's moved west, it's been more of a yard and garden pest and it has over 300 hosts.

So it usually kind of, overwinter not overwinters but likes to reside in woody ornamentals and then it'll come in and feed on a bunch of different vegetables and fruits.

- [Bill] Do we use traps?

- The traps are good for monitoring but they're not good for actually doing anything to the population.

They reproduce like crazy and their numbers really, really start to skyrocket.

So it's hard to use traps as a control method.

- Okay, thank you.

I learned something this evening, which is not hard but I mean... - [Laurie] You did learn about the stink factor.

- (laughs) Okay.

Bruce, last week, this person from Glen Dive said that Jane noted that Canada thistle was not native to Canada.

Now they're curious about Russian olive Did they come from Russia?

- I don't know about Russian olive.

Russian thistle, I think is a Eurasian species.

So, you know, it could be Russian, Eastern Europe common.

But Russian olive, that's an interesting one.

I'm not positive about that.

I don't know.

I'll look it up.

- I know it's not native here, but... - [Bruce] Yeah, it's not native.

- No, okay.

- Can I ask a question about Canada thistle?

So we're here in the Gallatin valley and when you drive around the Gallatin valley, you see just fields, fields of Canada thistle.

And I curse people because my garden which I usually take very good care of has Canada thistle all through it and I don't know where it all comes from.

- It's a city flower.

- It has to be from flowers.

So when would be a good time to spray Canada thistle?

- Well, because it's a perennial and it has an incredibly large underground root system, rhizomes, it's very difficult to get any kind of chemistry, any kind of herbicide you spray on it, down into that system and really have an effective kill.

The reason is because if you put enough on to see it die, it actually dies too quickly and it doesn't go out to that root system.

You put on a lot less than you think you should, or, I mean, there's labeled rates, but go to the bottom of that labeled rate.

It will more likely to have a much larger effect and get down through the system.

Now the fall is the time when Canada thistle is delivering, is recovering that root system.

So definitely after the day length, it's a day length controlled thing, so after the 1st of September is good.

After the first frost is even better.

So that's the best time to spray when the rosettes are still there, they won't bolt any longer.

That's the best time.

Again, don't put it on too strong.

If you see those rosettes die right away, then you're not doing any good.

Much better to put a low dose on.

- I agree.

I got a couple of questions here for Bill.

One from Haver, can you please talk about the role of beavers building and helping to maintain healthy wetlands?

- Wow, that's a great one.

The, well, beavers are the, you know, the great engineer and all of our, what's really interesting when you think about rivers, right?

The first people like the first Europeans that came out to the west were the beaver trappers, they took all the beaver out and made them into hats.

And then right behind those guys were the river ecologists, right?

So they started studying rivers and they said, this is how rivers look and this is what they should look like because no one's been out here yet so this is what a pristine river looks like.

But the reality is that we, everything, most of the things that we know about rivers and riparian areas and wetlands in the west were all post-beaver.

So they were already already damaged and people are just starting to come around to that and what has really changed in the idea of restoration and especially around rivers since the 1980s is it went from everything from the wetted edge down about the fish.

And now it's about outside of that and engaging with the floodplain because that's what beavers did.

They would increase flooding into the floodplain, bring in that carbon, drop the sediment down, and you'd need to have the river and its floodplain as a system to have a healthy in-stream system so you can have healthy fish.

So beaver are really important.

And now there's lots of work being done for artificial beavers structures to that have been incised and they put in these artificial beaver check dams essentially and raise up the sediment and raise up the river to engage with the flood plain, to bring in willows and young cottonwoods and then have beavers, attract beavers into that area.

- Okay, interesting.

- [Bruce] Will beavers never break their own dam?

- Will they break their own dam?

I don't think so.

They always just make bigger dams.

- Okay.

- Yeah, yeah.

I mean, when a beaver dam breaks, they're attracted to the sound and the hydraulics and they go right to that spot and fix it.

- Huh?

- Yeah, they're very attracted to those things.

So when you're doing restoration sites that you have beavers there, you've got to work around that thing by some beaver control structure.

- So if you saw one broken, it's probably a human involved.

- Yeah, or the beaver is not there anymore.

- Right, okay.

- Yeah.

- All right, I'm going to get back to you in a minute.

We have a quick one here from Libby, for Toby.

This person transplanted established lavender plants to a new location.

This spring she gave them new soil, but they died, why?

- (laughs) Oh gosh, there could be a million different reasons of why they would die.

I mean it's, that's a really hard question to answer without knowing more about how it was transplanted, whether it was watered properly.

Lavender really actually, I mean, it's pretty indestructive, so I'm not exactly sure.

It could have been put into an area where there was some herbicide residual that was in there.

- Good point.

- There's just a whole host of things.

I wouldn't actually know without more information, I guess.

- You didn't even cop out on that one.

(Toby laughs) It's just a tough one to answer.

- Yeah.

- I agree.

So back to you from Glen Dive, this person has wet areas on their land that hold water in the spring but they are dry for the rest of the year.

Are those considered wetlands?

- It goes back to your earlier question about where's the water comes from.

So out in eastern Montana, we've got a lot of vernal pools.

So spring pools, and that's snow driven.

There's usually in the sediment themselves, there have been cemented probably through ash fall a long time ago and they're in little depressions and then they get filled with snow or spring rains.

And then they fill up with water and then you get, to have a wetland you need water, hydric soils, and plants that are adapted to live in hydric soils.

So those vernal pools are considered wetlands if they're wet for a certain percentage of the season and they have those three parameters.

And they're super important to pollinators and to habitat in the spring and to birds moving through the area.

- Yeah, that brings a question.

I've been around here a long time.

We used to have a major issue with something called saline seeps in this state.

They're not as big a problem anymore.

Is there a reason for that and also were they considered the wetlands or wastelands?

- Huh, well that's, I mean, if you go back in the history of wetlands, wetlands and wastelands were pretty tied together quite a bit.

Mostly because people didn't understand the value, you know, the types of ecosystem services that wetlands provide.

But saline wetlands have been in Montana long before European expansion.

It was a thing for sure.

And it has to do with, you know, the mechanisms of saline has a lot to do with irrigation in the uplands moving through and moving the salts through.

And boy, I had a, my friend Russell Smith did his whole Master's degree on it and I learned a lot about saline wetlands with him and how to decrease that saline component, which is really, you know, make the land more usable again.

But we have whole halophytes, you know, we have a whole suite of plants that are adapted to live in those saline systems in Montana, they are natives.

- I actually think we used alfalfa around the edges to suck up a lot of the excess moisture and that was somewhat beneficial.

But they are wetlands.

- [Bill] Yeah, they're wetlands.

- Okay, all right, thank you.

Interesting.

From Laurel, did the snow storm last week take care of our hornet problem?

- You would think, yeah, there's still some stragglers around.

I think maybe with this next snow storm, if we have a little bit of a snow storm the next couple of days, I think that'll take care of them, but they'll still stick around.

Especially the Western yellow jackets were out.

I was out last week, they were out even up pretty high, about 6,000 feet.

So they're not done yet, but they're going to run out of things to feed on and that's going to be what takes, that'll take care of them when they run out of stuff to forage on.

- [Bill] How do they overwinter?

- Only the queen overwinters, so the fertilized queen.

So the workers will eventually just die.

And after a couple of really, really hard frosts.

But the queens have already gone to overwinter at this point.

- I'm glad they're dead.

(everyone laughs) They're just horrible creatures.

- Yeah, they're not much fun.

And they love steak and hamburger and bratwurst and everything else when you're trying to eat outside.

- That is a good question.

Are there different yellow jackets, ones products and ones that like sugar-type products?

Cause it seems like the same one that's eating my hamburger is also like on the rim of my Mountain Dew.

- Yeah, so they switch, I mean they switch kind of in August, late summer to more sugary-type materials to fatten up for provide resources for the queens that are about to overwinter.

But I mean, they're scavengers and they feed on meat sources or dead insects and things in the beginning.

But then they switch to our type of food and stuff in the late summer to kind of help the queens get fat.

- I have to ask Toby a question.

You ever had one in your beer?

(Toby laughs) And didn't notice it.

(Bill and Laurie laugh) - No, well, yes, but I spit it out very quickly.

- (laughs) It does happen.

- You have your sacrificial beer, so you just leave a little bit in the bottom and then... (Bill laughs) - Well, I do know that I, it was two years ago I went to the local hardware store and got the little packages that you fill with water and they fly in but can't fly out.

And I probably caught about three to 400 in about a week.

I was totally amazed.

This year, I think we had maybe four pesky ones that were bothering me.

So it was it a light year this year?

- It was a light year compared to the year before, yeah.

- Is there a reason for that?

- I don't know, yeah, I don't know why they were light this year.

- Yeah, I would agree.

There were nowhere near as many this year.

- Yeah.

- So do you switch the juice from a protein base to a sugar?

- For the traps that are available it's a (indistinct) and I don't know what- - Oh, it's different.

- It's different.

So, but that's, you really want to get that out in the spring to try to trap the queens.

But you can have it out all year and it'll still trap the workers, but it's the same lure that you use in the trap the whole time.

- Oh.

- Okay, good to know.

Bruce, Patty in Seeley lake, they still have knapweed.

Should they be pulling it?

Is it too late to spray it?

- In Seeley Lake.

I think, you probably could get away with spraying it but if we have another frost, then don't bother.

But yeah, you can pull it anytime.

(laughs) - Okay.

Bill, this is from Alan in Missoula.

As a policy, I need to pull this up so I can read it a little bit better.

Gotta find it here again.

That's what I don't like about these things.

As a policy, should wetlands be considered waters of the United States and operated, overseen through the US Corps of Army Engineers?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

We can talk about that for the next hour if you want to.

So if you go back, I teach wetland classes and I have an entire lecture on waters of the US, so I'll try not to give it all right now.

But if we go back to the Romans, they said that you can't own water like you can't own the air.

It belongs to the people, belongs to everyone.

And that idea has moved through the Europeans and the British and then eventually into And waters of the US is really should be seen as waters of the people of the US because it belongs to all of us.

But only waters of the US wants all of it if it affects interstate commerce.

If it doesn't, then it should fall under waters of the state, which is waters of the people of the state.

And so when we have water rights, we have rights of use, we don't actually own the water, right?

But that water belongs to all of us.

So the question is, should there be waters of the US, is that what's the question?

But it's this idea of what is under the jurisdiction of the federal jurisdiction or the state jurisdiction has been shifting since the Clean Water Act was signed in the early seventies.

And the Army Corps oversees the permitting, but it's EPA that oversees the Clean Water Act.

And then in the state, it's, you know, DEQ and DNRC.

- Interesting.

- It's a complicated- - It is very complicated.

- And very dynamic, it's really shifting.

There's a whole new shift going on with waters of the US.

- Okay.

- As we speak.

- Thank you.

Laurie, a Facebook question from Missoula.

How long will spiders stay alive in her garage?

(Laurie laughs) - [Bill] Forever.

(everyone laughs) - That really depends on the spider.

So I think most of the spiders that end up in our garage are on a one-year cycle.

So they will live till about now and they will produce an egg sac and then they'll die in the next few weeks or so.

Sometimes if you have a spider like a black widow, they can stay in your garage for quite a while.

I'm not trying to tell everybody to scare everybody that they have black widows in their garage.

But spiders related to black widows in that family, that comforted spider family that they can survive through the winter season.

And hobo spiders can remain in the garage for a little while.

So just it depends on the spider, but most of them are programmed to lay an egg sac and the females will die at this point.

- Okay.

Question every year at this time.

They planted garlic last year, put two or three bulbs in a hole, didn't survive, doesn't say Some tips on when and how to raise garlic.

- So garlic, you usually plant in the fall.

You want to get it fairly established, you know, in the fall.

Is it too late to plant right now?

I actually just planted my garlic today.

So it's not.

And yes, we can have some hard freezes that will kill it off, we can get some desiccation, you know, if it's actually sprouting which it sometimes does if you plant early.

You can get some desiccation which will actually go through and kill the plants, especially if there's no snow or any kind of snow cover.

There's lots of things that can cause it to die.

It could be just even a bacterial load or something, you know, in the soil.

The big thing is plant it in the fall.

If you see it coming up in the spring, you're good.

But if you don't, get it in first thing in the spring.

These long summers we're having, you're going to get garlic.

It likes a well-drained soil.

So if you have a real high clay soil it's not going to do as well.

And it does like that drainage so it doesn't rot.

That's going to be the bigger issue, so.

- Okay.

Bill, this person would like to know is DU, Ducks Unlimited, which I am a big supporter of, working with various universities for wetland restoration or is it doing it themselves?

- Well, I'm the president-elect of Society of Wetland Scientists and I think you and I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago about Ducks Unlimited and how come there's not more of a connection between Ducks Unlimited and Society of Wetland Scientists, at least at these meetings that we have.

And that really made me think about the role of Ducks Unlimited in wetland science and its history.

One of my students this semester showed me a picture of a Ducks Unlimited wetland duck habitat that they built in Winnipeg that looks like a duck.

Some great big lake it looks like a duck with an eyeball, it's an island.

In the early eighties there was a lot of restoration, rutland restoration that followed that pattern, they're called duck donuts, you know?

And then wetland science and restoration ecology went a different direction.

So it used to be more wetter more better.

Now it's not wetter more better.

So we have more emergent systems and things that aren't really just 100% focused on duck habitat.

But I think it's an interesting connection, especially how many, you have that number, how many millions of acres of duck habitat- - 15 million acres in North America of wetlands conserves through Ducks Unlimited.

And I'm interested if the society that you're president of interacts very much with DU.

I think it's natural.

- Yeah, it should be and I'm going to look into it.

Thinking about, you know, the outdoor, the economy in Montana, outdoor rec is 7.1 billion, that's with a B, $7.1 billion a year spent on outdoor.

$1 billion on aquatics, on fishing and boating.

And then a little shy of that on hunting.

That's a lot of money.

That's a lot of money generated in our state.

- You're right, and that doesn't even count the people that go out and watch the thousands of different types of birds and animals in these habitats.

- Yeah and about 50% of Montana's birds - Yep, that's pretty amazing when you think about it.

A comment and I encourage comments folks, if you hear something that you like to comment on or disagree with us on, hey, send it in, call it in and we'll try to get it on.

The Yellowstone Arboretum curator at Zoo Montana says that the Russian olive came from southern Russia and Eastern Asia.

So we learned something there this evening.

And the next question, Karen from Townsend has worms in her apples.

How does she avoid that?

- Oh, so that's probably the coddling moth.

And if you're harvesting some of your apples, you're probably noticing that you have some caterpillars or some caterpillar damage in your apples.

So likely you're going to have them again next year.

So pick up all your apples.

Sanitation's about all you could do this time of year.

So make sure the apples that you're not eating, make sure you get all those up off the ground.

And then there are a lot of things you can do non-chemically the next year, if it's just one tree you can wrap your tree with corrugated cardboard to try to trap the caterpillars in the cardboard before they reach adulthood.

And you could of kind of prune out your clusters of apples so they're not touching each other so you're not spreading the worms in between apples.

And you could also kind of bag them too, to try to prevent any sort of damage to the apples from the worms tunneling in there, caterpillar's And there are spray options as well too, but that's, you never, ever want to apply any sort of spray during bloom.

We calculate that by something called degree days which is a little tricky, but it usually ends up being seven days to two weeks after bloom.

So... - Toby, I know you try to grow apples but you have predators that seem to eat your apples that I heard.

I won't mention any names.

(laughs) - I have predators from human to bacterias.

Everything has tried to take out the apple trees of mine.

- Do you spray yours?

- I do, and I got to tell you that I don't follow the degree model.

I, you know, like most homeowners I'm doing my best because it's really hard to do the degree days.

There was a lot of work that was being done and probably still is up in the Missoula area, but Missoula's environment is different than ours.

And when you look at degree days, it's all about temperature and they're usually a little warmer.

I usually go with that seven to 10 days after bloom, which is difficult because some trees flower later than others, so you're constantly out there spraying.

And yeah, I have done it in the past.

I have finally just got overwhelmed.

First of all, I have a lot of perennials and stuff underneath the trees I don't like spraying.

And so I have just lived with it.

And one year, just a homeowner and you're, you know, using apples, you know, I use the corer and the ones that are bad get chucked and the ones that are good goes into the apple pie and that's just how I've done it.

And then the last part is, is if they're really bad, I just squish them, you know?

And it's a little gross, I guess, that you have like worm poop.

- Is it really worm poop?

- I don't know what it is but there's some brown stuff in there.

- Yeah, it's worm, it's caterpillar frass is the proper term.

(Jack and Laurie laugh) - Anyways, I think it just makes it a little spicier cider, you know?

It's all good.

- All right, enough of that.

Laurie, why have you, they have a, I saw a couple of yellow jackets under a leaf pile.

Are these overwintering queens or workers trying to delay their death?

- Ha, that's a good question.

Yeah, it's probably workers trying to delay their death.

Don't know what else to do with themselves if they can't find anything to eat.

(laughs) - Probably.

Okay, Bruce from Scobey, a Facebook question.

If we have another summer like last summer, are the weeds likely to take over in the low areas that are usually wet but mostly dried out last summer?

- Ooh, yeah, that's an interesting question because of the changing patterns in precipitation are really what is tending to define those low areas.

And whether it's in places like eastern Montana, like Bill had mentioned before.

In many cases there's no reason to think any particular weed will take over.

Certainly as we've seen and as things dry out, some of them turning saline because of lack of crop perhaps in the surrounding areas.

And as we go into more drought, people tend to fallow more.

That brings on more saliency and so you're going to see more halogeton and some of those kinds of species.

In terms of weed, kochia is one that tolerates that salt quite well.

Foxtail barley also tends to come into those areas.

But will we see a lot more?

I don't think we're going to see more because then, you know, there's other species that can't do well under the same sorts of conditions.

So when we get these drying out things and if we start to see more of these areas that were wet longer in the past but they dry out earlier, we're looking at probably more saline conditions especially if we because of the drought.

So that seems to be the universal answer.

I ask it anytime I'm giving a climate talk, ask farmers about if you have more than two years or you're going into a second year of drought, what are you likely to do?

And they say, well, probably not plant that rotational crop, probably go fallow.

And so I think that's one of those side effects that sometimes we don't realize comes along.

- Okay.

On that note, we have another question come in about the drought and this person has a wetlands.

And while it's still wet, the water level has dropped and the amount of the, whatever that weed is that has cat tails has come in.

Is that going to be a continual problem with drought or is there a way to get rid of the cat tails as the water level drops?

- Wow, cat tails are usually, Bill, maybe you can answer this better, but cat tails, I think they have to be submerged pretty much.

- They do, I think, but in deeper water they don't survive but in shallower water, they do survive.

- [Toby] Oh, I see what you're saying.

- So I suspect you're going to see more cat tail.

- Sure, sure.

- Yeah, they'll move in.

Yeah, cat tails is an obligate plant which means 1% of the time it's found in uplands but it's always wet.

Cause it pumps oxygen down to its roots, it does all sorts of things to adapt, to live in wet conditions.

But yeah, as it dries, as these areas are starting to dry up if there's cat tails along the fringe, they'll keep following that preferred depth, and (indistinct).

- If we get back into a wet period and it gets deep again, will those cat tails die?

- Yeah, some they don't, you know, I'm trying to think about how deep cat tails go, maybe about a foot or two, and then they don't like being that submerged.

- [Jack] Yeah, you're right.

- Yeah, so yeah, they'll move with the edge.

But cat tails will form a monocrop for sure.

And if you, I mean, if you got to choose which monocrop you want, bulrush maybe, or cat tails or, you know, lots of other species, but- - Well, and on those outside rims typically you'll see them starting to die off even though they're expanding into the interior.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Of the pond.

- Yeah, they will tend to be a monoculture of cat tails if they take off.

- Okay.

We have a question from Libby, for Laurie.

Her cabbages were destroyed by worms.

There also appeared to be eggs in the cabbage, which is probably aphids, I think.

But any idea of what worms would destroy the cabbage?

- Well, there is a caterpillar and it's called the cabbage white and it's a butterfly as an adult and then as a caterpillar it's green with a yellow stripe on it.

So that's one that's really common in cabbage.

And then we've had, we have the cabbage aphid too.

So if definitely could be two things going on there.

Yeah, this could be aphid eggs that are in there because now they'd be in the egg stage.

- Are those the ones that are like really waxy and almost wooly?

- Yeah, the cabbage aphids are really wooly.

They're difficult to control because they have that waxy covering makes it hard to contact them.

Yeah, so if you do have that caterpillar and I would check next year, keep an eye on it, try to catch it early.

They're usually active at night.

I've had a hard time.

I've found the butterflies out and then I, later in the season, but then find a chewer and can't usually find out who it is but it's usually the cabbage white's pretty common, hits a lot of different garden plants too.

- [Jack] All right.

- So aphids about two weeks ago there was, everywhere you looked there were aphid-size adults that looked very wooly.

Were those aphids?

(indistinct) aphids?

- Yeah, so there were, we have several different wooly aphids that come back to their overwintering hosts.

So we have the leaf curl ash aphid that has, it's kind of bluish and looks kind of wooly.

Then we have the wooly elm aphids and the wooly apple aphid that all will, they are, well, it looks like they're swarming almost when they're coming back to their overwintering host.

So that was happening for quite a while this year for two to three weeks.

So any one of those three types of aphids, but they do look kind of blue and wooly and furry-like.

- Yeah, very nice looking bug.

- Yeah.

- Okay, thank you.

Interesting comment from Whitefish and you guys can agree or disagree with this.

Coler believes the stinkbug odor is the same chemical as in cilantro.

- [Laurie] I don't know.

(laughs) - I don't think- - [Laurie] I will find out tonight.

(laughs) - That would mean that half the population loves the smell of stink bugs and half the population of stinkbugs and it will be the ongoing debate of cilantro now with stinkbugs.

- Okay.

I don't know either.

It's an interesting comment, something to think about.

Bill, from Bozeman area, this person has a full-time, I got to bring it back up here, seeping spring that flows into a minor tributary of Sourdough Creek.

Does it have automatic state or federal protection damage blocking or so forth?

- Well, this back to your earlier question of where does water come from?

So we talked about the vernal pools which are snow driven and spring rain and this one is a groundwater driven system.

And if it's immediately adjacent to the Sourdough, which is a tributary to a navigable stream, then it's very likely that it is under federal protection.

If it flows year round, it's going to be under state protection as well.

So there are, so if this person wants to do some kind of fill or action around that wetland, there's three things that has to happen.

First, avoid it, don't do it.

Second one is minimize your actions if you cannot avoid it.

So you have unavoidable impacts.

And the third is the compensatory mitigation for those unavoidable impacts.

And there's lots of guidance that's provided by the state or the feds on how to negotiate those permitting, torturous permitting pathways.

But you definitely, 100% should follow that path otherwise you can get into trouble.

- Okay, yeah, thank you.

Bruce, question from Polson came in last week actually on Facebook.

They have some property on the east side of Flathead Lake that burned right through the creek bottoms just last summer.

Should they get out there and plant some grass seed now or do it in the spring?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

And we always get a flush of questions after a fire.

What should I do, from landowners.

And usually the reaction is, I need to plant something, I know I need to plant something or else I'm going to have a lot of soil erosion either this fall or next spring and when the snow melts.

And it turns out that that's fairly rare that you're going to have a major soil erosion problem.

And especially around streams where you have a lot of woody and shrub species that will almost always resprout.

But certainly our natives all resprout, they were, they co-evolved with fire and so they resprout after fire.

And usually they'll do just fine.

So planting a grass unless it was grass before, is not necessarily a good idea.

If you're going to plant grass, plant a Montana species, a native species that are co-evolved with fire and there are some over there.

I would guess that mostly you're talking about shrub kinds of species.

So let them resprout, they'll be fine.

I know it looks terrible when it's black and you're afraid it's going to erode, but rarely do they.

So the fact is, and that fire was rapid.

It did get very hot in places.

I've had a look at it myself.

But the resprouting ability of most of the species is very good, so hang on.

(laughs) - And while I have you up, and this came in a couple of weeks ago and we haven't had anybody to answer but since you're here, I'm going to put you on the spot.

This person wants to know if grazing in forest lands is enhancing the amount of noxious weeds that we get in our natural forest.

- (laughs) It can work two ways it turns out.

Certainly if overgrazed or where you get a real concentration of livestock, you can encourage weeds to come in and many weeds are disturbance species and those end up being disturbed areas where you have a lot of open soil, you'll get weeds there.

In the same way, many of our systems and even forest systems where there's meadows and things, they co-evolved with species that were grazing those.

And if you don't graze them, then they tend to get litter packed, in other words there's so much litter there that a lot of those species can't survive.

So in fact, some moderate level of grazing can be a good thing.

And really in many cases, what it does is if you don't graze them you'll basically get taken over by grass seeds.

You'll lose all your wild flowers after a while, or not all of them but a lot of them.

And so it's a two-way street.

So it's kind of, yeah, overgrazing and where we have grazing allotments they're usually controlled by whatever agency is offering those, whether it's BLM or Forest Service.

And they check those periodically to make sure that they're not being overgrazed and then they control that stocking rate.

- Okay, good answer.

Thank you.

Toby, here's one for you.

I love these unique questions.

(Toby laughs) This person from Somers has very large flower beds and the last few months many turkeys are nesting and digging in them.

She wants to know how she can deter the turkeys without hurting them or damaging their plants.

- Oh boy, I'm not a wildlife management person.

I'm sure just a fence would probably keep them out, but I know that they can fly.

So I have no idea.

Get a dog.

(everyone laughs) - That's a good question for Steven Van Tasel.

- Yeah, that's a tough one.

Most of the time when I see turkeys, whether or not they're domestic or, you know, native, they're actually going after bugs.

They're actually doing good things in the garden so I don't really find them being a problem but I'm not in that situation in Somers.

I don't know for sure.

- They can be a problem.

There's no doubt about it.

- Stupid turkeys.

- Yeah.

(laughs) And they are hard to discourage, they really are.

Bill, from Silver Star.

This person has flood irrigation that supports a lot of wetlands on their land.

Is there a concern about what happens to these wetlands if they went to center pivot?

And I assume right now they're using gravity irrigation.

- Yeah, yeah.

So, gosh, you know, you think about pre-Lewis and Clark, right?

We have these really complicated valley bottoms with braided channels and rivers moving from valley wall to valley wall and there's all sorts of wetlands integrated in that.

And then as European expansion comes, the ditches expanded with them and so did mostly flood irrigation, that was the biggest source of irrigation.

And what that flood irrigation does is it brings up the groundwater, right, and then it moves laterally towards the stream and then whatever wetlands are remaining are being fed by that system.

So you can see those wetlands going up and down with flood irrigation.

And yeah, if we move to pivot head, it's really efficient at providing irrigation for the target crop, but that support of those lateral wetlands, I fear they'll disappear.

And with it, you know, like we said, you know, the birds and the animals that are supported and the billion dollar, $7.1 billion outdoor rec industry is tied to it as well.

That's a real puzzle cause we want to be more efficient over our irrigation, we also want the inefficiencies of the leaky ditches and whatnot to help our systems.

It's a double-edged sword, you know, and a double-edged benefit, you know, whichever we look at it.

- Yeah, it was a real interesting study, I think, in the Beaverhead on the groundwater system.

And when they started repairing the ditches or the canals, they were having a lot of wells were dropping rapidly and they were figuring out, oh my gosh, it was because they had repaired the ditches.

Those leaky ditches were keeping those wells alive in many cases which would only lead to also wetlands being supported.

- Right, right, right.

And we've adapted over the last 150 years, we've adapted to a new system, a human-made system.

And if we change that, then those adaptions are going to start to become really wonky.

- Yeah, it's pretty complicated water is, there's no doubt about it.

It's going to become more complicated.

- [Bill] Especially in-stream flows.

That'll be a big part of it too.

- I agree.

- [Bill] Yeah.

- Toby, from Basin, can grass clippings treated with weed and feed, put it in a compost pile and use next spring?

- Yes.

So usually the weed and feed is 2,4-D last for about most like three months.

And so it doesn't really stick around.

The composting does not break it down but it has a half-life that is short enough that if you put it in the fall, by the time you put spring, it shouldn't be a problem on your grass clippings.

- If that's 2,4-D, what about Banvel?

Will that- - Well, yeah, but you wouldn't be using Banvel on grass clippings.

That would probably be illegal.

- No, Banvel does come in some of your weed and feeds.

- Does it?

- [Bruce] Yeah.

- Well... - They all have Banvel in it.

(Toby laughs) That lasts a little while.

- Okay, that might be, yeah, the label's going to tell you, but yeah, I mean, I do some spraying especially for thistles, Canada thistle again, on my lawn.

And I put grass clippings in, I compost that, I put it back in my garden, I've never had a problem.

- That's 2,4-D?

- Yeah, it's just 2,4-D. - Banvel label is dicamba, right, Bruce?

- [Bruce] Yeah.

- Yeah, okay.

From Swan Lake, Laurie, every year this person in late August has a bad influx of carpenter ants.

What can they do to prevent this?

- Oh, we have somebody on the panel that's had a carpenter ant issue.

(laughs) Yeah, so first I would definitely want to make sure that they are carpenter ants but the tricky thing with carpenter ants is you have to find out what the source is and usually the source starts outside.

And it could be it's part of their ecosystem or part of their biology to break, you know, break down trees.

And so anything, any decaying organic matter or if there's a dead tree around, the carpenter ants, that's probably the source.

And then they form these satellite populations and will move into the house.

And so finding out where the source is, is a big deal because once they set up populations in the house, that means that the populations have gotten pretty high.

So yeah, finding the source is the big deal.

- A really old firewood in the bottom of your stack, get rid of it.

- Yeah.

- Was that your source, Bruce?

- Well, I don't know.

We're testing that theory but I have a sense that, there was certainly plenty of carpenter ants in those logs that were down there in the bottom, never got burned.

And so it's like get them out and burn them.

- That's good advice.

I'm just curious, how do you identify a carpenter ant versus other ants?

- Well, they look a lot like a field ant and thatching ants, they're also called mound ants.

So I'd definitely have to look at them under the microscope and the thorax, the second segment is flat compared to having kind of a divided segment in the thatching ant.

- Send them to you and you can- - Send them to me, yeah.

(laughs) - That works better.

- Sometimes I don't know by just looking at the pictures.

- Okay.

From Facebook, it seems like there is an overwhelming amount of alkali popping up all over the state of Montana.

Is this due to the long-term drought we've been in?

(Bill laughs) - You know, it could be.

I think that, you know, as I already stated, it usually accompanies a lot of fallow surrounding a particular area.

And that, you know, that's where we started talking about planting a crop in those places is really important and understand, you know, that you're fighting a two-way thing here because you don't want to dry out that soil too much, but most of the time as long as you get a crop in there, you can solve that.

And the best one is alfalfa, put alfa in for three to four years and your saline seat problem usually goes away.

- Okay, thank you.

Laurie, Mike from Chester contacted us during the week with an email.

He had lots of aphids in the kale and I happen to have them in the Brussels sprouts this year.

What can you do about that?

- Yeah, I think that's what we were just talk, those are probably cabbage aphids too.

They can also get green peach aphids, but they are, the cabbage aphids will definitely hit kale.

They could be the most numerous aphids in the kale.

And I mean, they could just, their populations can get kind of crazy.

And they have a waxy covering, like we were just talking about.

So you definitely try to, any sort of weedy mustards or any sort of wild cabbage or anything, anything that's really in the mustard family that's weedy or wild related to that, they'll overwinter in that.

So make sure you get rid of that around your garden.

And then try to take it, early in the season, make sure that you try to, there are insecticidal soap and there's a lot of different things that you can try on the aphids, but try to do it early before their populations get pretty high.

- Bill, we got just real quick question.

Is a wetland scientist, are they certified?

We got a couple of seconds.

- There's a professional wetland science certification that you go through, through the Society of Wetland Scientists.

- All right.

Bill, thanks for joining us tonight.

A lot of good information.

Bruce, good to see you as always.

Toby, it was nice to see you even though you haven't shaved again.

(Toby laughs) Folks, we'll be back next week.

We're going to look at biological weed controls.

Thank everybody for joining us this evening.

Have a good week and be sure to watch next week.

It'll be fun.

Goodnight.

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