- [Announcer] 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, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, the Northern Pulse Growers Association, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

- Good evening, welcome to another edition of "Montana Ag Live".

Originating today from the studios at KUSM, and coming to you over your public television system.

I'm Jack Riesselman retired professor of plant pathology, happy to be your host this evening.

As those of you who watched last weeks program you know that we have a soft theme this spring or fall to called sustainability.

It's a hot word in agriculture and a lot of other areas right now.

So we're gonna look at a couple other issues with sustainability, one tonight including soil health.

We'll get to that in a little bit.

You know how this program works, you provide the questions and we'll do our best to provide good answers to those questions.

Without those questions it becomes pretty boring here, so make sure when the phone number comes up on the screen that you supply questions, curiosity.

Hey and by the way if you have comments about anything that you see on the program I'm happy to provide response to those comments.

So with that let me introduce tonight's panel.

Way on my left the end of the table is Uta McKelvy.

Uta is a plant pathologist here extension at Montana State University.

She's been on the program several times.

Thanks for coming in tonight.

- My pleasure.

- [Jack] Cathy Zabinski, our special guest.

Cathy is kind of a soil ecologist, the Her interest is in long-term sustainability and agriculture.

She did write a book that is really very good about wheat, it was we'll talk about that a little bit later on.

So we welcome Cathy.

We'll get back to her and find out what she's doing here at MSU in just a few moments.

Tim Seipel, Tim is a weed scientist and probably we'd call him a crop land weed scientist.

He also is knowledgeable about weeds in range land.

And if you've got weed problems in your own garden or homestead, and most everybody in Montana does have some weed problems, good chance to have those questions answered.

And tonight Mathre.

Don agreed to come in tonight, we had Abby scheduled.

Abby is ill this weekend so Don graciously came in.

Don was a plant pathologist but what he's best known for now is being a professional garden expert.

(Don laughs) So if you have urban horticulture urban agricultural questions tonight Don will answer those, and he's very very knowledgeable in that area.

Answering the phones tonight Nancy Blake and Cheryl Bennet.

And with that Cathy, tell us what you do here at MSU.

- So I am a plant and soil ecologist.

I was hired a while ago as a restoration ecologist.

And thinking about how we can revegetate disturbed lands.

About 10 years ago I realized that this question about plant microbe interactions in the soil could be equally applied to agricultural lands.

And so the questions that I'm working on in the lab right now have a lot to do with soil health and how to pay attention to soil processes that keep nutrients flowing to the plants and just generally keep soils working at a level that's good for agriculture.

- Soil health is one of the big topics in agriculture.

Even the 20 years that I've been retired give or take, even then we've started talking about soil health.

Have we made inroads into making soils healthier than they were say 20 years ago?

- So (Cathy laughs) good question.

I am usually a little frustrated with the technical aspects of soil health because it's really such a vague term.

And even if you think about human health as because obviously the analogy came from there, you know when you're healthy and you know when you're not.

But there's all sorts of versions of not being healthy.

One of the challenges related to soil health is that it would be great if we had a simple measure where you could go out in the field and say ah here's what's wrong and here's how you fix it.

But just as with human health it's really hard to figure out what would that measure be?

So for your kids they are these don't wanna go to school, you check to see if they have a fever.

Okay if they have a fever they stay home, but there's a lot of ways to be sick without a fever.

In soil health I think that we are definitely increasing our understanding of some of the biological processes that occur in soil.

Part of my interest with soil is that oftentimes when we think of soil we think of sand, silt, clay, like the mineral part of it.

The part of soil that I'm really interested in is all of it that's not the sand, silt, and clay.

The air spaces in between that serve as a habitat for soil animals that are responsible for decomposing the organic matter in the soil, all the dead plant and animal and insect tissue.

And making available nutrients for plants to grow.

So we have made big inroads in better understanding soil communities, but we're at this point where it was a paper that we read in my graduate class this past week and it started out the first sentence was soil biologists are paralyzed by complexity.

(everyone laughs) And we're kind of at that point where okay we've got 20,000 species of bacteria in a teaspoon of soil and 4,000 species of nematodes and all this.

And what does that mean?

And at what point do we not have enough or how do we fix that?

So we're working on it but it's a work in progress.

- I believe it, it's a very complex system.

Don this one came in last week, we did not get to it.

From Missoula this person has some conifer trees that are going down hill, the leaves are turning brown.

Is there anything to be concerned about?

- I really doubt it Jack.

This is a normal process that most conifers go through, they get rid of their old needles and for a while it looks pretty bad.

But I would say just wait til next year and if it gets worse then it may be something to worry about.

But right now I think nothing to be concerned about.

Normal process.

- Okay I agree with ya entirely.

And Tim also from last week then I've gotta go one to you that's really kind of intriguing.

From Flathead area.

- Sprayed by herbicide.

- They're seeing a big increase in knapweed throughout that area.

Is there a reason why?

And number two, what should they do about it?

- [Woman] Okay.

- I think they're knapweed's always it's been a big area for knapweed historically in the Flathead down into the bitter root.

And so I think there's probably some lack of control going on, lack of maybe people managing it.

This in the fall you see it really conspicuously.

If you wanna go out and manage it, the time is to go out.

If you could chop the root rhizomes, the roots out with a hoe or you could go out and apply herbicide this time a year and really spot spray those rosettes and you can really kill a lot of 'em.

- This is a great time to be putting herbicides down.

And we have an extended fall coming, and nights are cooling down a little bit every night.

What happens when you spray herbicides on a plant at this time a year?

- It depends on what kinda plant it is.

And if it's a perennial plant, one that's gonna live multiple years, this is the time of year that it's pulling sugars down into its root system to store it.

So with things like Canada thistle if you really wanna get at it this year best thing you could do is to go around and spot spray those rosettes on a warm day.

- [Woman] Okay.

- When things are actively growing.

And you can really kill those underground root rhizomes and really dent that Canada thistle and knock those patches back this time a year.

- I agree entirely.

- Jack can I ask Tim another question?

- Sure.

- Besides knapweed we used to hear a lot about leafy spurge.

I haven't heard much about that, is it under control now?

- I think there's still a lot of leafy spurge in certain parts of the state that you go out into.

- Okay.

Okay.

- So if anyone goes towards Silver Star on the Jefferson you can find a lot of spurge around there.

But it's still out there.

But people have been doing better jobs at managing it, but it's still a weed that's pretty widespread.

- Okay.

- Thanks Tim.

Uta, this person here in Bozeman thinks they have crown gall on the roses that they're trying to transplant.

I don't think this is a good time to transplant roses, I don't know if they'll make it.

Roses are not ideal for Montana, even though it's warmed up.

You might be able to grow a few more than we used to.

What is crown gall, and if you have it on a rose should they be transplanting it?

- Right.

So crown gall is a disease that is caused by a bacterium which it used to be called agrobacterium tumefaciens and it recently underwent a name change.

I think it's called radiobacter, actually I don't know for sure, radiobacter something.

They change names quite a lot.

So this bacterium enters the plant through wounds that could be inflicted, for example with gardening tools or in the winter when you have these three fall cycles that's called frost heaving and can also damage the plant tissue.

And then they get in the plant and essentially cause the plant to produce a lot of cells that are not differentiated.

So over time this will look kind of like a mass, maybe like a cauliflower, just undifferentiated tissue on the plant.

And so this bacterium is pretty much everywhere in the soil.

Can also be transmitted by water and by your gardening tools.

So taking this plant that is diseased and putting it somewhere else will essentially transfer this bacterium too and definitely increase the risk for the plants around to get sick, especially if they were injured with the tools that you would use to transplant that rose.

- Don't do it in other words.

- Yeah so I would recommend not to do it.

And even where they're removing the rose if they're planning on replanting something there I would even recommend taking out some extra soil around there where this bacteria might be present and refill it with some gardening soil.

And definitely also sanitize your gardening tools, wipe them down with some Lysol or dip them in bleach or some rubbing alcohol to prevent spreading the bacterium that way.

- All right thank you.

I like this one.

Cathy you'll love this question.

This person saw an article on Google online the other day that said.

- [Woman] Okay thank you.

- If you had all the ants in the world there are more ants than there are any other animals if they break down pound wise.

They wanna know, are ants good for the soil?

(Don laughs) Tough question.

(Jack and Cathy laugh) - Well there's a lot of different kinds and the what's good for the soil is aeration and creating tunnels, but ant hills, they can extend.

I saw something else on it was a YouTube video where somebody was pouring cement into an ant hill and they spent (Jack laughs) four days carrying shovels of cement with a whole team and created this incredibly big structure of tunnels that I don't even know how many square feet of cement they used, it was tons.

And is that good for the soil?

I mean as long as you don't worry about growing anything in that soil, I think when the ants are in there it's pretty much it.

- If you break down, there's gotta be some organic matter and some nutrients if you've got gazillion number of ants in the soil.

I would assume, they don't live terribly long, so.

Biological, it provides maybe some nutrients, I don't know.

- I'm sure it provides nutrients.

- Okay.

Interesting question.

Tim.

Cheatgrass, this is cheatgrass time of the year.

- Yep this is the time of the year you really wanna start thinking about controlling annual winter annual weeds if you have those in maybe some different settings.

Maybe people who are thinking about putting in pulses, they're thinking about applying a herbicide this fall, something with a little bit of residual.

It's been dry.

Once we get a few rains we'll get some flushes of cheatgrass that'll come out there.

And so it depends on if you wanna get the cheatgrass after it's emerged or before it's emerged.

But pretty soon is really the time to get out there and manage the cheatgrass.

And winter annual weeds.

- There's a new herbicide for cheatgrass.

- Yep, it's called Rejuvra.

It's changed hands in terms of who sells it and deals with it but it is out there.

But that one is actually a herbicide that you probably wanted to apply pretty much now.

And then it is residual in the soil and prevents it from growing.

- Okay sounds good.

Cathy from Havre.

And this was a Facebook question.

They would like to know how successful we have been with no till in increasing organic matter in the soil.

- So no till from a soil health perspective is improvement relative to fungal communities and disturbance of the soil biota et cetera.

Organic matter increase happens really slowly.

And there have been studies that for over a five or 10 year period where we barely see an uptick in the amount of soil organic matter.

And part of the story behind all of that is that organic matter is really important in the soil for increasing water holding capacity and contributing to the habitat for microbes and being a food source for microbes.

So in some ways you add more organic matter you're also gonna increase biological activity and all of that activity will decompose the organic matter.

And so the stalk doesn't necessarily increase.

You've got more biological activity but you're not gonna measure more soil organic matter when you send your soil in for a lab test.

- Okay thank you, makes sense.

From Shelby, now I'll throw this at Tim but I don't know if he'll have an answer.

Do you have a recipe for choke cherry wine?

- [Cathy] Oh.

(Jack laughs) - A recipe for choke cherry wine, no I do not, but I will tell you this.

One of Uta's current graduate students Everett took a whole bunch of choke cherries from my house one time and it was next to the irrigated portion of the garden.

And it had really high sugar content in it.

And he brought it into his house and it fermented and made a lot more pressure than he thought and it painted all his walls purple.

(everyone laughs) And painted his white walls purple or pink.

- So I'll add onto that.

If somebody out there does have a good one email it in, and we do have an AG Live newsletter that we'll put that recipe in there sometime this fall.

I have had choke cherry wine, I've had better wine too.

(everyone laughs) So be it.

- Do you know it goes really, and Everett did, he is a successful choke and I used it to marinate game meat actually so to make like a marinated game.

That was delicious actually.

- Okay.

So we answered that question somewhat.

(everyone laughs) From Bigfork.

Can this person use barley or canola straw on their garden if they've previously sprayed them with a herbicide?

- That is a really tough question.

If it's Roundup Ready Canola and you wanna use and it just was sprayed with Roundup then I think you're fine.

But sometimes people also use something like Clopyralid or something like that in canola to kill volunteer canola.

So you have to be very careful.

It depends on what the herbicide that was used was.

- Okay.

That brings up a question for me for Cathy and for you.

We talk about soil health.

Does the application of these herbicides which we commonly use on a lot of agriculture or in Uta's case a fungicide, does that affect soil health in your opinion?

- So it's gonna vary I would guess.

So fungicides can often have effects on more than just the pathogenic fungus that they are catering to.

The flip side of that is that the soil is a really complex environment and it's really hard to saturate the soil with any single thing.

So there are very likely safe spots within the soil.

- [Jack] Right.

- So some impact, but again.

- [Jack] Pretty minimal.

- Probably.

- Okay.

I have a interesting question that came in from Havre for Uta.

I'll get to that after a quick question for Don.

And this person would like to know, is it too late to dig carrots?

- No, this is a good time to be digging carrots.

In fact even waiting until maybe early to mid October would even be better.

One of the things to do that I've noticed that the carrots get sweeter the longer they stay in the ground.

And having a good hard frost wouldn't hurt them at all.

- [Jack] Hurt 'em a bit.

- And we're still waiting for that really good hard killing frost, certainly here in the Gallatin Valley.

We've had a light frost but nothing of a killing nature.

So I'd say over the next two to three weeks is a good time to dig your carrots.

- I've actually dug mine a lot of times toward the latter part of October and if you want a good carrot cake, boy I tell you use those late October carrots.

And I might bring it in for coffee sometime.

- Okay.

- Yes please.

- Can I leave my beets too, my red beets, can I give them a frost or two?

- Well they're pretty tolerant, so yeah I think you could.

- Okay.

- Absolutely.

- And also sorry, so once they're dug and let's assume I had a killer carrot harvest and I can't possibly eat all those carrots at once, do you have recommendations how to store them?

- Okay here's what I like to do, I like to cut off just the very tip of the carrot at the top just so that you're not having any green material.

Wash them, put 'em in a plastic bag that has holes in it, and then put 'em in a refrigerator.

The holes in the bag keep the humidity from getting too high.

You can store 'em for several months that way.

So hopefully you can use up what you've got.

- Okay.

Nice thanks.

- Before they rot.

(Don and Uta laugh) - You don't wanna put 'em under a bale of straw because the mice will find 'em under there.

(everyone laughs) A lot of people used to try that.

Interesting comment here.

It says hi to Jack and Don from Jack Beringer.

- Oh yes good to know.

- Used to be county agent and Conrad.

- Right right.

- Been there for years.

And Jack I hope you're doing well and thanks for the comment.

Uta from Hill County.

This person had chickpeas, I think they had some ascochyta which is a leaf blight, they can be seed transmitted.

Are they they'd like to save the seed for use next year because seed costs are high.

What's your recommendation there?

- Yeah like you said Jack ascochyta is seed transmitted and it can quickly infect the seedling so and then cause disease that way.

So I would definitely recommend they send in a seed sample to the regional post crop diagnostic lab here at MSU.

And they offer several different tests, one of which is the ascochyta plus test that just tests for common seed transmitted diseases.

And so that way you will know how severe the seed lot is infected.

Just because the crop had ascochyta doesn't mean that the seed lot is necessarily badly infected.

And so depending on the test results they should decide whether or not they should use the seed.

If the infection levels are low enough they could certainly reuse that seed, but I would definitely recommend using a fungicide seed treatment to suppress those seed transmitted diseases but also protect the seedlings from those early season root rots that occur.

- Okay I agree entirely.

But I just read an article this past week about how the pulse industry has really increased.

The article said 20 years ago there were probably 100 products on the market that were based with lentils, chickpeas, dried peas.

Right now there's estimated to be over 11,000 products on the market.

And if you go in a grocery store anymore how many people eat hummus on the panel here?

(Don laughs) Yeah.

(everyone laughs) A few years ago we didn't know what it was.

And actually funniest one I saw is now people are making beer.

There's Rebellion Brewing Company just north of the border in Regina, makes a chickpea pale ale.

- Wow.

- Interesting.

- And a friend of mine just got back from Iceland last year and he had a chance to try a beer that's made out of canned peas and pickled red cabbage.

(Don laughs) - Iceland you say huh?

- It's called jólabjór.

(everyone laughs) - So I asked him how it was and his response was after a second one it's actually not too bad.

(everyone laughs) So but anyway it's a big new industry, it's been very beneficial for the State of Montana.

Soil health wise moving into a rotation with pulse crops and wheat or barley, has that been beneficial for soil health in your opinion?

- So definitely from the perspective of addition of nitrogen.

So nitrogen fixing symbionce with the pulses are an important contribution to the soil.

Some of the challenge with pulses is that they potentially produce less residue.

And from that perspective and from the concern of having enough crop residue on the surface to keep your soil in place over a windy Montana winter, that's another consideration.

But definitely for nitrogen cycling pulses are very useful.

- [Jack] Okay.

- Jack I thought I heard that Montana's now the number one pulse crop in the nation.

Is that true?

- That is true.

And right now I don't remember exactly what the figures were but I think we had about 150,000 acres of chickpeas, six or 700,000 acres of dried peas, and lentils were up probably over a half million acres now.

And I may be a little off, but we are growing a lot of pulses.

- That's amazing yeah.

- In this state.

And for weed control it's beautiful for weed control.

Tim you wanna?

- Well pulses are hard for weed control actually because there's not a lot of things that you can use and crop with them.

- But for the wheat that follows.

- But for the wheat that follows yes because you can manage the grassy-ness out of them.

So when we think of managing our rotations in the state, really those cereal years you have to really manage the broad leaf weeds.

And then when you go to the pulse years then you can manage the grassy weeds, the wild oats, the things like that.

So you have to be a pretty strategic in your thinking about it.

I had some weedy chickpea trials this year at the post farm I have to admit.

(everyone laughs) - Okay.

Cathy, this came in from Missoula.

This person says that they see a lot of advertisements for soil microbial products to benefit the soil.

They are curious, are they effective or are they more of a way for the manufacturer to make dollars?

- Maybe a little of both.

(Don laughs) I personally and Don can add his two bits to this too which will be helpful, but the soil is full of microbes and a whole community.

To add an inoculum to that that's going to be effective that will get established and do exactly what you want is a little bit in my mind it's a little bit like saying oh we should grow more wheat in the state, let's aerial seed weed across the whole state.

So you're adding a microbial inoculum to an already established microbial community.

I know we do it with legume rhizobia inoculum but that is a very tight relationship between specific plants and specific fungi and it involves a lot of communication between the roots and the bacteria.

For a lot of the other microbial inoculum the question is is has it really gotten established?

And the other thing I was thinking about was people take probiotics to change the microbial community in their stomach.

They take that every day, maybe twice a day for a long period of time.

So this sort of one application in a large field, I don't know what the likelihood is of it getting established but I'm skeptical I'd have to say.

- I am also quite skeptical but.

- Jack the other place where I see a lot of advertisement for microbial additions are soil media or compost media for use in greenhouses.

And they particularly advertise adding mycorrhiza to that medium.

And you see pictures of increased plant growth.

I'm a little skeptical about how well that really works.

Perhaps sometimes, but it certainly being And if you're gonna try it, try it on a small quantity of your materials and just see how they respond.

Do your own local testing.

- Okay I have a question here from Manhattan.

Makes sense.

They see a potato sitting in front of (everyone laughs) Uta and they're wondering what is it and what's going on?

So you wanna explain what's happening there?

- Oh well could you be possibly talking about Franken-tuber?

This is my pet potato that came to me a few weeks back.

And it came without the eyes, they're my addition to just personify this potato.

But so this potato came from a basement from somebody who grows potatoes in their garden.

And it seems that they had forgotten this bigger tuber in the basement and just found it a couple of weeks ago.

And noticed those smaller tubers growing from within the older tuber.

And they were very surprised and were wondering what happened here.

And we're not 100% sure as you know in terms of diagnosis, it's very hard to have a very 100% certainty with our diagnosis.

But what we think happened is that this potato just really wanted to grow.

Even in a light deprived basement over the summer.

And probably found a way to kind of grow within itself, and found that fertile ground which is the tuber right and produced smaller tubers.

And now we have Franken-tuber.

And it'll be a prop for Halloween at my house for sure.

(everyone laughs) - I've been around potatoes and plants for well over 40 years, that's the first time I've seen something like that.

It's kind of interesting.

I don't know if we can answer this but we'll throw it out.

This person has hops that they have planted for shade.

Don do you think they can transplant those?

- [Don] Hops?

- Yeah.

- [Don] I would think so.

- [Uta] The roots.

- I really have had no experience with hops personally but-- - Neither have I but.

- I would think the roots you could lift up and transplant.

- I actually transplanted-- - You might try.

- Some hops last year from a site where I was gonna do construction to somewhere else.

And yep it grew, it grew pretty well.

You have to get 'em to really make enough vines.

They like nitrogen hops and yeah.

- What time of the year did you transplant?

- I did that in spring and it regrew in summer and survived so.

- Okay.

- Or spring summer.

- [Don] That makes sense.

- [Jack] You makin' beer?

- No actually just hops tea.

- Okay.

(Jack and Tim laugh) - And you know you can donate the hops and then there is some local beer growing event where they just gather hops from the community, that may be your way to get in.

(Uta laughs) - Yeah.

- Interesting.

While I have you up Tim and I love this question 'cause I know how tough it is.

Is there a way to control bindweed in your garden?

(Don laughs) - [Woman] Where?

- Really long.

You need to take the long-term view.

And the seed bank can be painfully long lived.

If you get a really bad infestation of bindweed those seeds can stay viable in the ground for 20 years.

So when I mean the long view I really mean the long view.

I think getting the plant out as best you can out of your garden without chopping up the underground root system into a lot of smaller pieces is crucial.

There are some herbicides that'll work on bindweed and work fairly well.

Yeah 24D, like LV6, LV4, it will do a pretty good job on bindweed, but then you have to think about what you're planting in your garden and what might kind of be there.

I would say take the long-term, get the chunks of rhizome out as solid as you can.

Keep it from going to seed, and then just keep working over it year over year.

Heavy tillage will work too.

Having a lot of tillage in there.

And every three weeks Zack Miller did a project out in Corvallis trying to control bindweed in organic production.

And he had two years of tilled fallow tilling it every three or four weeks which is not great for the soil aggregate stability.

But it did take care of the bindweed.

- Okay.

It is a tough weed.

- It is.

- Very tough.

- It can be a tough one.

- Cathy from Highwood.

And this is an interesting call.

From what you said the dynamics of soil health take a long period of time.

Why has the acidification of soil in many parts of Montana occurred so rapidly?

Do you have any explanation for that?

And that's happened over a 10 to 15 year period where.

- Right.

My guess is that it hasn't occurred rapidly, it's just occurred gradually.

So it feels like it's rapid in that if the pH is shifting or another possibility is that you've got enough capacity like a buffer capacity of the soil to absorb the more acidic components of the fertilizer.

And then at the point that that's saturated you reach kind of a flip.

So frankly I would forward that question to Clayne Jones to get a more comprehensive answer.

You know what, we'll save that because Clayne is on the panel I think on October 9th and he's worked a lot with soil acidification.

And we're talking about pH's, high pH around eight 15 years ago that are now down in the sixes.

And that's pretty rapid.

And while I have you up, the term nutrient cycling.

This person would like to know what that means.

- So when we talk about organic matter in soil, so dead plants like crop residue, dead roots, whatever, that material slowly breaks down decomposes through the action of both chewing of little insects and metabolism of microbes.

And in the process the nitrogen and phosphorous that's within that material is released back into the soil.

Sometimes it's not direct, sometimes it's in fact usually it's incorporated into bacterial bodies.

So now it's all in the microbial community.

And then you've got protozoans and nematodes that eat the bacteria, and the bacteria is actually a little bit rich for them.

And the nutrients get excreted and there you've got it, it's available for plant uptake.

So it's the moving of nutrients from bound in organic material to be available for plant uptake.

And really important process in all soil is just to sustain a plant community.

- Okay thank you, good answer.

Don, this person has harvested literally everything out of their garden even though it hasn't frozen yet but they were anticipating they were gonna freeze out shortly.

They wanna know whether or not they should rototill their garden in the fall.

- Okay Jack we used to do that routinely but then I found that it was better just to take the organic or the weeds and the plant residue and go in with something like a flail mower and chop it up.

And then come back with kinda like a shovel plow that leaves a pretty rough surface on the soil over the winter.

And then the freezing and thawing will And then come in next spring with your rototiller if you wanna use a rototiller.

Some people are even shying away from rototilling because they says it creates kind of a pan at the depth of the rototiller that's kinda hard for the roots to get through.

So there's a variety of opinions on that, but I'd wait til spring to rototill if you're gonna rototill.

- They mentioned that and we've ran into situations like this years ago mainly in the big Big Sandy area where they use the same type of farm equipment year after year after year.

And they did create a hard pan, and that was very difficult for wheat and barley to penetrate.

And as a result in certain areas of fields you would see compressed soil and compressed wheat and barley that just did not produce well.

So hard pans can be brought about by implements for sure.

- For sure yeah.

- Okay comment from Missoula Valley.

And we do, this person thinks we should have Clayton Marlow on, he's a regional director involved with promoting sustainable AG in And I know Clayton well and we have invited him to be a panel member and he hasn't responded yet, he's busy.

But we do have a person coming on the ninth of October who is also very involved with sustainable agriculture, he's a producer.

Kenton Wesson, or Wesson from the Malta area.

So we are going to have these people on and we will have people that complement 'em.

So yes, sustainability's important and we will address that as we go along.

Tim this person has a lot of perennial weeds in their range land.

Is this a good time to spray for 'em?

And they didn't say which perennial weeds they had.

- Yep I think it's a good time to spray for 'em.

You have to go around.

And if for thinking about the sustainability, using less chemical in this context, I know sometimes it takes longer but just walking around with a backpack sprayer and really just targeting those single rosettes will save your grass, will save any collateral damage from happening to our perennial grasses.

If it's in alfalfa, if you have sort of hay alfalfa mix you can do the same thing.

If they're perennial weeds you might wait til that alfalfa really gets more dormant so you don't damage alfalfa if you go out and spry across the whole field.

- Right.

- But it's a good yeah this is a really good time to use it.

And you can use less chemical by just really spot spraying.

- Okay.

Uta this person tried to grow some faba beans, and faba beans, we tried to grow 'em commercially here about 30, 35 years ago probably Don, and they were a disaster.

But this person (Don laughs) right now has some black spots on the faba bean leaves.

He's wondering if that's a problem, and what they should do to prevent that in the future.

They wanna grow 'em some more obviously.

- Yeah that's oh, I've seen some faba beans this year and they are given me a headache.

I'm not (Jack and Don laugh) very familiar with them and they seem to turn black.

So as to the black spots, I mean from where I'm sitting right now without seeing an actual sample it's hard to say what causes that.

I mean it is fall so it could just be part of the natural process of the plants nesting.

What I would say is let's assume it's a disease.

And so from that perspective we wanna avoid this disease occurring in the next year.

So they should take the leaves and the plant matter and dispose of it so to prevent the potential pathogen to remain in that soil.

Also I would recommend pulling out the roots, just because oftentimes we see symptoms above ground but really the issue is in the root.

And so we don't want those roots of the pathogens, potential pathogens decomposing in the soil.

But from this distance it's really hard to make a diagnosis.

I know if you've seen some diseases on faba beans that you could identify don?

- [Don] Nope, never saw faba beans being grown so.

(Don laughs) - We've-- - So they never made it out of the ground?

(Uta laughs) I've had them on my, I had faba beans for a couple years that were really good and then yep they went downhill.

So if anyone has the secret to growing faba beans.

In Canada faba bean production is really high.

Other parts of the world, Sweden for example, it's one of the most common silage forages for animal feed.

But I can't grow faba beans either.

- Okay.

I remember when we tried to grow 'em in the early '80's here and we had alternaria problems with 'em at that time.

But biggest problem is-- - What problems?

- Alternaria, a fungus.

- Oh yeah.

- Biggest problem we had is nobody wanted to buy 'em.

(Don laughs) They grew 'em without a contract, and that's something you don't wanna do especially crops.

What's that big, you been on the golf course today?

Or what is that?

(Tim laughs) - That would be a hard golf course to play I would say.

- Yes it would be.

- I do not play golf a lot but.

- The roughest stuff.

- Yeah I thought this was an interesting sample to bring in that came to us who just got her diagnostic lab earlier this week.

And so it's a really neat show and tell.

If we can have a close look here you see the sample has a really thick layer of thatch above the soil which in this case is a quite dense clay soil.

And so talking about lawn and thatch layers you don't wanna have a thatch layer that is thicker than half an inch.

Thatch is essentially just a word for organic matter, like the roots and the grass clippings from the lawn that accumulate here.

And so what is a problem with this is it just makes it really hard for your water and your nutrients and the air to get to the grass roots.

And so over time your lawn might not thrive as well or look a little bit sick-ish.

Is that a word?

(Uta laughs) And so the way you could address this is by core aeration.

The best time of the year to do this probably in the spring, but if you have a really thick thatch layer in the fall, doing it twice a year in the fall and the spring might be good.

And so with this sample here where we have this really dense soil underneath too you could consider after doing this core aeration to spread some compost soil and then raking it into the holes just to kind of break up this hard pan so to speak.

Right and kind of putting in a little lighter soil.

Yeah.

- I've had problems with that, and I've pretty much remedied it with aeration, it works pretty good.

Interesting question here.

And it's from Billings but it's also from Bozeman and Helena all around the state.

And this person says many of the green ash in town are dead or near dead.

And those are generally the younger ones.

He thinks they're a Marshall's seedless ash.

Is there a better variety to plant for that environment?

I happen to do a little work on that a few years ago.

Originally we used patmore ash, it was a Alberta variety.

But talking with Jerry Cashman and others we'd now found that the patmore ash is very prone to winter damage, especially when you have a hard frost.

The best one right now seems to be a line out of North Dakota called prairie spire.

Found a little more history about that.

And if you go online and look up the ash article in the whatever we call it the programs that we write associated with this, there's an article in there about the ash.

And I don't remember, it was last year sometime.

From Polson Cathy, this person has heard that there is a fungus in the soil that can act similar to a root system for the plant and be more beneficial for some plants.

You wanna touch on that a little bit?

- Yes that's likely mycorrhizal fungus.

And a mycorrhiza is in fact a symbiosis, like a close relationship between a root and a fungus.

And it's a very ancient relationship.

It's evolved separately like maybe five or six different times with different groups of plants and different kinds of fungus.

And when we find fossils of some of the earliest land plants you can find fungal structures inside the roots.

So really important to for the plant to increase phosphorous uptake and sometimes other micronutrients.

And very often the plant contributes all of the carbon that the fungus needs to grow.

That's yeah, so, Don mentioned them earlier when we were talking about microbial inoculum, because you can find 'em commercially available.

Mycorrhizal inoculum that you can add to your garden or your fields to increase micorrhizene in your host plants.

And Don's skepticism which is totally similar to mine is that these fungi are in most soils pretty widespread.

And it's not necessary to add an inoculum.

I would say there are some exceptions to that, and that might be metal contaminated soils or some scenarios where the soil is in really some kind of dire condition.

But yeah very helpful.

The one thing about roots is that they are all sorts of fungi and bacteria that in fact do all kinds of things both inside and outside the roots that sometimes are pathogenic and sometimes are very beneficial.

So every time you see a plant it's in fact a whole community of a lot of different organisms.

Makes it interesting to try to study.

- Don you had grad students working on mycorrhizal one time didn't you?

- I think so but (Don laughs) that's part of my skepticism, I don't think they had much success.

But I did wanna make the comment that many of these mycorrhizes sometimes called ectomycorrhiza are mushrooms.

And so you see-- - True.

- A lot of the mushrooms in your lawn or in the forest, They're all doing a good thing for the plants.

In fact I think most plants are mycorrhizal to certain extent.

- It's really the exceptions that are not.

- That's right yeah.

- And I couldn't remember the AG Live newsletter when I was stumbling around with trying (everyone laughs) to tell you where to find the ash article.

But if you Google "Montana Ag Live" and look at the "Montana Ag Live" newsletter you'll find an article about the ash, which answer a lot of your questions.

(Jack laughs) We talked about this earlier.

I'll throw this one at Tim, it's from Gallatin Gateway.

They would like to know if you can kill purslane by covering up with black plastic.

- Oh.

You might be able to.

I bet it's you're gonna have to keep it on there.

This time a year nope, it's not, we've lost all our heat.

You know what I've did, I ate a lot of purslane this year I have to admit.

(everyone laughs) I have, I had some sweet corn and I got some real nice flushes of purslane underneath it and it was tasty.

And I have some fermented that I'm gonna bring in for Jack a little later in the season.

(Jack laughs) But it is a tough tough weed to manage.

You might get it keep it from growing by covering it with black plastic, but I bet when you take the black plastic back off those seeds that will still be viable.

And you probably have to cycle through that a couple times to really kill those, kill that purslane.

- Jack in our garden club garden we've got a lot of purslane and we pretty much come to the decision just to leave it.

It's a good living mulch, it doesn't really take up much nutrients for the plant, and it prevents water from evaporating from the soil.

And you're the first person I know who's actually told me that they've eaten it and liked it.

- Oh yeah no I think I like it fresh.

And yeah I have some fermented purslane that it has a nice taste to it.

- Sauerkraut purslane right?

- [Tim] Yep sauerkraut purslane.

- Good stuff.

- Yeah that's like pickled beet beer right.

(everyone laughs) I'm not so sure.

- Sounds like we have a dinner together here.

(everyone laughs) - I'll pass thank you.

- So but Don, so how yeah I mean I've come to the conclusion that I leave it a lot of times too.

It's a little bit, it's like a cover crop I think.

I'm inter cropping with the cover crop, so I view it as a sustainable.

- That's right.

- Way to keep it-- - We got other weeds that are more of a problem than purslane.

- Cathy he mentioned cover crops.

In your opinion surely how beneficial are cover crops to soil health?

- So really having a root in the soil, having a live plant is a really major contribution to soil health.

So cover crops instead of fallow for example can make a major contribution to reduce soil erosion, to add organic matter, and just keep biological activity up at a higher level.

In Montana it's not quite as easy as in places that have more abundant rainfall.

And so work of Perry Millers and work that I've done with Perry and Clayne Jones really show that the cover crops are a definite contribution for soil health.

But the impact that they might have on the subsequent years' cash crop is gonna depend upon the rain cycle for that year.

Some places you have enough rain that you can actually grow a cover crop after harvest like in the shoulder season.

But in Montana we don't have that luxury.

- We really do not.

And although there are more cover crops moving in the state.

And if you use them in conjunction with livestock the economy or economics is not too bad.

Mentioned cover crops, this person from Great Falls wants to know what the best time in the Great Falls area to plant Austrian winter field peas for a cover crop.

I'll answer that for Perry.

Perry always says if he got moisture the end of August or first week of September is a good time to get them in.

- And it's probably getting, maybe it depends on how nice the fall is right, you need to get that Austrian winter pea up a little bit to get it through the winter.

- You do.

And I think right now we're probably too late to do it for this year.

- Yep and I bet it's pretty, the soil is fairly dry so germination won't be rapid.

- True.

Quickly from Helen, and this could be a tough one.

Uta this person's peonies this year were sickly.

The leaves were yellow to red, stems were twisted and black.

Any idea what's causing this?

And I think I might know if you.

- Jack?

(everyone laughs) - If they water it from above, it sounds like a phytophthora blight.

- Oh okay.

- And the best way to avoid that is not to water overhead.

And I suspect that's what's causing that.

Quickly Cathy from Cut Bank.

This person says that they've mined the soil for years, bear fowl things like that, destroyed the organic matter.

How long will it take to improve that soil?

- Well that's a good question.

- We don't have a lot of time (Cathy laughs) on this one.

(everyone laughs) I would say that growing plants in that soil is gonna have an immediate positive impact.

So this is goes back to this question on soil health.

So do you need 20 years and you would have more organic matter, likely.

But if you are improving it in one growing season, excellent.

- Okay.

Quick question Don, and this is always an issue.

This person had difficulty getting some of their seed from Helena Garden Seeds.

Do you think you should be ordering them now or wait til spring?

- Well I know two years ago it was really a problem getting seed.

And so our garden club soon as we get the garden catalogs in December we order in early January, and we've had really good luck getting seed.

If you wait later in the spring April that sorta thing you may not get the varieties that you want.

So I would order soon as you get a good catalog.

- And when do those normally start showing up?

- Oh earlier and earlier.

I see some in November now, but normally I have all my catalogs by - Which particular seeds did you guys have problems with getting this year?

- This year there was one bean variety called painted tongue that we couldn't get from anybody, nobody seemed to have a seed supply.

But hopefully it'll be available next year.

- Okay sounds good.

Folks we're coming down to end of another program, glad you joined us this evening.

I wanna thank the panel, (light acoustic music) especially Cathy for coming in, we enjoyed it and it hope you learned a lot.

Next week we're going to have a sustainability issue with estate planing.

And if you don't plan well with your estate especially with increased land values in the state you're not gonna be sustainable, you won't be here.

So join us with Marcia Getting next week.

Have a good week, thanks for watching, goodnight.

- [Announcer] For more information and resources visit Montana PBS dot org slash Ag Live.

- [Announcer] "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, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, the Northern Pulse Growers Association, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

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