- [Announcer] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by: the Montana Department of Agriculture, MSU Extension, the MSU Ag Experiment Station of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, the Gallatin Gardeners Club, and the Montana Federation of Garden Clubs.

(bright music) - Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the first show of the fall season, 31st year of "Montana Ag Live," coming to you live from the studio of KUSM-TV here on the wonderful, vibrant campus of Montana State University now that we have our students back.

We also have two guests in the background that are with us.

You can see them.

We have Monte and we have Champ from the University of Montana and Montana State University.

And they came by today to really help us to talk about all the great research that goes on throughout the Montana University system.

You know, we have the College of Ag here at Montana State University, the College of Forestry up at the University of Montana, and we do all this great research across the university system for the benefit of all of the stakeholders, citizens, and people in the state of Montana and beyond.

Across the state, we have a lot of really broad impact.

And so Champ and Monte came along to just remind us today a little bit about how the university system works and how extension works.

And now we're gonna get started with our show tonight.

We have a great panel organized for you this evening.

We're gonna talk about fall vegetables and storing fall vegetables.

If you guys have any questions about horticulture, if you have questions about storing your vegetables, about what to do with your garden this fall, how to get your trees ready for fall, what to do with your lawn, make the phone ring.

Please call in your questions.

This show wouldn't really function without you guys calling in and asking us a number of questions.

So we'll get started tonight and we'll introduce our esteemed panel.

We have a great panel organized.

We have Uta McKelvy on the far right end over there.

She's gonna answer all your questions you have about diseases and plant pathologies.

She's our extension plant pathology specialist.

And tonight our special guest is Mac Burgess, who's a professor of truck farms, or no, I mean he's a professor of small-scale agronomy, so really thinking about high-value, intensive vegetable production, fruit production.

So call in and ask all your really difficult questions to him.

Next to him, we have Joel Schumacher.

He's our extension economist.

So if you have any questions about grain markets, cattle prices, cattle numbers, all these types of things, ask these questions to Joel.

And next to me, just to my left is Abi Saeed.

She's our extension horticulture specialist.

And Abi travels all over state giving lots of extension presentations.

I think she's around 50 presentations- - 60.

- 60 presentations she's given across the state so far this year.

So if you haven't seen her in person and asked her a question, call in and ask her a question right now.

And I'm Tim Seipel.

I'm a weed scientist, or you might call me a plant ecologist.

And I really work on plants and how they interact with the environment.

So weed questions, crop questions, make sure you get those in.

We have two phone operators tonight.

We have Nancy Blake and Alexander Conrad.

Keep those guys busy.

The number's up there on your screen.

So with that, tonight's theme and topic is how to store all the hard work we've put into the year in the garden.

And Mac's gonna give us a little bit, a few tips about what's coming out of the gardens now, how to store it and how to harvest it, and what kind of season it's been at the BART farm this year.

- Boy, it's been a warm one.

It's gonna be a great fruit year.

The plums aren't ready to pick yet, but I have had a few questions about how do I know when it's time to harvest various kinds of fruits.

So I have a whole bunch of 'em here to look at, and maybe we would start with the cantaloupe.

- Oh, yeah.

- Yeah, so this is a ripe cantaloupe and I can tell so because it smells really good.

But with cantaloupe, how you know it's time to harvest them is that the fruit will slip off the vine is the word.

It'll actually break right off there really easily.

This one fell apart on the ride over here.

I trimmed it with the vine, but it came right off.

And the scar will be a little bit concave.

And even in the grocery store, you can know you're gonna have a good melon if you find that.

And lots of melons get picked a little bit early and they're not quite as flavorful as they could be, but that's how you know a cantaloupe is ready.

And we'll come to these other ones later maybe, huh?

- Yeah, sounds good.

We have a few questions that have come in.

Well, we have one, we're gonna go to Mac.

We had one question that came in and this is a caller from Helena and they were raising echinacea.

So echinacea's in the daisy family and we have a little bit of, Mac just happened to bring in a piece of echinacea with him.

But this caller from Helena has "aster yellows," in quotation marks, and the caller was told to remove the plants.

How does a person deal with aster yellows in something like echinacea?

- Echinacea is a perennial plant.

They will re-seed and grow from seed as well, but each individual plant is a perennial, will live many years, and when a plant gets a virus, or, in this case, a phytoplasm, it's got it for life.

And so if you confirm that you have aster yellows, you really need to remove the plant.

That disease is spread by leaf hoppers and it's not curable.

I would say though, however, that, so this is a healthy looking echinacea flower from my yard.

And right next to it, I've got a whole plant with flowers that look like this.

And my first guess was this was aster yellows, but, actually, when we look really, really close at this, there's a mite, the coneflower rosette mite, that's in there.

They're little tiny things.

You need a pretty good magnifying glass or like a 25x scope to actually see 'em.

They're little tiny white things.

They've got four legs up at the front of their head and they cause a similar symptom to the aster yellows.

So it would be important to figure out which one you've got.

Mites could be controlled with the horticultural oil.

They're not gonna doom the plant forever, but they do move around in the wind and we do have 'em here.

- Great.

- How do these mites overwinter?

Does anybody know by any chance?

I don't.

- Well, it depends on the mite, but like Eriophyid mites like that often overwinter in their galls usually or in soil.

You might find them overwintering in depending on what their lifecycle is.

- I've read they'll overwinter in cracks in the stems.

So I suppose clearing the old plant material out.

In general, sanitation never hurts.

- So if it was a mite, you could trim that and next year should be good?

- Yeah, I would certainly clip the deformed flowers and throw those out either way.

But if it's the aster yellows, you want to dig the whole plant out.

- Abi, you have another show and tell.

- So this is a similar kind of mite than the one Mac was mentioning.

This is called an Eriophyid mite and this is a family of mites that attack lots of different types of plants.

And in this case, this is on a three-leaf sumac, also known as a skunk bush, and it's called that because it has a very strong smell, which right now the cantaloupe is covering, which I'm glad for.

But these mites can create these little pink little galls on the leaf surface, and sometimes they can be finger-like projections, sometimes they can be little velvety fuzz over the leaves, and sometimes they can look like these little bumps on the leaves.

And these are again caused by mites.

This is mostly a cosmetic issue.

It's not usually going to impact the overall health of the plants and their overall lifespan, but they can be somewhat unsightly.

But these ones, usually dormant oils before bud break can be a helpful way to reduce the population.

- Now, even though those are both Eriophyid mites, they're not the same species.

- No, they're not.

- They're very species specific- - They are.

- To the plants they like.

- Yes.

- Yep.

- And, well, Uta, while we're on the subject of Eriophyid mites, so for maybe some of the viewers that haven't gone across the state giving 60 presentations, across the state of Montana, we had a very strong line of precipitation differences.

We're in the southwest part of Montana.

We've gotten 50 to 75% of normal precipitation.

And then in the northeastern part of the state, we've received up to 200% of precipitation.

And so there's a lot of volunteer grain out there, especially that's fallen as people have tried to combine it.

And so Uta, you did your PhD on wheat streak mosaic virus.

This really seems like a year where we could have wheat streak mosaic virus.

Do you want to tell us a little bit about it?

- I sure can.

How much time do we have?

No, I'll try and keep it short.

Yeah, so wheat streak mosaic virus is transmitted by another Eriophyid mite, the wheat curl mite, and so both the virus and the mite need a green host to survive.

So right now, these rains that we had pre-harvest and the ones that we receive now that delay harvest are really promoting what we call the green bridge.

So they're facilitating a lot of green growth where the virus and the mites can reside.

And so we had some or higher incidences of wheat streak in the Golden Triangle area in Montana this year.

So I would certainly say with these fall or late summer moisture conditions, there is an increased risk for wheat streak perpetuating into the next growing season.

So the best management really is to eliminate that green bridge.

I know it's tricky, right?

'Cause we're running out of time to get the fall planting in.

But so ideally we wanna terminate the green bridge, kill everything that is grassy green, especially that volunteer wheat, and make sure it's well dead before our winter wheat crop emerges.

And so that might require the winter wheat to be planted a little bit later, which might not be a bad idea if the fall is gonna be warm and a little bit longer.

The longer we have winter wheat exposed to the mites that are moving in the environment, the higher the likelihood that the wheat becomes infected this fall and, typically, a fall infection will result in much more severe yield losses.

So definitely if you had a field or a neighboring field that showed symptoms of wheat streak this season, I would be very vigilant.

If you have a lot of green bridge in your field, I would be very vigilant and try and terminate that as good as you can and consider planting a little bit later.

Obviously there are other factors to consider.

And if you ever wonder, if you're seeing symptoms in your wheat or other cereal crop that are yellowing, streaking kind, think of me and the Schutter Diagnostic Lab in Bozeman.

You can email some pictures, you can send us a sample, we can have a look and tell you if we think it's wheat streak or not.

- [Abi] And how long of a break would you want between having any vegetation?

- Yeah, so typically we say we want, you know, no green material for two weeks, which is becoming quite unrealistic seeing that it's already September.

So as long as possible within reason, 'cause there's trade off, right?

What we don't want is winter wheat emerging while there's still plenty of volunteer wheat and other grassy wheats green around, 'cause the mites will move directly into the winter wheat and it's gonna be bad.

Let's not make it bad (chuckles).

- Could you also follow that, instead of like with wheat next year, could you come in with a pea, a lentil- - Yeah, good point.

- Or a barely or something?

- That's a good point, yes.

So any broadleaf crop wouldn't be a host or anything that's not like a grassy kind of cereal.

Yeah, so if it's really bad, maybe consider rotating to a non-host crop, yeah.

Thanks, Joel.

- Yeah, lot of talk of Eriophyid mites.

They got a lot of play on "Montana Ag Live."

- We'll have a blow-up mascot of them next time.

- Okay, so we have some more callers.

Let's get to a question from a caller in Butte.

Caller wants to eliminate his large raspberry bed and put in a lawn.

Is fall the best time to do that?

And what product should he use?

- So, I mean, I would start off with, depending on what type, like if your raspberries are still green, you could use a general broad spectrum herbicide.

You can use glyphosate or something like that if you would like and eliminate it.

So cut it to the base and you can spot treat the individual plant.

So where you've made those cuts, you can spot treat it with a herbicide and that will reduce kind of any, you know, residual to adjacent plants and it also ends up being more effective and you're wasting less material.

So I would do that, and then I would add a nice good layer of compost if possible and try and work the soil a little bit.

You may wanna remove some of the roots if it looks like it's, it's looking a little bit, like, if it's a pretty extensive root system.

And then at this time of year, since it's Butte, we're getting maybe to the end of seeding time.

So I probably would recommend waiting until the spring to seed a turf grass.

If you wanna try and just put some turf cover on the ground, you can seed some perennial rye grass.

It's pretty quick to germinate and will allow for that coverage if you would like.

But for the best results right now, the spring seeding will probably be good.

- Spring seeding for the grass.

Yeah, you could probably dig out, I was wondering if you could, we jokingly call, when we talk of herbicides, we have modes of action and mode of action number 30 is called steel in the field.

And so I was wondering if just a Pulaski kind of getting out, getting that root system out a little bit might do well.

- I've been successful just digging 'em up and mowing them when they're in the grass and eventually they go away.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Yep.

- And you may still be fighting with a few, you know, raspberry plants popping up in your grass, but you can take care of them pretty quickly by pulling them out.

- Okay.

We have a stack of questions coming up.

We have one for Joel here and this caller would like to know, cattle inventories remain really low, almost record low in the United States.

Do we expect cattle inventories to increase, and how does that affect the beef prices that we see at the store?

- Yeah, well, certainly we're kind of at, you know, really kind of long-term lows right now in terms of the US cattle herd, been on a decline for a while.

Now, cattle markets cycle, and so this has been going on for a hundred years where we have, you know, five or six or eight years where it's growing and then it shrinks for four or five or six years.

There's been all the research on why exactly.

But we're certainly at kind of the low point and we're kind of wondering where the bottom point is and when that'll start to turn.

Here in Montana, we did see a 1% increase last year and some of that I think is a little bit drought-related.

We had some grass come back and producers started to rebuild.

On a nationwide basis though, you can kinda look at, you know, this isn't like building a house where if all of a sudden we want a whole bunch more, we just put more people on it and we build more houses.

You know, you pretty much get one calf per year out of a mother cow.

So the only way to really build it is to either keep cows in that breeding herd longer, so maybe keep an older animal around and get one or two more calves out of it than you otherwise might have done, or we're gonna not send those young heifer calves to the slaughter plant.

So we can look at the percentage of heifers that are in feedlots right now as kind of an indicator of how many of those heifer calves are being saved to go into the breeding herd and that number is improving, but we still need to go about 1% more, I think, before we'll start to see the US herd start to increase.

So we're certainly seeing less of those heifer calves in feedlots than we did a year ago, but we're kind of getting maybe to the point where we're at a break even or maybe we'll see a little bit of growth, but we might also be 12 to 18 months out from where we get to that point.

- Okay, so how does that affect beef prices that we see in the grocery store?

- Yeah, well, you know, less animals means less beef production.

Now, there's been a little bit of adjustment on that too.

We can leave animals in those feedlots longer so that when those animals do go for slaughter, we're getting more pounds of beef off of each animal that goes.

And right now, corn and soybean prices have been low and that's primarily the big two components of the feed while they're in a feedlot.

So to compensate some for that lower number of cattle in those feedlots, we're feeding 'em to a much heavier level.

But we also import a lot of hamburger.

Just 'cause of the American diet, we tend to import hamburger and then we export cuts like steak and then also some of the lower-value cuts like liver, kidney, and things that there's not as much as a market for here in the US.

- [Uta] Where do we import from?

- We import from quite a few places.

Australia certainly brings us things.

Brazil brings us hamburger.

- Argentina.

- Canada and Mexico as well.

Sometimes we're actually seeing live animals come in, you know, from either Canada or Mexico and then get finished here.

So they come in as a lighter animal, they end up in a US feedlot where they're adding weight.

You know, so I guess when that animal goes, you know, to processing, part of it is US-grown meat and part of it is, you know, imported, so.

- So how's that working out now?

I know as we started to talk tariffs in the spring season on "Montana Ag Live," we were talking about cattle moving across the border between Montana and Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, as many as three or four times in some instances.

How have Montana producers adapted, or have there been any changes?

- Well, we don't have really good numbers, but certainly, you know, we have seen cattle that, you know, due to different advantages in production, it made sense to, say, feed them in Canada or to bring 'em to the US for processing, you know, and some back and forth things.

Mexico tends to almost exclusively send that need finished and we've had New World screwworm there where we've had some health reasons we didn't wanna bring in some of those animals for a while or have some additional testing.

So it's meant less critters coming in.

So it does affect producers in terms of the total beef supply.

And if you've been to the grocery store lately, retail prices are up, and if you're a cattle producer right now, it's a great time to have calves to sell.

These are probably some of the highest prices you've ever seen in your lifetime, which also makes it a little bit tough to build your herd up because you got that heifer calf that you can take a really nice paycheck for right now or, you know, take the gamble and try to build your herd up and have, you know, more calves to sell down the road.

- All right, thank you.

Okay, we have, well, actually, before we go too far, we have something really amazing on the table with us tonight and that is a Montana-grown watermelon.

There are not many years that we grow great watermelons in Montana, or watermelons at all.

This is the first year in the Gallatin Valley we've had prunes or plums in four years, three or four years or something.

But Mac, you want to tell us a little bit about your watermelon there?

- Yeah, this is a ripe watermelon.

I had one of its siblings just recently.

And then so the question arises, how do you know when a watermelon is ripe?

And there's something about the sound supposedly.

I don't know if I quite (indistinct).

- [Abi] I've had very inconsistent results with the tapping.

- Right, right, right.

There's also the ground spots.

So when the ground spot turns color, that's an indicator.

But really what's going, this one is definitely ripe, but if you look at the stem, they don't slip off like a cantaloupe does, but if you follow the stem, the last tendril before the attachment of fruit, when that starts to dry down, you know it's ready.

And in this case, the whole stem is dried up.

So whether it's ripe or not, it's not getting anything from the plant anymore.

And, actually, they were ripe.

This is a hybrid called JuiceBox and they've done really well for us this year.

And I think that's the, last time we had watermelons like this was '07, I reckon.

It's been a little while.

(panelists chuckle) - Oh, that's good that you can remember the good watermelon.

(Mac and Tim laugh) Okay, so we have some other questions that are coming in.

So we have a caller from Bozeman.

Caller has a caragana hedge with weeds behind it.

Can she use dead leaves from her trees around the hedge to control the weeds?

How deep and how close to the hedge?

- That's a tough one.

Depending on the type of weed, oftentimes with leaf litter as mulch, I don't see it being as successful in weed control 'cause weeds can often grow through it and the leaves will decompose fairly quickly.

If you wanted to try a mulch method of trying to control weeds, I'd probably use wood chips instead of leaves.

I think that would be more successful.

And in terms of how deep, you'd probably need to top it off, but I would say a minimum of four to five inches.

But again, this would depend on the type of weed.

So if you have something like bindweed and stuff like that, that's gonna grow right through up to the top.

So I'd say step one would be to reach out to your county extension agent and identify what that weed is.

And then step two, we can think of mechanical control, including something like a mulch method that could be a possibility for helping minimize the weed issues.

- Could you ever stop the growth of a caragana, also called Siberian peashrub, the unkillable shrub?

Could you ever stop its growth with that much mulch that you would, I know they're not trying to manage the caragana but if you put too much mulch on caragana, can it cause problems?

- I can't think of it causing many problems, especially if you're not creating like a volcano of mulch right around the base of the caragana.

If it's just a few inches and if it's touching those stems, studies have shown that there really isn't a negative impact to plants if you have healthy wood chips.

Again, if you're using wood chips from diseased plants, that can be an issue.

But healthy wood chips shouldn't cause an issue.

- Okay.

Okay.

We have a question from Bozeman, and I had one or two, I dug a few of these, so the caller dug some potatoes, I dug some potatoes the other day too, and they have a few that were up near the surface and have a little bit of green on that top side.

First of all, how should we store our potatoes going into fall?

If we have green on them, I learned as a graduate student many years ago, on this show, that if you have green potatoes, from Barry Jacobson, that you should peel it off, get rid of it, right?

Could you tell us a little bit about it, Mac, and why it's bad to eat a green potato peel and then how to store it?

- Well, the green itself is just chlorophyll, right?

But I think that if it's starting to grow, it's putting up some of those solanine-acy toxin compounds.

I don't think a green potato is gonna kill you, or you'd have to eat a lot of them, but it's not good for you.

And I'll trust that you got from Barry that peeling them is okay.

- Yep, peeling 'em is okay.

- Yeah, potatoes wanna be ideally cool, like very near freezing, but above freezing, and just the right humidity, kind of a medium humidity to humid, and they'll store for quite a long time.

But then, you know, one thing to think about when you're thinking about how to store vegetables is how do they do it at the grocery store?

And potatoes are left out at room temperature, of course, in the grocery store for weeks on end and they're fine, but they're in brown bags to block the light.

So we want to keep 'em in the dark, and so in a bag would be ideal.

You know, on your counter's fine.

I keep mine in the garage.

The garage is attached to the house, but unheated, and as long as they don't freeze, being colder and closer to freezing is better.

- Yep, how do you keep yours in the dark?

Just a box closed?

- Yeah, the garage is dark enough.

- Okay, great.

Thank you for that.

Okay, we have a caller from Columbia Falls.

Caller grew giant sunflowers.

They grew up to eight-feet tall.

How should he treat the head?

Leave it on the plant or cut it off and leave it on the bench?

Will seed from the plant grow giant sunflowers next year?

- [Nancy] So if she's really.

- I mean, yes, you can grow sunflowers with the seeds from those and I'm kind of a proponent of leaving the seeds on the head because birds also love to eat the sunflower seeds and it's a really nice source of food for a lot of our overwintering birds.

So I'm a fan of leaving it on there.

You can remove it if you want and, like, hang it up on a fence, but it's easy enough just to leave it on there.

- Yeah, I've been enjoying the chickadees in the garden picking up the sunflower heads in the morning lately.

- Yeah, it's a lot of fun to watch.

- It's a lot of fun to watch.

You can stand out there and sip your coffee and watch the chickadees.

(panelists chuckle) Okay, we have a caller from Helena and they have an apple tree and it keeps getting infested with strange white spots they can't get rid of and they want to find a way to stop this.

- So I'm not sure, like, if the white spots are on the leaves or if they're on the fruit themselves.

So this is a good example of maybe sending a sample or a photo to the Schutter Diagnostic Lab and we can have our, you know, awesome plant pathologist take a look at it to see what it could be.

Sometimes if you have, like, white patches and spots on fruit, it could be like, what I have seen too is, like, leaf coverage and stuff.

You may not get even reddening or color on the fruit peel itself.

If it's on the leaves, it could be a pathogen.

So it's hard to say kind of with that description.

It'd be good to have more information but probably reach out to Schutter Diagnostic Lab and send a sample.

- Mm-hm.

- Yep.

Great.

Okay, let's see, what else do we have here?

We got a bunch of questions in the queue.

Okay, we have a question for Uta.

Well, and others can jump in.

This caller grew both white onions and a yellow round onion and they've heard that white onions rot faster than yellow onions.

Is that true?

- [Nancy] Helps the panel answer the questions.

- I'm not sure.

I think it might depend more on the variety of the white or yellow onion than just the color of the onion itself.

I would say, not knowing a lot about those onions right now, the best way to improve storability is to make sure they're properly cured, much like, not exactly like Mac mentioned with potatoes, but we also need to cure onions.

So they wanna cure them in a warm and dry place, have them spread out far enough so that they really dry down.

And then after that, they can be stored in a cool and dry area.

And a lot of people like to braid the leaves together and have that, like, onion, what do you call, onion braid even?

- Yes.

- Yeah, or, you know, you just trim off the leaves and then keep them in a box or something, like, where there's some good airflow.

Yeah, but I would think that, you know, I guess there, and Mac, can probably speak to that, right?

There just some varieties that are, like, storage onions or onions made for storing versus fresh consumption.

- There are storage types of yellow and white and red onions and then more sweet fresh-eating types that will still store for several months, just not 10 months.

- Is that on, like, the label when you get some?

- Yeah, typically it'll be in the variety description their storability and I think it has to do probably with but also moisture content and if they can dry down in a timely fashion.

And that's one of the challenges in our climate here is having that time that the tops will fall over and then you want 'em to turn brown and if there's still green leaves, then there's too much moisture and you don't want to cut, you don't want to cut green leaves off of an onion.

You wanna wait for 'em to turn brown, and it might snow before that happens.

- So should we leave them in the, should we leave them in the garden now?

I have some great red and yellow onions.

- [Mac] And the tops have fallen or they're about to?

- The tops have fallen over but they're still quite green and it's really, I pulled my peas out next to 'em.

That's why I'm asking.

- I'd say it's fine to leave them until you have rain in the forecast.

- Okay.

- Or snow.

- [Tim] And then you can pull 'em out and get 'em dry.

- So you got another day or two.

(panelists laugh) - And if they're still green at that point, you know, put 'em on a table where they can dry out.

- Okay.

Yep, great.

Okay, thanks.

Okay, we have a whole bunch of other questions here.

We have a question from Bozeman.

Her beebalm plant developed a dusty mildew on it when it started flowering.

How can she organically control it?

You should just talk about powdery mildew in general, Abi.

This was an amazing year for powdery mildew.

- Yeah, so much.

- This was, and I'll let Uta talk about what the pathogen is, but in terms of one of the reasons that I've seen it be so bad this year, oftentimes the moisture, but also heat, 'cause powdery mildew is one of those interesting pathogens that's not like normal fungal pathogens.

But for control, I would say try and thin out your beebalm a little bit to improve air circulation.

That can also help if you are wanting to cut it back to the ground this year, dispose of the vegetation, instead of mulching it back into the leaf litter or the surface of the leaves there.

But increasing that airflow can be really helpful in reducing the likelihood for this.

And I'll let Uta chime in about, like, how powdery mildew works.

- (blows raspberry) Well, I mean, it's a fungal pathogen.

It's a pretty common, and, you know, it likes humidity but not necessarily like moisture in the So when you irrigate your lawn at the wrong time of day and you have, like, just this humid air around for a long time, that's when the powdery mildew really pops up.

But usually, like Abi said, it's like more a cosmetic issue.

It doesn't look pretty.

It's not like it's really gonna kill your plant.

In fact, this type of fungal pathogen lives on or, like, tries to keep its host alive.

So really a cosmetic issue.

And I think like a broad spectrum fungicide would do the trick.

Is it economical?

Probably depends on how much that shrub or whichever plant it's affecting is worth to you.

- And then in terms of, like, organic control, you can use copper-based products, is that correct?

- I think so.

- For powdery mildew.

That's a possibility.

But I try with kind of, like, reducing the environmental conditions that favor powdery mildew and try and reduce the likelihood of it to begin with.

And then usually by the time you have the pathogen on the leaves, it's usually too late to treat with a fungicide at that point anyways.

So for something like that, I would usually probably just wait until next year and apply a preventative measure, but try with reducing those environmental conditions that favor the pathogen.

- And with most any things this time of year, sanitation is a great way to set yourself up for success.

The powdery mildew will produce these spores that can last on an infected plant matter over the winter.

And so getting rid of the plant material that was infected should reduce the disease pressure for the next year, so to speak.

- So is it sufficient to compost it?

For example, I have a zucchini plant that has powdery mildew all over it.

It's still making beautiful zucchinis.

- [Mac] And good riddance at this point, right?

(panelists laugh) - You know, I've gotten smart over the years, Mac.

We have only two zucchini, one squash, one zucchini.

(panelists laugh) I have learned something.

But so the zucchinis don't get powdery mildew on 'em.

They look great as fruits.

It's just the leaves that are covered.

So if I put that into my compost this year, will I just be perpetuating my powdery mildew problem into the future?

- You can, yeah.

So oftentimes with any pathogen in a compost pile, my concern is usually if you have a really well-managed, active compost system that you are maintaining that internal temperature of 140 degrees, then that can kill pathogens.

But if your temperatures, if you don't think it's gonna get hot enough to kill that pathogen, I would probably avoid composting any sort of diseased material.

- Okay.

- I've got about a half an acre of squash and one observation is there's varieties that they're more or less resistant.

So some of 'em have got it pretty bad and other ones don't.

And we've always just composted all of it and we always get the powdery mildew.

So maybe that's the problem.

But, actually, it's really not a problem.

It doesn't come at the end of the year.

The squash are great.

I don't see it, I don't see a case for it being a problem really.

It's just that time of year.

- Yeah, if it's not impacting the part of the plant that you use, yeah, it's not an issue.

But if it's your flowers and stuff, I could see that being problematic.

- Okay.

We have a question from out in the Mondak, northeastern Montana, and this caller has heard that they haven't sold many soybeans or don't have many soybean contracts in North Dakota this year and they were wondering about the status of the other grain markets in Montana for wheat, lentils, and pulses and what it might look like in the future as we go, especially for wheat.

- Well, you know, the story for kind of a couple years has been pretty strong world yields for a lot of, you know, the common crops.

So that's corn, soybeans, wheat.

So we've kind of seen some similar things.

We had some kind of highs in like 2022-ish and we've seen kind of some gradual declines since then and it's been pretty consistent across, you know, whether you have soybeans or wheat.

And we do see some soybeans in Montana now kind of in that Sidney country where it's a little bit warm, a little bit lower in elevation.

So there is some of those grown in Montana, even if it's not a crop that we're probably known for.

And again, we've had some (indistinct).

Corn and soybean specifically are used a lot for cattle feed.

You know, we don't have as many cattle in the US right now, so less demand in terms of the usage.

So there hasn't been like a go-to crop that we could say, "Okay."

- [Nancy] And what's your question?

- "This crop, you know, I don't think it's making me enough money.

I should switch to this right now."

It's kind of been an across the board kind of story.

So it's been, you know, on kind of the sort of profitability side the last year or two, it's been great to have cattle and it's been not too great to have just about any of the crops, so.

- Yep.

You know, I have a barometer for that actually.

The number of questions that I got as an extension specialist this year that dealt with producing forage for cattle was really high.

And there were a lot of crop questions too, but you can tell that this year, people were really thinking about producing forages.

- [Mac] Sure.

- All right, we have the questions stacking up here.

Okay.

We have a question from Florence and this is about cherry trees and they said that their cherry trees were infected with south fly larvae and they tried to use neem oil and diatomaceous oil, I didn't know that was a thing, and wanted to know how to treat them early.

- I'm not sure what south fly is.

Often some of our common cherry pests are like western cherry fruit fly, spotted wing drosophila.

So I'm not sure what south fly is, but if it is a similar, like, drosophila type fly pest, timing of the treatment is really important.

Diatomaceous earth is I believe what they're saying.

I don't think there's a diatomaceous oil.

It's just made out of those diatom sea creatures.

It works for soft-bodied insects, but it's usually for ones that are going to be like crawling around that it impacts.

So I would say maybe confirm the identity of what that fly pest is and then check out our Western Ag Research Center's website and look under the cherry tree tab and they have really good schedules for treatment of common pests like spotted wing drosophila and western cherry fruit fly, including both organic and conventional options for spring and the timing of the year.

There's also a link to that on that website about the Utah Pests' Web, which is just a tracker for timing of common pest issues.

And that'll tell you what time of year, what stage you are for that pest, what time of year you wanna start applying those.

So keeping track of kind of what those pests are and what those resources are.

And if you're not sure kind of about this information or how to interpret it, reaching out to your county extension agent.

They're a wealth of knowledge and resources for you so that they can help you develop kind of an IPM plan or a management plan for your pests.

- Okay.

Yeah, okay, we have another followup question from Clancy.

He has a fruit orchard with apples and plums.

When should they stop irrigating to harden them off for the winter?

- So in an orchard setting, I probably would say once you, so this is kind of a debated topic in terms of hardening things off in the winter, but for this, I'd probably wait until like late September to start tapering the watering.

Usually probably waiting until you've started and are underway a majority of the harvest 'cause as long as the fruit production is still going, the energy from that plant is going into the production of that fruit and if you cut it back too early, that can impact the long-term health.

So for that, I'd probably wait until the end of September, early October, to start tapering watering.

- At this point, we don't want to encourage lots of lush new growth.

- Exactly.

- But we do want the plants to go into winter with water in the root system.

- Exactly.

- So we dial back now but then ramp it up again before freeze.

- Yeah, exactly.

Slow it down and then at the end of October, before the ground, before the hard freeze, make sure it's getting nice saturated root system going into winter.

- But that's also why we wouldn't wanna prune right now.

- Exactly.

- If you're feeling behind, that could stimulate new growth that's gonna be tender and not winter well.

- Okay, and that kind of leads into this caller's second question.

He has a grass mix of streambank wheatgrass, crested wheatgrass, and sheep fescue, and he wants to plant a dry land lawn.

And he was asking when should he plant it this fall?

And it might be better to wait till the spring or you think you could get away with it still?

- [Abi] You could maybe get away with it.

What's the location?

- That was in Clancy.

- Do you know what zone that is?

- Between Butte and Helena.

(panelists laugh) - So the goal for seeding grasses is, ideally, for cool season grasses, you wanna give them about 45 days minimum before frost when you're seeding.

Some varieties will germinate really quickly.

So you can get varieties that will germinate within a week or so.

So if you can get a variety that germinates quickly and get a few weeks, like at least three weeks, before the ground freezes, you can overwinter that turf successfully.

So if you're gonna seed in the fall, do it now or as soon as possible.

And you may need to over seed any sections that didn't do as well in the spring and, again, wait until after the snow is gone and those soil temperatures are above 50 degrees Fahrenheit for that germination again for cool season grasses.

- Okay, thank you.

Okay, we have a caller from Three Forks and the caller is killing morning glory by treating it with 30% vinegar plus detergent and salt.

This person would like to know if it's gonna sterilize their soil or cause issues.

- Yes.

- You're not killing the morning glory.

You're just- - Yeah, you're just seasoning it with salt and vinegar.

- Seasoning it.

- So morning glory, and I think we're talking field bindweed here, is a plant that has a root system underground that may go as deep as 20 feet.

- [Abi] Wow.

- And it's a huge network of underground roots and you can kill the top of it, you can kill the top of it with herbicide over and over and over again, and the weed will continue to come back over.

It's a perennial plant.

It is very difficult to remove.

In organic situations, tillage every three weeks for two years was basically the only way we could get rid of it in organic situation.

That's Zach Miller's research up in Corvallis.

30% vinegar with detergent and salt, and if you're spot spraying that area, you could definitely have a negative impact on the soil by spraying that in that area, from salt, from different types of molecules that are made for detergent to take the dirt off of your clothes, that causes issues.

And then having 30% vinegar is also a lot of acid.

You may acidify the soil in that general location.

- I'd say the salt would be the biggest- - Yeah, salting the earth kind of- - Salt would be the biggest issue.

- 30% vinegar will burn the tops off pretty much anything, you know, but you're not gonna kill Canada thistle or bindweed.

You'll turn it brown for a couple weeks.

- Yeah, so I would probably avoid doing that.

I'd try the tillage strategy that Tim mentioned instead.

But for something like that, the negative impact to your soil without any effect on the bindweed or the morning glory, I would say it'd be worth not going that route just to protect your soil and anything else you might wanna plant in there in the future.

- Yep.

(Nancy speaks indistinctly) Okay.

We have a question, and I believe this says Havre, how soon would it be best to transplant white radishes?

And the caller wants to know when would be the time to do so?

- Wouldn't usually think about transplanting radishes.

That's usually a direct seeded crop and a radish can grow, you know, depending on how big they're gonna get and most of the white radishes I think of being like the long Japanese style ones that maybe take 60 days, but a red, round radish could grow in 30 days and, you know, what's the harm in trying now?

You might- - Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

- You might be able to harvest.

- You might get some.

- Yeah, by the end of the year.

- Some of them may even actually overwinter 'till next year.

- The days are rapidly getting shorter and it's gonna snow, but you can grow a radish in 30 days.

- If not, you just cut it off and you eat the sprouts.

- Yeah, they taste good.

- Who needs the radish?

- But I would just stick seed in the ground.

No need to transplant.

- Yeah, some excellent pesto and green salsa made out of radish tops actually.

- Has a little zing to it.

- Yeah, it has a little bit of zing.

It's pretty good.

Okay, we have a caller from Bozeman and she just saw ants outside of her house which flew off.

- Ooh.

- Goodnight.

- She is concerned they might be carpenter ants.

She captured several in a jar.

How can she get them identified, director of the Schutter Lab?

- Hmm.

- So do you mind if I jump in with these ants are flying?

- Go ahead.

- So right now is often the time where a lot of our ants are mating.

And so the winged adults, those are the winged adults that mate at this time of year, and then they drop their wings and then they go and start off a new colony.

So that's why you're seeing these flying ants right now.

I'll let you talk about Schutter.

- Yeah, like Tim pointed out, the Schutter Diagnostic Lab would be a great place to get those ants identified and so it's great that they captured some and they have them in a jar that's hopefully sealed.

So we usually ask that you bring us dead specimens.

So if you could put that jar in the freezer for a couple days and then bring it in on Tuesday, that will be perfect, and our insect diagnostician, Chloe Rice, will have a look and let you know and maybe she'll come in a few weeks and talk about them here on the show.

- Yep.

So we had another question that was followed up about a ag alert that we wrote actually.

So Montana ag alerts, if you are not subscribed to 'em, you can find them on ipm.montana.edu or just go to the website for "Montana Ag Live" and there's a link there.

And they had a question about Palmer amaranth being found within the state of Montana.

And so we found Palmer amaranth in Montana this year three times now.

This would be, we found one plant last year.

We found four plants in 2022 in Montana.

And we're really on this early detection rapid response for Palmer amaranth.

Palmer amaranth is an amaranth species, kind of like a red root pigweed, but it's a little bit different and it's evolved a ton of herbicide resistance and could potentially cost us millions of dollars in our ag industry.

So we've been really trying to be good about finding new populations that show up in the state of Montana.

And with all the precipitation north and east of here, there's been three instances of Palmer amaranth that have jumped up.

One was in Hill County.

A great constituent with a sharp eagle eye spotted it just in a field, ended up tying it to a custom combining unit, went to the other fields that they combined and found two more plants that were associated with it.

Hasn't made seed.

We found one plant in Fort Benton this week that was almost six-feet tall.

So be looking for the funny pigweeds that are out there.

And then one more instance of Palmer amaranth showing up in Moore, Montana, this week associated with the bird feeders.

And I got an email this week that actually came from colleagues in Washington State University, and Washington state's also on the lookout for Palmer amaranth, and they found their third population of Palmer amaranth in a Safeway parking lot associated with bird seed, Safeway signature bird seed, that was spread in the parking lot and was filled with weed seeds.

The population in Moore was also associated with contaminated bird seed too.

So we have a lot of different vectors showing up, but stakeholders have been really good in the state about spotting the Palmer amaranth and we still haven't had confirmed seed be produced in a field yet.

So great (indistinct).

- So what should I do, if anybody watching tonight is wondering about that funny pigweed in their yard or in their field, what should they do?

- Yeah, so this week in the Schutter Diagnostic Lab, there were a lot of pigweed samples that came in.

So if you find this really big funny pigweed that's like feet tall, seems to be just flowering, is a little bit out of place, call your county agent, get it submitted to the Schutter Diagnostic Lab and get it identified and we can really help you contain those populations.

We'd rather not let it get spread out into our cropping systems in Montana.

- So you mentioned bird seed was the source of some of these.

Can you get, like, certified weed-free bird seed or is there anything- - No, there are no regulations that I know of that govern bird seed.

So you get the dirtiest of the dirty things that show up in commercial bird feed.

There was a study that was done and they took a hundred bags of commercially available bird seed in the US that they just went to the store and bought.

97% of them had herbicide-resistant So 97 out of a hundred bags.

That included kochia, mare's tail, pigweeds, and all kinds of things.

So whenever I look at bird seed, I kind of go, "Ooh, that's dirty business right there."

And I think we should all keep that in mind.

So keep an eye out around our bird feeders.

- And then do the birds potentially spread those seeds around too?

Like, wow.

- Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

It's very interesting.

But I've asked and there are no, there is no state regulation that's governs bird seed and I don't know if there's any state in the United States that has regulations that govern bird seed.

- Are there even labels that say, like, made in Montana where you might at least keep it to regional weeds or?

- No, I don't think so.

- Okay.

- You just have to grow your own sunflowers.

- Yeah, grow your own sunflowers as the caller was earlier.

Yep, that's why I grow a little bit of extra safflower sometimes.

- Okay.

- All right.

So we have, well, we have a followup question on watermelons.

And the Bozeman caller wants to plant watermelons and wants to have the best success at growing them.

What are the top five steps in order to do so?

- Genetics.

So pick a small variety with as early of a maturity date.

So this is a 70-day hybrid watermelon.

A good start.

Don't let it run out of fertility or nutrients.

Appropriate timing, and that's a gamble.

So, you know, late May, early June and cross your fingers that it doesn't get frozen.

And then all the plastic tricks to retain heat both in soil and the air.

So this was with plastic mulch on the ground, black plastic mulch on the ground, and a covering, a row cover or in a high tunnel, and all those things and then cross your fingers for a warm summer.

Well watered, well fertilized.

Don't ever let it stop growing.

- All right.

- That's all the tricks.

It's a difficult crop.

- Yes.

- I wanna know about those cucumbers while we're- - Oh, yes.

- At this stage.

- We have this nice long, is this the Armenian cucumber?

- Yeah, that's an Armenian cucumber.

You know, it's that time of year when you leave your pickup truck unlocked and somebody might leave cucumbers in it and they're gonna be huge, right?

Like monster zucchini, and everybody's like, "What I do with all my zucchini?"

And I'm like, "Well, you could just pick 'em when they're smaller and then you wouldn't have so many."

So, you know, that's an ongoing debate.

But this is a cucumber too.

This is a really cool variety called Picolino and it's just, it's genetics.

This is as big as they get.

It's a snacking cucumber.

They're seedless, they're really thin skinned, and they get about five inches long and they don't really, they don't get any longer, they'll get fatter and then they get kind of hollow and they're not as good.

So pick 'em when they're small.

But you gotta know your variety, right?

Because there are perfectly great cucumbers that do have the genetic potential to get a little bit bigger than this, and then there's these guys.

Super cool, Armenian striped cucumber.

And this is the size you harvest 'em at and they're really sweet.

They're really good.

- Cool.

- Yeah, just a fun little, fun food for thought about when to pick your squash and your cucumbers.

If you pick 'em when they're smaller, you won't be so overwhelmed by 'em.

(Abi chuckles) - Yeah.

Abi, you have a webworm display here in front of us that we should talk about.

- Yeah, so I was getting a few questions over the past few weeks about all of these little webs covering the branches of trees as you drive down.

This is a chokecherry that has fall webworm webbing on it.

So this is a caterpillar that's a native moth in Montana.

And, again, chokecherry is also a native plant here in Montana.

So this is a natural part of the lifecycle of these pests.

If you have a lot of these, it can be a little unsightly as you see a lot of webbing.

But usually for issues like this, the timing of the year is a factor.

So for these types of pests, fall webworm specifically, they're usually attacking those trees later on in the growing season.

So usually like late July into August.

And at that time, the tree has often made enough of the energy that it needs and taking it to its root systems.

So it rarely impacts the overall long-term health.

If you're trying to manage this, it can be tough with pesticides and that's because the webbing can interrupt the pesticide application and protect some of those caterpillars in there.

And at this time of year, the caterpillars have dropped out of the webbing and they're pupating either in the leaf litter or the soil or loose bark.

But usually for this time of year, I wouldn't worry too much about this type of pest.

It works, you know, hand in hand with these native plants and they also are food for our native wildlife like birds.

But it can be unsightly.

If you have a really young tree, you might consider treatment and you'd use a BT-based product because, make sure it's a caterpillar-specific and that can be a helpful control option.

But if you're seeing a lot of those trees and they have this webbing, that is fall webworm and the caterpillars are no longer in the webs.

- [Mac] Is that harmful to the tree?

- It can be if it's a really young tree or a really stressed tree, but for the most part, because of how late it is in the year, it doesn't impact the overall health.

So these trees are gonna drop their leaves in a few weeks anyways, so it's not impacting them too much.

- All right, so we just have just a little bit of time left.

We have a quick, quick answer from, question from Knox in Montana.

Caller has a pear tree.

When should it be harvested and how ripe should the pears be?

And then the caller's second part, which I'll quickly answer before we go back to pears, is they also have lots of pine seeds on their property.

What kind of pine tree is it?

Around Noxon, I would probably guess it's ponderosa pine, and that'd be pretty common.

So you have 30 seconds, Mac.

What should we do with our pears?

- Pears are not quite ripe yet in Bozeman, but what you wanna do with pears, they're not gonna get soft, mushy ripe on the tree.

How you know when a pear is ready to harvest is you lift up on the fruit and the stem will remain attached, but it will break off where the stem on the fruit attaches to the stem on the tree.

It'll break off nice and clean just by lifting up on the fruit.

So wait for that, and then bring 'em indoors.

And depending on the variety of pear, the type of pear, you're gonna ripen them indoors at room temperature and when they start to start smell, they're good.

- All right.

Thanks, Mac, for the quick answer on your pears.

Thank you all for joining tonight.

Jack will be back next week to host and we look forward to having all your questions answered.

We have a bunch of questions we didn't get to.

We'll get to 'em next week.

Thank you all for watching, and enjoy your week.

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