You Hello and thanks for joining us for another episode of Mid American gardener.

I'm your host, Tanisha Spain, and joining me in the studio today are two of my pals here to talk about all things green and growing.

So first, we'll have them introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about them, and then off we go.

So Chuck, we'll start with you.

Okay, I am Chuck Voigt, not so recently retired from the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois.

I did vegetable crops and herbs there, but in my undergraduate career, I did just about everything else in horticulture.

So we're kind of a generalist, really.

We love that too.

You can answer just about anything, can't you?

I'll try.

Okay, thanks, Phil.

I'm Phil Nixon.

I'm just barely less recently retired extension.

I think I've been eight years.

You've been nine or something, but this is 10th.

Okay, well, a little bit less than barely, but close.

I'm a Bug Guy.

Entomologist can answer insect questions, and we'll talk about those today.

And boy, are we going to quiz right off the top of the show.

We're going to start with my horrifying experience.

So, okay, I'm a little dramatic, obviously.

So right outside my bathroom window every morning, I throw open the curtains and let the daylight in, and I just saw just this pulsing movement on some leaves yesterday, and immediately shot Phil an email and said, What in the world is going on outside my window?

So we have got I took a video on my phone, so bear with because it's not the greatest.

But here are the little critters that are just decimating these leaves right outside my window.

Yikes.

So Phil, please just take it away and break it down.

Get them what these are fall web worms.

And this is the second generation of fall web worms, because unlike the tidal or their name, their common name, they have a spring generation as well.

So they can be a spring fall web Fall, Spring, whatever they're in the spring too, usually in June.

And then I always associate in Illinois that second generation is usually going great guns right in the middle of a State Fair, and we just ended that.

So middle of August is common.

When they're new, they're around until the middle of September or so, and they feed in groups, the adult moths, which are white and about three quarters of an inch long.

Of course, fly at night.

You don't normally see them, but, but they will lay their eggs in groups on the leaves, and when they hatch out, first of all, after any good Caterpillar first eats its egg shell, which these things do, that's their first meal.

And then they then they start feeding on the upper on the under surface of one leaf, and they'll take that out and pretty well eat all of that and and then the as they grow up, grow larger, they they cover more leaves, and they spin a communal web in which they live.

And that web is great for shedding rain and keeping parasitic wasps and flies from feeding on them, and also birds from coming in and eating them.

And so, so they get along, all in there, all in there.

And what they'll do is they'll spin the webbing over a few leaves and maybe a two or three foot of branch, and then eat all of those.

Typically, the colony size is anywhere from, I've seen ones as low as 35 or 40, up to pushing 200 150 160 somewhere around in there, actually did some research, right?

Counted number of birds in this so as part of the part of the data I was collecting.

So, so, yeah, they are, they are communal.

That way is the tree in any danger depends on the type time of year.

The first generation, which occurs in June, does cause harm to a tree.

Second generation does not in fact, what will happen is, is any spring feeding insect on leaves that do a considerable amount of damage to many any plant, but particularly trees.

If you think about it, a tree has got to build up a certain amount of energy reserves to go through the winter and to set leaves in the spring.

And we can do I've seen graphs where they have the energy level coming in in the spring, and when they when the leaves come out in the spring, that energy level dips down, because it took a lot of energy and work to do that, and then it starts building.

Up as those leaves are picking up making sugars from photosynthesis, bringing in light and carbon dioxide and water and making making sugars and so on, putting out oxygen as a wasted byproduct, in their point of view, which we, of course, we need to breathe.

Yeah, that's a waste product for them.

But at any rate, that will build up to a certain start building up.

But if you get a spring defoliation, then that dips back down to to re foliate takes more energy, drops it well below what it was before, and research has shown it never makes it back up.

Okay, on the other side of a coin, if they go through and get have leaves and are in good shape until roughly the first of July through June.

You can think of it as being Fourth of July, Independence Day, if you don't have bug problems till then, then anything when it happens there afterwards is probably not going to be a major factor.

If it takes all the leaves off, the tree, will relief, but it still build up a bunch of energy in that, in that May and June, into where it's it's doing better.

Okay, so even it has to relief.

That's a problem.

Now, from a horticultural standpoint, if those new leaves occur later in the season, such as within just a few weeks of frost, they won't have sufficient time to harden off fall, and you'll lose those leaves to frost, and you may lose some bud development, things of this nature.

So it's a horticultural problem little bit, if a relief too late.

But generally, when you're getting into August, September, and the leaves are eaten off a tree, what we look at is the energy produced by a leaf as wild as it's early and young and pliable and soft and light green, it's producing a lot of photosynthesis, doing a lot of photosynthesis, producing a lot of sugars, producing a lot of oxygen.

Once you get to about the first of July, they tend to get the leaves tend to get stiffer.

They tend to get darker green, and the amount of photosynthesis they're doing drops way off.

And so really, what they do from the first of July through September, or whenever a leaf drop occurs, is relatively small to what they produce, energy wise, in April, May and June, or particularly May and June, and so insect damage in the latter part of the season isn't really a major factor, okay?

And we're going to come back to you, and we're going to talk about control.

In just a second, you get your we go, GB photo up there too.

It's a major cosmetic problem, yeah, as you noticed, when you as I noticed the curtains are closed in that bathroom because I don't even want to see it.

So we're going to come back and talk about control.

But you brought some things in that are getting chewed on a bit too.

Yes.

Well, I knew I was going to be on with with you, so I thought I would bring in some, some neat stuff.

Yeah, you can look at the at the leaf miner on Baroque, and then we'll look at this one in a minute.

Okay, but that's been by my driveway for quite a while.

My question to you is, when you see lots of oak seedlings, they seem to get this like crazy.

Now, is that because they're down at eye level, and is the same thing happening in the top of my relatively mature bur oak tree, or is there something about being close to ground level that makes them more attractive for feeding by them?

My purely scientific answer is, I don't know, okay, noted, however, over my years of experience, I have noticed that that to be the case.

And it's unusual to see many see this damage very high in the tree.

And in fact, this is caused by a very small moth.

It's oak leaf.

Minor is what we call it.

And the moth itself, the adult moth is probably, it's not even more than a half an inch long.

I mean, they're little, probably three, eight, somewhere around in there.

And what I found in over my career is that small moths don't tend to fly very high.

So my graduate work, some of the other graduate students in the lab, they were working on on on a small moth that a tip moth on Pine.

And what they found out is, was that once the pine got over about 12 feet high, it didn't have any problem from that insect anymore.

The insect didn't fly any higher than typically, about eight or nine feet.

Interesting, and it's a small moth, and I think that's much, very much the case here.

I mean, if you could get the pine tree up to 12 feet, you might lose lower branches, but you never have a problem.

And the main problem there was it was it fed on the tip and caused the tip to die.

Which means you got a branching tree which was short and not tall, and certainly, from a forest standpoint, did not make good pine boards.

Okay, too many knot holes in it from a branches coming out.

So, so I think you're right.

I think that that generally, these small moths don't fly very high.

Now the fall web worm, which is a bigger moth, closer to an inch long.

Commonly, the first time you see those at the very top of a 6080, foot tree.

And commonly, I will tell people in that situation, you are the only one seeing that damage because you've seen it.

Your typical person knows what your sidewalk cracks look like.

You don't have a clue what the top your tree looks like because you never look up.

And if you want to do that, just walk down the street sometimes and see how many people you see looking up.

Those are the ones that are stumbling over.

The sidewalk cracks.

Okay, so we look we look down, or we look forward, we don't look up.

Now, what's eating this guy like a trivia game?

This is an evening primrose.

The flowers open in the evening and then kind of close up again at daybreak.

I thought this one was was interesting in that you can see where the leaves came out early and got tough.

Then the Japanese beetles came out and started chewing like mad.

And then as we got up to the top, the Japanese beetles are kind of getting through their cycle.

And so the very top is, is, is fairly clear again, but they're just just decimated while, while they're out and doing their their normal thing.

But now, do they prefer these more tender?

Or, Why did, why do you think, well, that that's, that's what I'm getting, because these bottom ones are, aren't that they're that they're that they're tougher, that they probably develop some anti herbivory, chemical structures in there, that they kind of discourage feeding, where these were young and tender And good, yeah, because there's clearly a preference there, yeah.

Well, what it comes down to is, is that as a leaf ages, it produces more wax on this on the cuticle surface.

And so as you can just look at those right now, and you can see how much glossier those bottom leaves are than the ones farther up, they have more wax deposition on them, which puts makes them more resistant to water loss, and it also makes them more resistant to insect feeding.

And so you have a situation that way.

The other thing is, Chuck's completely right in that as a leaf ages, it produces more secondary compounds which act as insecticides or non feed and type chemicals.

And so, yeah, the odor, if a leaf gets to be a little bit older, that's that's a real advantage associated with it.

You can see that one they had, they ate it a little, but it was like, yeah.

And with something better than this, and with those being holes in the leaves, like in the center, that's probably slug damage rather than a caterpillar likelihood, slugs will tend to eat holes in the leaves.

Caterpillars normally eat from the edges in so do beetles.

And so it could be Japanese beetle damage up on it.

There are some other beetles that get on them and and many of our flowers, and I think including primroses, there's a there, one of the nymphala Butterflies actually feeds as a caterpillar on them.

If I'm not mistaken, How tall do those get?

Do they get pretty tall, fairly tall.

Yes, it's, it's, if it's where you want it, it's a flower.

It's, you know, Wildflower.

They also can be kind of weedy, gotcha, because they're, they're a little more prolific than some people might like.

But do you do any type of control methods around these or just kind of let nature do what nature does?

Yeah, there, there were, it's, it's just survival of the fittest.

They the it.

They are interesting when they, when they come out.

It's not this one, but there's another species of this that, that I grew once they gave us seeds up in up in Michigan at an event, but those open in like seconds, and so you can, you can look at them, and it's like a time lapse photograph, only.

It's happening in real time, which, which is kind of fun.

The other thing associated with that is any insecticide, except for, say, Bacillus thuringiensis, christoche, BTK, would be a problem to any pollinators coming to those flowers, insecticide wise.

So the BT is only going to hit caterpillars, but then you can easily have beetles feeding on this, which, if you spray with BT, they'll kind of go, thanks for a shower.

I'll keep eating.

Thank you.

So, but so generally, yeah, something that's herbaceous will will normally grow out of being attacked.

And if, and if they're hit too hard, then.

And they'll kind of hang on with some lower leaves and come back next year if they're a perennial.

How has your garden done with insects this year?

With it being hot and dry, what were, what were the growing conditions like?

There's two parts to this.

The one part is the garden hasn't done spectacularly well, mainly because of the gardener.

Insect wise, it might have been better than than average.

Okay, I hadn't.

I hadn't grown squash in a while, and so the squash seemed to they didn't have cucumber beetles when they were babies, and they've grown, and I don't see any Hey, and you put them in early.

I did not put them in super early.

I was going to say Jennifer, her.

She was talking about her work around was she put her squash in exceptionally late, not on purpose.

It was just life got in the way.

But she avoided that.

Yeah, and I would normally do that with zucchini.

I wait until late June or so, so by the time they're up, the vine borer has, has, yeah, one of our recommendations with squash vine borer is to is to wait until you have your have your crops such that that it doesn't start vining until the end of June, early July, because the moth only flies through June and then stops, so it's not laying any eggs after that.

And so you can actually have with zucchini, particularly being such a short season vegetable, you can easily get along with with planting for a for a summer crop, and avoid the squash vine borer all together, right?

And they're so susceptible because it's a bush plant that doesn't right, doesn't root at every node, like the Vining, right, right, exactly, and even.

And the squash bug over with the other major pest of that plant over winters as an adult.

And if there's nothing in there for it to eat during, during May, it kind of goes, well, let's go, guys, we got to fly somewhere.

There was something to eat, and so they're not there either.

When you're when your squash comes up, gotcha and it's late, okay, all right, let's do another one in your Okay, in your picture of surprises, okay.

These were growing kind of close to where the primrose was.

These are try to scantia.

I'm trying not to say wandering dude.

Now wandering dude.

They're wandering dudes, wandering dude.

They have so it's a pretty color of of blue or whatever.

If it's an optical illusion, that it looks blue to our eyes, whatever, they're not very big and so not super showy, the plant is, is just an invasive pain.

You know, I've taken responsibility for introducing ground ivy to the farm, which is my shame.

My mother brought these in on purpose, and they just see themselves all over and are real pests, probably not as as voracious as ground ivy, because they are an annual and they pull exceptionally.

That's a neat thing.

They pull easy, real easy.

Yeah, it's kind of fun to weed.

Oh yeah, yeah.

It's like, in moderation, yeah.

Every time you feel too bad about pulling these, go over and pull a lamb's quarter and strain your back and then come back and do these where just a couple fingers, does it?

Yeah?

Yeah.

It's so I mean, it's got a pretty little flower on it, but I could see it, it does, but it gets away really easily.

And, you know, there's some house plant rattlesnakes and Sabrina's that that don't over, you know, don't over winter and seed themselves outside.

So you might want to, so do these grow up, or do they kind of crawl?

Because I'm thinking of my only experience.

They start out growing up, and then they sprawl, gotcha so they kind of do both, and then they rooted every joint.

They rooted every joint.

That's why it's a great house plant.

Is because they're super easy to root.

But it's outside.

They can do a number on outside.

They they can, they can fairly quickly make you regret you want to do the last one, sure.

Okay, this is obviously a mint square stems.

Leaves look something like something like basil, something like Coleus to other mints.

This is perilla.

If you know Asian cooking, it's called shiso.

I was just going to ask if you can eat it.

It is, yeah, it's a it's a little different.

For a little different aroma.

So it would be something that you might have to get used to, or, you know, it's pretty good.

This one grew at my grandpa voids place and was by the pump in front of the house, and just they reseed like crazy.

When people would call me on the phone and said, my basil is reseeding and really causing me all kinds of problems, I would say normally you may have perilla, because perilla is a much stronger reseeder than basil will ever be.

Basil is pretty easy to control, even if you let it go to seed pretty drastically.

So this was, was always there at grandpa's house.

Unfortunately, the house is gone, and that's been cleaned up to the point where I don't believe it exists on that on that farmstead anymore.

Somehow some of them got planted.

I think Grandpa was was big for carrying things around and slipping them in.

Would you start today?

Would this go good in soups?

How do you guys use them?

I don't use it at all.

It's just a nostalgia plant for me because of the connection to grandpa and his stuff.

And I don't see grandma using it to any great degree.

So I think this happened.

And if I'm not mistaken, it was, it was purpler, because there, there are some deep purple ones, and then some, some that also have kind of frilly leaves that you might sort of confuse with, like some of the roughly basil's.

And then it may have done a little genetic drifting towards the wild type back, which is a nice, spicy and nice perhaps anymore, yeah, yeah, I don't know it.

It has a definite aroma, but it's not like overpowering, like a basil or something else.

Don't have to whip something up.

It's amazing, because even in a even in a drought year like last fall, they just barely started to flower.

When they got frosted, they receded like like crazy.

Apparently, doesn't take them more than a few hours to mature seed, I don't know, but so it's not something that you need to have a lot of.

And if you have it, you want to clean it up so it doesn't it doesn't oversee, keep it in check.

But I have kept it going.

It has come close to being lost, because it gets it doesn't compete especially well with with a lot of the other things, not like your typical mint, right, or spearmint, at least, right?

It pretty much only, only propagates by seed.

So okay, well, thank you very much, Chuck, we've got about five minutes left.

Phil, I want to make sure we get to the pictures that you sent over there on the screen.

Did you want to talk about this guy?

Well, this is a close up of the fall web worm.

There are two races, by the way, the fall web room is what we were talking about.

Is outside.

Tanisha is bedroom bathroom window, okay, and But at any rate, this is a black headed race, which, as you can see, has a black head and black spots down the back.

Almost looks to have a black stripe band down the back sometimes.

And then there's a red headed race, which is the one Tanisha has, and it has a red head and no dark spots down the back.

But they used to get up to about an inch and a half long, very fuzzy caterpillars.

And just wanted to show you what they look like close up.

Okay, one thing, one Moffat, you may start seeing very numerous in the next few weeks.

Typically, in my photos, I see them coming in around the 10th of September.

This is spotted beet web worm, the adult stage.

It's a relatively small moth.

This is on on goldenrod, which is Bloomington, same time as the moth is out typically about an inch and a half long, inch and a half wings, wingspan, so they're small, but they're very numerous.

And one of the reasons they're very numerous is, as you might guess, they feed on beets.

Well, as I ain't got no beets in my garden, well what you do have is, is that, if you've noticed around the the soybean fields have big, tall weeds growing up in the middle of them that are very slender and thin, these are actually amaranth plants of various types that have gotten resistant to the to the herbicides that are used to control the weeds in the soybeans.

And this insect is a larva feeds on amaranth and other pigweeds.

Pigweed is is a common name for the amaranth, but there's a whole bunch of different species of amaranth that are out there, and these feed on it, and so this is why you see so many of them around.

So you wonder why, I don't remember ever seeing as many of this kind of moth you didn't All right, one that's out in the middle of the summer, and it's still out in August now, is the green Clover worm.

And this is a couple of color.

Phases of it next to each other, and green clover, wind and larvae feed on legumes, red clover and also soybeans, to a certain extent.

And so we will get huge clouds of these.

In fact, my wife's got a couple hummingbird feeders up in our yard.

We've had a couple nests of hummingbirds develop.

We got probably about 10 or 12 baby little hummingbirds running around, flying around.

And at night, these things are just clustered on the on the on the feeders, feeding up the soaking up the sugar water.

Got a few feeders up.

So now I'll be looking so you may have dark moths all over your feeder at night.

Insect, show, yes, yes.

Well, thank you guys.

We're out of time.

It went fast, didn't it?

It always goes fast when you're talking about insects.

Bugs are fun.

Bugs are fun.

Ish, even outside your window.

Thank you guys so much for coming in.

Thank you guys so much for watching.

If you've got questions, send them in to us at your garden@gmail.com, or search for us on socials, just look for Mid American gardener, and we will see you next time.

Good night.

You.