Chad Cummings_Weed ID_MG.School_2.21.2024

Summary

Chad Cummings presents an educational and entertaining talk on weed identification, organized by the Dallas County Master Gardener Association. He discusses his background and passion for the topic, highlighting the significance of weeds in agriculture and gardening. Cummings offers witty anecdotes and scientific insights into various plant species, demonstrating how different weeds can be identified and managed. The presentation is rich with practical advice, interactive elements, and draws connections between weeds and broader ecological systems.

Highlights

• Chad Cummings uses humor and personal anecdotes to make weed identification interesting. 😂
• Seed dormancy is a fascinating aspect of weed biology and survival. 🌱
• Interactive hands-on sessions help participants connect theoretical knowledge to real-world application. 🤲
• Understanding agricultural landscapes is key to identifying and managing invasive species. 🌄
• Unexpected climate and weather changes can alter weed growth and infestation patterns. 🌦

Key Takeaways

• Weeds are simply plants in the 'wrong' place. It's all about perspective! 🌱
• Seed dormancy allows weeds to survive and spread across seasons. 🌿
• Certain weeds are closely related to our essential crops, like quinoa to common lambs quarters. 🌾
• Identifying the proper time and method for weed control is crucial for effective management. ⏰
• Weed seeds can remain viable for decades, waiting for the right conditions to sprout. ⏳

Overview

Chad Cummings, a passionate educator and weed specialist, offers a presentation that merges humor with scientific knowledge, making the subject of weed identification captivating. He introduces the concept of weeds as plants that are out of place, encouraging viewers to see the plant kingdom from a gardener's perspective.

A central part of the talk focuses on seed dormancy and its role in weed propagation. Cummings explains that while many cultivated plants have had this trait bred out, weeds retain it, enabling them to thrive under diverse and sometimes harsh conditions. This biological insight offers practical implications for managing garden and agricultural environments.

The session ends with a hands-on activity that reinforces learning by inviting participants to identify and discuss various plants they've found. This interactive approach not only solidifies Cummings' teachings but also empowers attendees to apply their newfound knowledge in their own gardening or agricultural practices.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 15:00: Introduction and Basic Concepts Thank you all. I want to highlight a section of examples we will review in class. Katarina brought a pot of weed, a joke some may recognize. Please, no need to reveal if you do, as we aren't a legal entity here. Before delving into concepts, let me introduce myself.
• 15:00 - 40:00: Characteristics of Weeds The chapter introduces Chad Cummings, who is leading the discussion on the characteristics of weeds. Mitchell Kel, an intern assisting Chad, also contributed to the presentation. Although he is not present due to class commitments, Chad acknowledges Mitchell's help. The focus of the chapter is presumably on the detailed exploration of the traits and types of weeds.
• 40:00 - 70:00: Understanding Herbicides and Pesticides The chapter begins with a personal narrative from someone living in Bonham, Texas, mentioning geographical clarification about the place relative to Grayson County. The narrator recounts moving to Texas nine years ago with his wife, who is a veterinarian. The wife worked significantly in the veterinary field, including serving as the director of a veterinary technician program at a local college.
• 70:00 - 120:00: Identifying Common Weeds This chapter discusses real estate and land values with a focus on Fanning and Grayson County. The speaker recounts their experience with buying land and the challenges of moving due to high land prices. Despite getting a job in Grayson County, they decided not to move due to affordability issues compared to what they own in Fanning County.
• 120:00 - 165:00: Management of Invasive Trees and Shrubs The chapter titled 'Management of Invasive Trees and Shrubs' appears to touch on personal anecdotes mixed with a broader discussion on managing invasive plant species. It mentions a delay in taking action on certain management strategies for unmentioned reasons. The speaker shares personal details about living in Grayson County, the schooling of his daughters, and their family's connection to Texas and Oklahoma, suggesting a blend of personal life contexts with professional insights. The narrative hints at the speaker's diverse professional background, which might be relevant to the management discourse.
• 165:00 - 180:00: Best Practices for Pesticide Use This chapter discusses the essential background and expertise required for working in pesticide use, particularly in agricultural settings. The speaker shares their personal career journey at Corva Agroscience/Dow, emphasizing the importance of understanding insects, small grains, and range and pasture. The unique combination of these skills, along with their educational background in Agronomy and Crop Science, leading to a master's in Weed Science, highlights the interdisciplinary nature of this field.

Chad Cummings_Weed ID_MG.School_2.21.2024 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 thank you all so uh I do want to point out that there is a nice little section of uh examples that we're going to look at here in class uh I did bring a pot of weed see what I did there actually Katarina brought a pot of weed for those of you that might get that reference don't raise your hands if you do we're not any uh legal legal entity here so uh but I do want to introduce myself and before I get started I did want to also
• 00:30 - 01:00 point out uh that Mitchell Kel is an intern working with me for the fall or sorry the spring now and uh he's going to be in every couple of days but he isn't actually here on Wednesdays because he does still take class during the semester to so he's out studying right now but uh he did help me with some of the generation of this presentation so I wanted to give him props on that for sure all right so just a brief introduction to myself uh my name is Chad Cummings I am Chad Cummings
• 01:00 - 01:30 uh live over in bonum Texas for those of you knowledgeable of North Texas you're like but that's not Grayson County right yeah yeah but it's okay because you know we can have fun up there too uh we actually moved down to Texas about nine years ago now my wife and I and my wife is a veterinarian and so she actually worked for quite a while down here in Wy uh at Colin College and was the director of the vettech program down there for a while uh but here in the last year and a
• 01:30 - 02:00 half or two years ago she started back into practice uh she practices in bonum and so when I got the job over in grayon County they said okay so when are you guys moving to Grayson County well we live on a house in 20 acres in fanning County and if anybody knows real estate market or knows land prices I said if you can find me 20 acres in a house that's really nice in Grayson County for the same amount of money that we're spending in fanning County I'm a go for that I'll come right over needless to
• 02:00 - 02:30 say two years later we have not made that move yet for for whatever reason I can't figure it out uh but no we have a great time up there our daughters are in Bell school system so it's right over the Border in Grayson County and so we're officially Grayson nightes but uh my first daughter was born in Oklahoma my second daughter was born here in Texas so I think that like makes us true Texans now maybe is there anyway my background is is kind of of diverse and uh the company I used to
• 02:30 - 03:00 work for Corva agroscience or Dow uh they really liked the background that I had because when they hired me onto the job they wanted me to know a little bit about insects they wanted me to know about small grains and they wanted me to know about range and pasture and it's kind of a weird mix to get somebody that has all those facets but my career in education uh started out in Agronomy crop science uh went into a weed science masters and then finished off in
• 03:00 - 03:30 rangeland ecology or conservation ecology my specific project was looking at invasive species and how we can manage those on rangeland so uh this talk is near and dear to my heart for sure I do have a passion for it and it's one of the ones that I like the most to talk about so uh we're going to start off with what is a weed can anybody Give me a definition for a weed that is an absolutely awesome way to put that as well right in my opinion it's a plant
• 03:30 - 04:00 that is somewhere that I don't want it to be right so does anybody know this plant common lambs quarters does anybody know what it's really closely related to like really really closely related to okay so plant out of place right unwanted plant or if you want to go true academic on them you can say an undesirable plant that conflicts with human preferences
• 04:00 - 04:30 needs or goals and then you can drop the mic right no so this plant is really really closely related to one of our natural grains quinoa so kinoa is kop podium kinoa it is just a little bit shy of being a weed and in some cases it could actually be a weed as well uh these plants are all Native uh to the US North
• 04:30 - 05:00 America and we actually had kinoa out in the world prior to us cultivating it and making it a grain so it's very important is this a weed if it's in your garden probably a weed if it's out in the hay Meadow probably not a weed right that's the one we're trying to cultivate what part of that plant am I holding right there does anybody remember from plant
• 05:00 - 05:30 biology last week stolen that's right so this is a stolen remember so on some of our perennial grasses in particular we have above ground stems and we have below ground stems the above ground ones that have all the leaf tissue are the stolens the below ground ones that don't have any Leaf tissue but have rooting structures are what romes good job way to go all right so I like to take a little square quadr with me just about
• 05:30 - 06:00 everywhere I go in fact I have it in the back of my car right now and I like to throw it on the ground just to see how stuff is doing right so if we were going to be making hay do we have a good population of berm grass here not really yet right so this is a recently sprigged field uh I was just kind of trying to evaluate how much we got to establish how many different plants we got to establish the good news is there's a lot of open space there right
• 06:00 - 06:30 the bad news is there's a lot of open space there because what likes open space weeds absolutely weeds love to fill niches in the environment all right one of the best things that we can do especially in a yard or even in a garden uh to prevent lots and lots of weeds from getting established is to make whatever we're growing as healthy as it can be in the soil environment that it has and make sure that it's crowded everything else out right now it's a
• 06:30 - 07:00 fine line because you can start crowding out itself as well so we have to be careful I love to show this chart love love love to show this chart everybody loves fruits and vegetables right what if I told you that a lot of our major major weed problems are in all of these plant families we have all of our mustards we have what's a good mustard that we actually use that we eat they're up there if you want to
• 07:00 - 07:30 read broccoli cabbage right lots of the brasas yeah so we use rape seed oil a lot that's that's canola uh so there's a lot of good good mustards out there but there's also shepherd's purse flicks weed turnup cabbage I'm going to say a bad word or bastard cabbage is what it's called sometimes uh so it's it's one of the yellow flowers that's actually out right now on the roadside
• 07:30 - 08:00 uh within the lily family we have wild garlic we have wild onion and even green Brer does anybody know what green Brer is so green berer is a viny very very viny hardwood stem plant it's got lots and lots of thorns on it and it's really difficult to control even to the point that one of my fun things to say when I do a weeds talk to producers is if they have Green Brier the best herbicide is a good realtor you're just never going to get rid rid of it it's always going to be
• 08:00 - 08:30 there uh within the nightshades of course we have tomatoes and potatoes and all of our good Nightshade crops we also have horse Nettles and Silverleaf Nightshade bull nettle ground cherries that are all weeds uh tomao is also in that family as well so it's a good one um within our cucurbits we don't have as many in this particular family but we do still have some uh for those of you that maybe have come from the West there are several different weeds out there like smell melon and buffalo gourd uh that
• 08:30 - 09:00 really do live up to their names they smell like skunks and uh it's a neat little plant but it's very hard to get rid of because it's a perennial and most of our natural native cucurbits are perennials so it's kind of neat to see that within the grape family we have Virginia creeper which is a common weed in backyards growing up trees uh it's also very common in the forest as is Mustang grape uh we can actually make Mustang Grape Wine if anybody wanted to drink that I don't prefer it but to each their own uh within the carrot family
• 09:00 - 09:30 and I'm actually giving a carrot talk on Friday uh where I'm going to really point out and Dallas did a great job the last two years of really bringing to light that everything is poison him loock right that's what everybody thought anyway because the news report said poison himac is here so everything is poison himac but it's not I I promise you it's not uh because we do have a lot of carrot and celery and cilantro uh Queen ANS lace is one or wild carrot is one poison him is another one but we
• 09:30 - 10:00 also have a whole bunch of parsley hedge parsley and Texas parsley uh that are just kind of out there in the world no big deal uh what I will say is that one of my funnest calls from Kaufman County or emails I guess it would be is that somebody shot the a agent down there a picture and then he forwarded it on to me and he said do we have something to worry about is this poison hemlock and I looked real close and I said you know what that's in a raised bed what do you think it was it was good old
• 10:00 - 10:30 cilantro that they'd let go to flow and then to seeds so yeah I mean some of it within weeds is why is this here and does it make sense that this is a bad thing right or is it just out in the world living or did we actually put it there so something to think about annual sunflowers ragweeds Marsh elders broomweed and bitterweed the sunflower family is one of our worst weed problems in production agriculture for sure without a doubt cesi
• 10:30 - 11:00 leeda clovers tick Clover this is a group of plants that in a lot of cases folks want to have so a lot of our grazing uh producers will want to actually have clovers in their pastures because that helps out with some of the nitrogen fixation uh for those of you that don't know legumes can actually bring nitrogen from the atmosphere and from the soil and make it plant usable nitrogen very very big thing in the crop world uh what I will say is that there
• 11:00 - 11:30 is a misconception out there that if we have a little bit of clover or if we plant vet or something into the system then we'll never have to fertilize again the reality is it just produces a little bit and a lot of that is used up by the plant itself so there is some help there but it's not nearly as much as what folks would like to see here's our family where kop Podium rests and it used to be that there were two plant families there there was amaranth the ACA and there was kopot ACA but they decided just lump those all together
• 11:30 - 12:00 because of course taxonomist need to keep a job so they decided to switch things up so now it's just one big family and then last but not least is our Rose family of course in the grand scheme of things Roses by and large by a lot of our gardeners are a very very good thing uh but there are rose plants that are out in the environment that do cause problems for some of our producers uh blackberries and dewberries can grow in fields pretty readily uh any kind of multiflor rows or McCartney Rose are
• 12:00 - 12:30 also weeds that we have to deal with on a regular basis there might be in other geographies but to my knowledge we don't have any weedy Palms but if you planted a palm and then decided to change that area to something different then it would be a weed y so trifoliate orange is actually a weedy Citrus now I didn't put it on the list because we don't really have it up here unless somebody plants it yeah it's it's from about Waco South so it's it's not a major problem up here but it is in in Texas for sure try fully at
• 12:30 - 13:00 Orange you bet you now the fun thing about that fruit is that it produces a fruit that's almost the size of a limit and looks more like an orange or Tangerine but there's like that much pulp to it and all the rest of it is seeds yeah the seeds are massive compared to what we see with our cultivated Citrus for sure all right all of that to say this is what we're going to cover today in the next four and a half hours I love to learn with Hands-On stuff and after I go through this first little set of slides I'm going to start
• 13:00 - 13:30 passing around the pot a pot and we're going to let you guys touch and feel some of these weeds so uh really I wanted to get through a couple of definitions first because those are kind of the most boring part right so one major major difference we have between our cultivated crops and even the seeds that you will buy at Home Depot or Lowe's or Tractor Supply that come in the little seed packet all of those were bred to make sure that they all germinate at about the same time so we
• 13:30 - 14:00 have bypassed seed dormy in many of our cultivated crops in the real world in nature plants have evolved and developed to have intermittent seed germination because of seed dormy that allows them to grow and survive through multiple seasons and to keep that population going so it's really important to point that out because seed dormy in
• 14:00 - 14:30 crops sometimes can be a thing and we do sometimes have to scarify different crops to get them to actually germinate the way we want them to many times that scarification process has been done at the processing facility and the seed packet that you get or the pluck that you get those are already ready to go you don't have to worry about scarifying those at all but in real world the seed dorcy process is is a real big thing and in fact some of our weed seeds can last
• 14:30 - 15:00 20 to 40 years in the soil without germinating ever so you'll say well I've been doing really really good I have you know almost all pasture here and then you get a good hard rain and weeds come back up and you're like but there haven't been weeds here in the last three years well yeah there have they're just under the soil surface so seed production is another big one that's a huge difference between most of our cultivated crops and our weeds in the world so seed production in cultivated crops has for the most part been
• 15:00 - 15:30 minimized to a minuscule level right we have little bitty cucumber seeds or we have little bitty or non-existent watermelon seeds bananas on a commercial scale do not have any seeds at all right or they're just little black specks but in the real world all of those crops or all of those weeds will have very monstrous seeds and many many species produce thousands and thousands of seeds in any given season so uh the plant that I actually did my research on
• 15:30 - 16:00 cieda can plant or sorry can produce over 100,000 seeds per plant per year and that's why it's such a big problem also it can stay in the soil for about 40 years without germinating so that seed dormy plays A Part as well Transportation so we all know that humans always always always double and triple and quadruple check all of the biological characteristics of a species before we bring it from Africa and
• 16:00 - 16:30 introduce it to the US right no now back in the 1890s that process was even more truncated and we really had a small number of characteristics that had to be checked off before they would bring anything over and in 1896 we actually had a World's Fair in Atlanta and introduced like hundreds of different plants that year to the Americas out of an right because it had a showy flour or it had a
• 16:30 - 17:00 really tasty fruit or whatever that thing was they had a huge introduction of a whole bunch of different plants that year and we do it all the time even to this day although I will say that now USDA apas and many of our regulatory organizations actually do a much better job of making sure that those plants are not on a checklist somewhere we have international lists of problematic plants that we need to have watch out for so we try to make sure that those
• 17:00 - 17:30 plants are categorized correctly um I did want to point out that this is a lot of times human-based or maybe animal-based uh many of our livestock will have seeds get into their fur coat and then they'll walk to other pastures or to other areas and then those seeds fall out when they change hair coats uh that can occur for sure but we also have abiotic Transportation can anybody think of one plant that does that really well
• 17:30 - 18:00 dandelion have you ever been a kid and like went and grabbed the poofball and gave a big blow or you see that happen all the time when it's out in the real world and we get a windy day in Texas right so abiotic Transportation either wind or water can also occur and what we saw down during Hurricane Season and some of the worst hurricanes Katrina and so on down in the coast is that folks got weird crazy weeds that they never had before because they came in with all
• 18:00 - 18:30 the flood waters so they can be transported from one area all the way down to another area a really prime example of that would be salt Cedar in the western part of our state and in the western us as a whole salt Cedar is a tree it's a weedy tree uh as its name implies it tends to make the soil saltier around where it is but it also mines the salt so the plant itself is a really salty plant but it uses waterways to transport down through rivering systems so it's a major problem out in
• 18:30 - 19:00 the west all right our good old buddy dandelion so I did go out grab a dandelion poof it out blow on it a little bit and all these fun seeds came out of course you have the seed itself there that one doesn't look real healthy but these two look pretty good and then you have that papillary on the other end that allows it to be carried through the wind right that's how it disperses its seed to new areas okay so why are weeds so impactful we've
• 19:00 - 19:30 kind of already covered a couple of these things uh already today but I'll go through them just a little bit more the variability in seed dormy is a big one we have the exploitation of resources that a lot of our cultivated plants can't utilize uh that could either be low fertility situations that could be low or high pH situations that could be Heavy Metal soils where most of our cultivated plants can't survive but other plants will actually mine
• 19:30 - 20:00 those heavy metals out of there that's one of the main reasons that CIA was brought into the US is that it was able to be used in land reclamation in those mining facilities uh it also has a wide range of different conditions that the species can thrive in now if you think about a plant like berm grass it's got a pretty wide range as well but once it starts getting into the drought stage of a year a lot of our Bermudagrass a lot of our St Augustine a lot of our zoa start to go dormant right not not dead correct most of the time but dormant but
• 20:00 - 20:30 if you'll notice a lot of the weedy grasses actually Stay Green longer and can withstand a lot of those drought conditions or Frost conditions better than some of our cultivated grasses Dallas grass is a great example of that for sure uh when everything else is brown Dallas grass will crank on and actually the last two summers that particular grass species saved us as small cattle producers because all of our desirable berm grass did go dormant but the Dallas grass just keeps cranking
• 20:30 - 21:00 on kept producing forage and kind of sustained our cattle for sure High reproductive rates and high reproductive efficiency for sure compared to what most of our cultivated crops are so that's a big big one ability to compete with planted crops or natives for all of those different things I I hate to keep going back to CIA but it's the one that I have the most research background on it actually has a big time photosynthetic difference between it and the plants around it a
• 21:00 - 21:30 lot of the natives that are in those systems have a much much lower photosynthetic rate on a per Leaf basis and also Leaf number difference than what CIA does so it can not only mine the light at a much higher rate because of each individual Leaf but it also produces a whole bunch more leaves that can mine a whole bunch more of the sunlight that's coming through so that's real common I love to use this slide and all it I did not make this slide I did
• 21:30 - 22:00 not make this graph I robbed it fair and square uh but it is one that is a very very telling graph and it's telling for a couple of reasons number one just to think that Roots can get that deep in a viable soil and number two that a lot of our grasses a lot of folks think well even the native grasses they're only going to use about four or six in of the soil and that's all they're going to use because they're a fibrous root system right so not true especially with a lot of our native grasses and I can actually
• 22:00 - 22:30 send a PDF of this presentation to Karina and she can give it out to the group so that you'll be able to read all that fine print down at the bottom to see what those are uh but a lot of these are native grasses and native plants and so uh when we talk about gardening and gardening natives this is a great graph to use because you can really emphasize the point that you know what we're not just doing good because we're getting natives back out there but we're doing good because the soil uh roots systems are going to be really beneficial to
• 22:30 - 23:00 breaking up those colloids down deeper in all right let's talk a little bit about weeds in general so my first weed that I'm going to plop into a tray and let you all look at so we've got one grass and one broadleaf both of them are more or less uh one grass and one broadleaf what do we know about broad leaves and their root systems are they fibrous Tap Root
• 23:00 - 23:30 ryome what do we know about most of our broadleaf plants they are a Tap Root yeah most of our dcot most of our broadleaf plants have a Tap Root of some kind they can have a few fibrous roots in them as well but by and large a lot of our dcot or a lot of our broadleaf plants have a tap rout they also have a really cool leaf type uh that really has either web type leaves or you'll notice it kind of talks about
• 23:30 - 24:00 uh netlike or branched so a lot of these plants will have a really cool venation on their leaves it's a really easy way to tell a grass from a broadleaf most of them are going to have very showy flowers now there are exceptions but compared to most of our grasses that don't have much of a flower at all all of our broadleaves are going to have shy flowers and that's why we use a lot of them in gardening right it's because we want showy flowers so grasses grasses have a parallel venation on their leaves
• 24:00 - 24:30 now the leaf that I'm passing around it might be kind of hard to see because it's kind of one of the first true leaves on that plant and so it may not have as good of a grass um demonstration as what the one in the picture here does but almost all of our grasses will have up and down leaves the nation with the stem right so they're going to go right in line with it uh most of them some of them will have pubescence or hairs on the leaf either upper blade or lower blade we can use that to help identify which grass that
• 24:30 - 25:00 is and a lot of them are going to have vegetative stems that have leaves rolled up in those stems and then once they flip to reproductive mode those stems will elongate and get very very long the inner nodes the area between the two leaves is going to expand and within that space it's going to be Hollow almost like a bamboo or something like that there will no be no more rolled leaves in there because what that's doing is basically pushing out that seed
• 25:00 - 25:30 head all the way to the top of the plant and giving it structure to where it gets up above most of the vegetation so that it can then move in the wind or have pollinators pollinate between flowers on most of our grasses each one of these is going to represent a flower and on most of our grasses that's going to have either one or two seeds per flour that's another big difference because many of our broadleaf plants or our dcot are going to have multiple seeds for each flower you think of a tomato uh you
• 25:30 - 26:00 think of an aggregate fruit like a strawberry where it's going to have just tons of different seeds in one floral structure the other one that we have a big problem with and I would say that this is probably one of the worst weed problems that we have in our gardening in our Landscaping is a sge and sges are neither they're grass-like they're monocot in most cases uh but they do not have a tap rout for the most part they can have nutlets down here so almost
• 26:00 - 26:30 like little potatoes or tubers that can help sustain that population over time but they are a sge a grass-like plant in a completely different plant family than any of our grasses so there are a bunch of different Genera of sges uh but what I will say is that many of the true Cyprus will have a triangular salmon so that's one easy way that you can tell if it is a sge is either you can look at it from the top like I did here in this
• 26:30 - 27:00 picture and the leaves are going to go off in a triangular pattern or you can cut the stem with a knife and look at the stem itself and the stem will be a triangle and when those leaves come into the stem you'll notice that they come at that three angle area but at each Leaf blade it's going to kind of go down into a v type shape as it joins onto that angled stem so it's kind of an easy way to tell it there as well well the funny thing about this is and maybe it's not
• 27:00 - 27:30 too funny but a lot of the chemicals that we use for controlling grasses do nothing on sges many of our pre-emergent herbicides don't work on sges because a lot of them are perennial plants and I'll get into herbicides in a minute but pre-emergent herbicides don't work at all on perennial ased plants how do weeds grow they grow can anybody guess what that is over in my hand over on the left well right
• 27:30 - 28:00 hand side of this graph it is a ryome you are exactly right so this is a Johnson grass ryome and it's one of the reasons why Johnson grass is so tough to get rid of is that its root system will have both fibrous roots in it but those underground horizontal root stems are going to be segments of little plants ready to grow so anytime we pull it out anytime we chop it out with a hoe or with a shovel anytime we Yank It Out by
• 28:00 - 28:30 hand all of those little root segments break off and become new plants so really have to be cautious with Johnson grass because you'll never get all of that ryome you'll always cause it to have more plants and the tricky part about most of our perennial plants and this is going back to your biology lesson last week I don't know if you touched on this or not but almost all of our perennial plants succumb to apical dominance as long as the top of the plant is not cut off as soon as you cut
• 28:30 - 29:00 the top of that plant off all of those axillary buds go crazy and make all kinds of new plants and that could be a root stock that could be a ryome that could be horizontal root stock and so it's all going to start making new plants because you no longer have that kind of Oppression of that uh growth by that apical dominance and it's all biology it all is okay so let's talk about different plants first we have
• 29:00 - 29:30 annuals annual plants complete their life cycle in one growing season or in one year now it gets a little tricky when we talk about stuff like brasas uh mustards that start in the fall over winter and then finish off in the spring those could kind of be called a banial but most of the time we consider them an annual because they take the full cool season growing season to complete their life life cycle with these with these annual plans and you'll notice we have goat weed here Mar's tail broom weed and
• 29:30 - 30:00 [ __ ] up there and so we have a couple of different um kind of problematic weeds and pastures but a lot of these can also be problems in yards and also in gardens for sure as well uh the goat weed is actually one of our perennial problems that we have every year it is an annual weed but it comes up every year and one of the main reasons is that it has intermittent seed dorcy so it just keeps coming on so so when we think about control or management a lot of times we
• 30:00 - 30:30 want to try to get these plants either pre-emergent so we use a pre-emergent herbicide or pre-emergent control or we're going to get them when they're very very small when they start to get a little bit bigger they start to put on a lot of hair pubescence on the leaves makes it tougher to get the herbicide in there they also have a very massive uh system of roots that gets tough to control all of it and they also start going to reproductive mode really quickly and once they get to that flowering stage trying to control that
• 30:30 - 31:00 plant is for lack of a better word fruitless uh because all of the energy is going up to filling that fruit you don't get any translocation of the herbicide up and down the Plant so it gets pretty tough bals bals like I said kind of take two seasons to make a fruit uh they are not perennial they will not last forever in most cases uh but they do take two seasons a good example of this this would be all of our thistles and then some of our mustards as well and so when
• 31:00 - 31:30 we think about it timing is very very important with these plants as well almost all of them will go through part of the Season as a rosette and we're going to go out and see some of these later on um possibly out in in the fields and in The Yards uh but thistles start as a rosette a very small growth stage where they don't have any reproductive tissue on them at all that bolt or that elongated stem is what we call that area that is going to produce
• 31:30 - 32:00 a flower once it starts to that stage that's basically one and done uh we are we are into reproductive stage and you'll likely have very limited um access to those we do have some mustard so I'm going to send around an annual and a banial in this group uh the annual would be the Buttercup and then the banial would be the mustard so the Buttercup doesn't have any flour on it yet the annual or sorry
• 32:00 - 32:30 the banial mustard does have some flowers on it both of those are dcot and both of those are going to have a tap rout yes ma'am absolutely yep hitting it in the vegetative stage before it starts that bolting process is the key and a lot of times they're going to be a whole lot more fun to spray anyway because if anybody's ever been around thistles when they get that bolt on them they like to reach out and grab you and tag you with their spines so they're not fun at all uh so yeah that vegetative stage is definitely the the best time and then we
• 32:30 - 33:00 have our perennials and so perennials it's a whole different animal because they're not coming up from seeds very often now they can and I do want to point out that even Johnson grass can be controlled with pre-emergent herbicides if you don't have any ryom in the soil currently so it can get what we call seedling Johnson grass but it won't be able to get any kind of established Johnson grass that already has a perennial root system there so it's going to be kind of tricky in that regard but in almost all cases we try to
• 33:00 - 33:30 control these plants with herbicides after they've gone to flour or when they are producing fruit and so it's kind of very important that we we are able to identify a plant as an annual banial or a perennial to work with management for sure all right so I love this slide I think it's like 67% accurate 80% of the time and so it's really a good SL I actually made this up uh this last year
• 33:30 - 34:00 because I work really closely with our inw or bear rep here in this area and he sells resalon which is sold in the Turf Market as spectacle and if anybody knows that is a pre-emergent herbicide and so folks always get frustrated with hey I sprayed your herbicide and it didn't work and he's like well a your plants have already germinated so it's not going to work anyway or B you're trying to spray a perennial plant right so I asked if I could do this with him and and he and I put together this chart of
• 34:00 - 34:30 some of the common weeds that we have here in North Texas and when they actually come up so germination is when they actually start that growth process from a dormant seed and we are going to basically see that first in root development and then second in above ground development did everybody catch that so if it's 55 degrees outside and I go and spray my pre-emergent herbicide because there isn't anything showing so
• 34:30 - 35:00 I should be safe is that an accurate statement correct it could be but chances are everything starts to get going at about 50° or above some say 54 degrees some say 55 but most of our seeds will start to germinate especially our warm season plants when the temperature gets about 50 to 55° in the the soil that's not air temp that's soil temp okay so air thermometer will
• 35:00 - 35:30 measure the air you need a soil thermometer that basically looks like a basting thermometer or roasting thermometer that you would stick in your turkey and you stick that into the ground and then it measures what that soil temperature is uh when that gets to 50 to 55 degrees many of our seed annuals will start to germinate that germination process starts with just the root development so a lot of times you won't even see that first hypoc cotle or that first
• 35:30 - 36:00 true leaf on the dcot until that root has started to produce some energy because the seed at that point is still living on whatever it has right there in that parac carp and it's not going to start producing any kind of energy until it gets some root system there to start drawing nutrients from the soil I did put a little disclaimer down there at the bottom that said all of this is right unless it's not right because stuff can happen right you know we've
• 36:00 - 36:30 come out of two droughts here in the last two years where a lot of our Su summer annual weed species didn't even come up until August and September because we didn't have any rain to get them really flushing early on in the season so it can happen any time of the year really quite honestly and it usually follows rainfall events about 10 to 15 to 20 days after that event especially if you're coming out of a drought you will see this hu huge flush of New Growth out in the desert that can
• 36:30 - 37:00 happen in like days right you get a nice little rain shower the plants go from dormant seed to germination to vegetative stage to reproductive stage and flowering in about 7 seconds I mean it just happens so fast but here in North Texas we get enough rain where it doesn't normally happen that fast I want to take just a quick break of from our weeds discussion and I know you're going to go into it a little bit more during the IPM section I believe and some of the other section I want to talk about labels and labeling just for a moment because I feel like
• 37:00 - 37:30 it's my due diligence as an a agent that anytime I get up in front of people I want to make sure we're all on the same page when it comes to chemicals okay these are not poisons that's the first thing I want to say there will be an audience out there maybe some of you in the audience are those people that will classify Every chemical that we use in agriculture as a poison simply not true I'm going to get to that here in just a second poisons are a common misnomer for
• 37:30 - 38:00 pesticides but there are only a few pesticides that are actually poisons warin is a poison to control feral Hogs that is a poison herbicides I used to be in the age of of the old days when folks would get up and get a jug of Roundup and they would get a mixing cup and they would pour some round up into the mixing cup and just drink it well while they were doing their presentation and almost all those guys are still here because it doesn't cause
• 38:00 - 38:30 cancer it does not cause cancer okay so pesticide hierarchy we have pesticides that's the big big word right that includes all of it it includes herbicides it includes fungicides what do fungicides do kill fungus right kill those fungal pathogens what do insecticides kill insects bugs all those good things what do wrot genocides kill you see where I'm going here it's like
• 38:30 - 39:00 pretty easy right but you will have a lot of folks that you will talk to on a regular basis that say all pesticides are bad and are going to kill all my cats and dogs or they're going to kill my goats simply not true nematicides anybody got a rough guess of what that one gets nematodes are all nematodes bad you're going to learn during the IPM section that some neemat toades are actually used for our benefit and there are thousands thousand of species and nematodes out there that do good for our
• 39:00 - 39:30 benefit they're eating some of the bad bugs they're eating some of the soil dwelling microbes that hurt our plants so it's great to have them it's May 15th do I need to go spray something in my garden in my yard in my pasture depends what's there thank you very much but you will also hear folks that will tell you on March 15th I'm going to put out my pre-emerge and and on May 15th I'm going to put out my post-emergent herbicide on June 1st I'm
• 39:30 - 40:00 going to spray for army worms or tobacco corn worms or whatever that is they want to go on a calendar basis and as my previous slide a couple of back showed there is no set date that everything is going to happen in agriculture and in Plants stuff can happen water cycles can happen drought Cycles can happen that will inhibit us from being able to use calendar days to make decisions and even on a seed packet that you get from
• 40:00 - 40:30 Lowe's or Home Depot for wild flowers or for cucurbits or for sunflowers it will say plant from February to May that's a stinking long planting window right that's like half the year so it's it's always going to depend on what's Happening that year we know for a fact that this part of Texas our last frost free date is probably what April 1st April 15 somewhere in there what do we March 15th okay March 15th we we go a
• 40:30 - 41:00 little longer up north you know that hour and a half up north labels labels labels labels are the law and that is no joke that is no kidding do not use a pesticide off label that's how you kill your goats and your dogs and your cats is by using pesticides off label federal law mandates a lot of these every true pesticide has to go and
• 41:00 - 41:30 get EPA registration there are some loopholes and we'll talk about that here in a little bit that don't require EPA registration all I would say about that and I will say it again later be cognizant that there is no regulatory agency guarding what marketing material these companies put on their bags if they are not a true pesticide okay they can say that it cures cancer and there's no legal ramification to that state law also mandates on some of our pesticides
• 41:30 - 42:00 we have a state limited use set of pesticides primarily the 24ds and the dieas those are gross regulat herbicides uh we will have to have a pesticide applicator licensed to use those there's also a large number of our different fungicides and insecticides that are kind of guaranteed by that as well so has anybody ever opened the actual label when you get a product like Roundup or any of those others from the
• 42:00 - 42:30 store show of hands how many have opened the label all right next time we ask this question I want every hand to be raised Katarina okay so next time you ask it everybody needs to go home find the bottle of weed killer find the bottle of insect killer at the house that should be put away properly with the lid still on it and properly marked in its original container see where I'm
• 42:30 - 43:00 going with this and there will be a label with that if not the online is cool because you can search the name of that and put label behind it like we' be gone label and it will give you the current label that's on cdms or some of these other sites that the company has there for you okay so what are the parts of the label now I'm actually using a insecticide here that's common in range of pasture and so and actually row crops as well uh this is a synthetic pyin and
• 43:00 - 43:30 it's called Lambda CCI fluin I know that's a really small print but that is the active ingredient okay so Federal restrictions does anybody see a federal restriction on that label restricted use what does that mean that means you cannot buy or use this product without a t DDA pesticide applicator license okay now for
• 43:30 - 44:00 homeowners and gardeners there are some loopholes on product size you can get a quart size bottle quart size bottle of some of these insecticides or some of these herbicides to use for your home or garden without a pesticide applicator license now that's great if you're a home Gardener that doesn't want to go get a pesticide applicator license that's a little bit of a pit fall or a speed bump for those of us that work in education that want
• 44:00 - 44:30 to make sure that every landowner is properly using their pesticides right because if they don't know they don't know all right what do we have after that we have the brand name what is the brand name of this product Warrior 2 right it's going to be in big bold letters because that's the company's marketing strategy right name recognition just like all of the political signs we see around here right now what office they're running for or may be that big but their name's going to be like that big and it might even
• 44:30 - 45:00 have like a catchy phrase like hell yes for whoever Mr Hill or Mrs Hill is so yeah it's it's going to be that marketing strategy right okay who's the manufacturer of this product senta correct what is the active ingredient lambas sial ciuin sorry Lambda cylin group number and type of pesticide group three and it's an insecticide right why is that important group number is their
• 45:00 - 45:30 mode of action that is the way they attack the pest that they're going after and so insecticide groups we're going to have a list of those herbicide groups we're going to have a list of those I think we're up to about 27 or 28 different types of modes of action in the herbicide realm is it 16 or so or what do we add in insecticides now 36 yeah there you go 36 different groups of or families if you want to call it that of different pesticides uh pesticide formulation and
• 45:30 - 46:00 concentration so this gets a little bit tougher to find it's not one gallon I promise you that that's the net contents you'll notice this little small print underneath the active ingredient will tell you the strength of that pesticide so that becomes very important when we talk about mixing stuff and getting recommendations from folks right because if somebody says I'll just go spray round up at a 1% solution so 1 o per gallon and you'll be just
• 46:00 - 46:30 fine has anybody ever gone to a store where they have like multiple roundups on the Shelf yeah and like some of them are the actual glyphosate ingredient some of them aren't and many of them are going to be different concentrations of that active ingredient in the bottle so if we use a 1% solution of a 4B gallon and a 1% solution of a 0.5 lb gallon which is what a lot of our home and garden type
• 46:30 - 47:00 [Music] [Music] glyphosat-prozess you want to make sure that you can find that EPA registration number uh let's
• 47:00 - 47:30 see on this one it's actually down here yep so this is the cast number that's another different number that's a way that we categorize them as well but the EPA number will be down here and the first three letters of that EPA number are going to actually be the company that makes that product so the EPA number first three numbers is your company the other digits are the actual product number in their line of products so it could be lots and lots like this one this one's a what $12.95 so that's
• 47:30 - 48:00 the 1295 product that they've made from sjena um that's the way the company does it and then another big big one is signal word can anybody find the signal word on this one warning absolutely yes is warning good or bad we'll learn that here in a second great question the good stuff now I say that in tongue and cheek but to be quite honest sometimes it is the good stuff because you can take a very inactive
• 48:00 - 48:30 active ingredient mix it with a good penetrating agent a good solvent that can get through plant tissue a good carrier that can make it spread across the plant itself and you can make a very inactive ingredient very active in a hurry so all of that other stuff is typically water or oilbased Carrier depending on the type of herbicide and then you're going to have some stabilizing agent in there you're going to have to keep it all homogeneous uh many of our herbicides if
• 48:30 - 49:00 you let them sit out on the Shelf over time you're going to have them separate and you need to shake shake shake for sure every time you use a herbicide uh and then you're going to have some of those penetrating agents or adant is what we call them uh that will help get that product into that plant and a lot of times depending on the different formulations like a Roundup it's very sensitive to pH in the water solution and so you're actually going to have some buffering agent in there as well to buffer that water source to make sure that you have it in a proper pH do these
• 49:00 - 49:30 things have expiration dates okay what I will say is my favorite Texas Tech answer which is it depends it depends on the formulation so if it is a solution in theory that never dissolutes so those components are microencapsulated those components are mixed throughout that solution to keep it from actually disol in out if we have other types of herbicides that you do
• 49:30 - 50:00 start to see some of that precipitate form it's important number one that you shake that bottle and it's important number two that you basically make sure that all of that goes back into solution because almost always that little bit of crystallization or that little bit of precipitate is your active ingredient because almost all of them are salts and so over time those salts will start to settle out and so you want to make sure that all gets back into um into the solution U many of our newer herbicides are built so that they will
• 50:00 - 50:30 separate out over time I would say about three to five years on average but shelf life shelf life but what I will also say is it all depends too on what the environment is that they're being stored at so if they're an internal facility that has climate control your garage say for instance that has some climate control safer than if you stored out in the Machine Shed that doesn't have any kind of climate control any kind of insulation
• 50:30 - 51:00 whatsoever it's not just the cold the cold will impact it because if there's any water-based part of that formulation over time it can freeze but the heat the hot can do just as much damage so yeah I'd say in theory three to five years but you always want to inspect that and make sure that there's not a whole lot of precipitate now if you get a weed beone bottle from the store it's a relatively black solution in a relatively Black Bottle is it going to be easy to just look at that bottle and
• 51:00 - 51:30 see if everything's still good no it's really not right so that's where if it's been sitting there for a while and gone through several cycles of heat and cold I would be very cautious about using that now they will put a lot number and a manufacturing date on there they are required to do that it'll usually be kind of like your milk carton it'll be a digitized ink on that carton somewhere now if it's so old that you can't see that anymore that's probably a good indication that it's too old right
• 51:30 - 52:00 too old all right let's keep cruising for a little bit uh we have four different signal words on almost all pesticides a lot of the ones that are caution or even less than caution will not have a signal word on it if it does not have a signal word on it that generally means it's a relatively safe pesticide if it's in its original packaging if Bob forgot to put that it's a danger poison when he put it into the milk jug after the other jug got a hole in it it will not have the proper label
• 52:00 - 52:30 to it and it will not have the warning label so please be cautious I'll get into that a little bit more later all right these are all based on either human toxicity or plant and animal non-target organism toxicity and it's going to depend on what that herbicide or pesticide is as to what they use that as the basis for determination almost all always they'll go with the one that's most sensitive and that's how they develop their key word many of our
• 52:30 - 53:00 herbicides for instance to humans are really really safe you can drink them like we did like I demonstrated with glyphosate I didn't demonstrate like I told you about with glyphosate but the reality is it's really detrimental to some of our non- Target plant organisms that are out in the world so we have to put cautionary statements about that okay a few reminders and faq's that I get frequently asked questions that I get about the label all the time it seems like all right what's the first
• 53:00 - 53:30 question how much product do I put in my sprayer all right so the label will always have a mixing instruction section to it now will that look the same on every product absolutely not sometimes it's all in words sometimes they develop this nice little chart for you you have to know what size your sprayer is I get a lot of folks that are like well I think it's either like a one gallon or a three gallon PumpUp sprayer and I'm like well we need to know so take a couple of gallons of milk
• 53:30 - 54:00 out there and pour it in there and see how many you use so it's going to differ on how much you are mixing into but for a lot of these it will also differ by how much you're actually spraying the plant a lot of times with our hand pump sprayers we recommend folks spray to glisten what do you think that means has anybody ever walked outside in like June in Dallas and like within
• 54:00 - 54:30 seconds you start glistening right you're not running off you're not fullon sweating but you're kind of glistening that's glisten it does not take much to get to glisten I promise you and if you're sitting there pouring it on the plant and it's dripping off and going down into the soil you have overapplied that pesticide in almost every case most pesticides do not need that and there are exceptions and most of those are individual plant treatments where we're actually treating the stump or the standing tree and that
• 54:30 - 55:00 one we want to run off but almost every case of folar application you really only need to spray to glisten how do I know how many gallons per acre I spray that's another huge one I get especially from our a producers they have this sprayer that they went and bought at Wy sprayers they took it home it usually takes like four tank loads to get my 10 acres sprayed but I don't really know what the output is but we can figure that out
• 55:00 - 55:30 right so there are calibration methods that we can do whether you're talking about an actual boomed sprayer where you actually have a couple of nozzle spread throughout there uh those are are very uncommon in the gardening and Landscaping industry right almost all of them are going to use a big tank in the back of a truck and then they come out with like a fire hose looking thing and just drench everything uh so that's going to be more of your boomless sprayer type calibration but there are
• 55:30 - 56:00 ways that we can figure that out and it's very important that we do that because if you take four tank loads to spray your yard and pasture or you take eight tank loads to spray your lawn and pasture the use rates there are going to be really really different if you're putting in the same amount of herbicide or pesticide into that mix can I just use product X from my garden and pasture pesticides to put in my lawn in all of our labels that are proper pesticide labels we will have a general use
• 56:00 - 56:30 pattern listed on those and in that General use pattern it will list the places where we're supposed to use this particular pesticide where are we supposed to use res lawn pastures and hay Fields now if I let my lawn get up tall enough that I could hay it does it become a hay field no no it does not and you will get some really smart producers out there that will find a couple of labels and
• 56:30 - 57:00 they'll say this product is $27 per gallon and this product is $120 per gallon if I look on the label they're the same exact active ingredient at the same concentration percentage in the mix so I can just buy this $27 bottle and go use it on this other use site because it's cheaper they will want to do that on a regular basis that is illegal okay now the companies are wise
• 57:00 - 57:30 to that and a lot of times they'll put a little smidge of something in there that will dissuade you from doing that like they will put a little bit of glyphosate in there if it's only supposed to be a fence line and Barr treatment so that it kills everything right so you don't want to use that in your yard or you don't want to use that in your garden more often than not they don't and those EPA numbers will be the exact same but they as a company will Market to the lawn and ornamental with this version and to
• 57:30 - 58:00 pastures and rangelands with this version exact same jugs exact same products exact same concentrations but they use this one to Market to lawn and ornamental where they can charge more and the pastor guys don't want to pay that but it is illegal to use one in the other use site you have to adhere to what the use site describes if one dose doesn't work I'll just double it or you know triple it the label is the law
• 58:00 - 58:30 right it's going to have its use pattern and its use rate designated on there I can tell you from experience that with certain herbicides if you use double or triple the dose you will kill that plant or at least the top of that plant so fast that you will not be able to get control of all of the root system down below and yes it looks cool really quick cuz you start crinkling it all down but herbicides have to translocate through
• 58:30 - 59:00 those plants from wherever the site that it enters the plant at like the leaf has to go down into the stem and then ultimately down into the root system and we have to be cognizant of that if you put it at such a high rate that it blows the top off really fast everything in those axillary buds will come back right because it hasn't got there yet and so it's really important that we use that at the labeled rate uh one St statement that I Ed down at the bottom here pollinators and other beneficial insects may be affected by higher than labeled
• 59:00 - 59:30 doses of many pesticides many of these pesticides can be used in and around pollinators if you follow the label directions but if you go off label if you apply at the different times of the day when all of these pollinators are active when you use higher than the recommended dose rate you can start to impact the environment around you and in some cases you can actually start to cause erosion I or not erosion but pollution problems more so than what the company plans on that being and that can
• 59:30 - 60:00 be a complaint call right in and of itself so very important for us to think about that do all pesticides kill pollinators if you ever do a garden show if you ever go to a demonstration garden day and you're out there talking to producers and you happen to mention that well we used you know Lambda Calin or ciuin to control some of the tobacco hornworms out here people will flat out be mad at you for killing all of the
• 60:00 - 60:30 pollinators okay whether it's warranted or not people have a misconception through media through social media through the one study out of the 800 that claim that gly glyphosate caused cancer they will be very upset because you have killed all pollinators and the reality is many of these pesticides have minimal to no impact on our pollinator species especially a lot of our herbicides that we use in weed control all right if there is one
• 60:30 - 61:00 dandelion in my yard that is at a critical level that I must apply and get rid of it correct no no and I'm very sure that Katarina will go through a lot with our economic thresholds economic action levels uh economic injury levels I'm not going to get into a lot of it but just because you see one tobacco hornworm does not mean you need to spray the entire garden with pesticides you can go pluck that dude off Monitor and
• 61:00 - 61:30 watch for additional Invasion or infestation okay just because we see one dandelion does not need mean we need to spray the whole yard with our herbicides it could and you might want to but it might be a waste of money as well all right when in doubt reach out please please please you have Katarina you have Matthew orwat here in Dallas County we also have agents all across the state and Specialists all across the state that deal specifically with these
• 61:30 - 62:00 issues do not hesitate to ask and do not hesitate to call Texas Department of Agriculture if you have a question or email them they will answer it they will help you and agricultural information here at this toll-free number okay one last point on that and that is to say that your family doesn't like pesticides around the house but they also like pretty pretty trees pretty flowers and a weed-free lawn right so please please
• 62:00 - 62:30 please clean up please put your pesticides back where they're supposed to be with the caps on in their proper bottle and make sure that they're cleaned off so that if Little Jimmy comes up and grabs it he doesn't grab a handful of lamby fluin or whatever that pesticide might be make sure that those are clean all right let's take a break was that good timing or was but sounds awesome and what I didn't
• 62:30 - 63:00 talk to Karina about is the fact that I did want to and I may be outside of that no you're good okay um I wanted to do a little bit of a game and it's kind of a game when we get outside uh we found this worked really really well with our 4 students and even adult learning as well is I'm going to send you guys out into the world like the world within the confines of this area and I want you to pick up plants and plant parts and whatever you want
• 63:00 - 63:30 and bring back and ask an actual question about it and we're going to split off because we don't have time to do that 42 different times I'm going to pair you into twos or threes and you all go out together and find something that you want to know about now please make sure that it's not like what plant diseases this and how what fungicide do I use to because today's lesson is about what weeds right weeds so I want to make sure that I can actually answer the question or Karina one of the two of us
• 63:30 - 64:00 can so but yeah that method has worked really well because I can get out there and spout off and pontificate about a whole bunch of information that you may or may not really want to know about which is probably what I'm doing in here as well right but when we get outside the real world is so much more telling and the real world problems are so much more telling and so I want to make sure that you as Master Gardeners in the world will be able to answer some of those questions that are real world for instance I don't know how many times I
• 64:00 - 64:30 get questions like this they'll send me a plant sample that looks like that but even better it's been in the dashboard of their truck for like a week and crinkled down into nothing and then they're like okay so what is this and how do I control it and I'm like round up but the reality is real world situation
• 64:30 - 65:00 you will be at events you will be out in the world and people we were just having the discussion earlier about people will come up and because you have this book in your library they will come up to you and be like okay so what variety of roted dendrin should I put in a partially shaded partially hot goes down to 30 but gets up to 95 type area round Roundup there you go the is the law no I don't but the reality is people will ask
• 65:00 - 65:30 you the most offthe wall questions I guarantee you I'm giving a talk to the international Society of education and conservation of kangaroos macropods on Sunday never thought I would be giving a presentation about macropods but it's this presentation plus a little bit of information on plant toxicities and so so but yeah you never know what you're going to be doing when you become Master Gardeners don't
• 65:30 - 66:00 feel like you have to know it all okay you can learn just as we learn when those questions come up it's a time for us to do a deep dive into whatever that topic is get back to them within 24 hours reach out to a specialist that we have around the state down in College Station or otherwise and really be able to provide that person with that answer or at least a a contact person contact email that they can reach out to to get that answer so it's very important yes
• 66:00 - 66:30 ma'am so why would we call it a weed if it's in a place that it's undesired by the person beholding said plant right so to you to my daughter my six-year-old henbit is the most beautiful flower of all time most beautiful flower of all time and she will literally go out and pick henbit flowers on a daily basis and bring him in and say see Dad this is beautiful I love it I don't disagree so in a place
• 66:30 - 67:00 where you don't mind henbit being there it is a great flower a great plant to have does anybody know what henbit is related to what plant family is it in we haven't talked about it actually up here who said that mint correct so it's in the mint family lamium and plexico is its actual name but it's in the mint family the Lami AA and that group of plants is
• 67:00 - 67:30 really helpful and beneficial for us for herbs for spices for mojitos and all kinds of good things so we know that those types of plants have their place and what I will say and folks are going to get on me about this one too but the little yellow flowers out there the little purple flowers out here the little white flowers from the mustards there's not a whole lot else flowering right this second that pollinators can utilize and when it gets
• 67:30 - 68:00 up to 50° or 80 degrees like it's going to today the pollinators will be out looking for something to utilize as a nectar source so they have their place now will the HOA allow you to keep the hbit in your yard maybe maybe not you can try to push back you will likely get retroactive push back to say you're in you're not and they will make you mow down your henbit but the reality is in natural areas in underst stories of
• 68:00 - 68:30 garden areas henbit may actually provide some benefit to the overall environment and overall ecosystem for sure yep it's all in the definition of a weed right but if you're trying to do a golf course and you have henbit all over the Fairway is that going to be a weed yes right because nobody wants to take their seven iron out a 6in tall H bit not going to work right what's that weed dondra very good is it a good plant
• 68:30 - 69:00 or a bad plant it depends it's the Texas Tech answer you guys are already there way to go and that's a great answer as a Master Gardener as well right are tobacco horn worms bad dep it depends they make beautiful mild butterflies absolutely do right I was going to say birds eat them too do you like song birds some of them are
• 69:00 - 69:30 insector for sure absolutely so it all depends right okay so dichondra is a weed it is a weed that folks will find in their lawn a lot especially in this part of Texas it is a plant that is not susceptible to very many different herbicides and a lot of times you have to use a Trier based herbicide or a very heavy rate of 24d herbicide to get it there are some of those labeled for lawn and garden but you have to be cautious on which on you use because 24d and
• 69:30 - 70:00 triop here are also very good at controlling roses and controlling lots of broadleaf ornamental plants and Eucalyptus and all kinds of other things so if you have any desirable plant like that in the general area that this is in you may just want to hand pull it and it is a prenal it is a very very uh deep root not deep rooted but very sparse rooted perennial so lot of cool stuff there people have used that for and they definitely do use this for ground cover
• 70:00 - 70:30 soil steril or soil stabilization and just kind of a nice ground cover effect for sure absolutely okay what are we talking about next we are talking about common weeds across North Texas does anybody know what that one is me neither hard yeah this was one of those emails that I got from folks that say what is this and how can I kill
• 70:30 - 71:00 it round up but use it at the right rate because absolutely I believe it's probably in that sge family it kind of looks like one of our rushes and it was found in a very wet area let's think about environment when we think about weed ID because if it's in an area that is dramatically wet
• 71:00 - 71:30 dramatically dry has major soil differences there are certain plants that thrive in those areas and there's a high probability that it's going to be one of those plants so in a very wet area of a field a very wet area of the yard it's going to sustain big populations of sike plants okay they just love water they love it absolutely dondra does too okay we already know this one right so
• 71:30 - 72:00 annual it's going to be controlled by almost all herbicides and in lawns we don't really normally see this this can be somewhat of a problem sometimes in in older Gardens because animals will bring the seed in but usually not a problem but again because it's an annual this is the stage that we want to control this weed in if it gets a seed head on it and it gets to be about 5 and 1/2 ft tall 6et tall and somebody says what herbicide do I use on this I'm going to
• 72:00 - 72:30 say 3 months ago okay all right anybody got an idea on that one Mar's taale has anybody seen that one before real common weed on the roadsides real common weed in some of our pastures depending on the year uh this one is actually one that can be either an annual or a banial and so it can over winter and then come back out and produce a reproductive stage with this one is just starting to do so it
• 72:30 - 73:00 will bolt up that over winter it will kind of sit in more or less a rosette stage but it is in the sunflower family so uh it's going to be pretty controlled by most every herbicide is that an aster it is an aster yes sir sunflower family Aster rer those are all your asers sunflowers uh many of our very problematic weeds in the world green milkweed or analou horn milkweed is another name for that one depending on the species is this a good plant or a
• 73:00 - 73:30 bad plant it depends right if you're trying to raise horsey this is not a good plant if you have grazing livestock that are overg grazed that might eat this plant this is not a good plant if it's a old field or a natural area in a park that doesn't have kids running around in it and it can just be left alone it is an awesome plant because yes monarch butterflies love this plant this is one
• 73:30 - 74:00 of their host species for many of our monarchs and other butterflies uh is it does have a poisonous latex to the sap inside the plant that is what the monarch caterpillars utilize for their defense mechanism and so that is poisonous to most animals although I will say it takes a lot for it to actually impact any kind of mammals so it's it's not generally thought of as true poison it
• 74:00 - 74:30 can cause some dermal reaction on some more sensitive persons but not too often all right what about this one has anybody seen this one smart weeds this is ladies thumb or smart weed Pennsylvania smart weed as the name kind of implies so this is one that also loves wet areas loves water really cool about this plant and ID characteristics that is a sge how' you know that was a
• 74:30 - 75:00 sge notice those triangle leaves right so if you can start passing some of those around if you haven't already this yeah so look at that one everybody as it comes around if somebody sent that one into to you what's this weed and how do I control it there's like seven yeah and it's in Turf so I mean do you want to keep the turf are you trying to get rid of the turf what are we doing in here with every all of it but yeah almost always you're going to have multiple weeds in an area because weeds like to do
• 75:00 - 75:30 what fill in spaces exactly they're going to find an open Niche and they're going to fill that open Niche so absolutely that is a sge probably in the Cypress genus one of the true sedges this is ladies thumb or Pennsylvania smartweed and one really cool differenti Factor about the smart weeds or anything in the polygon ACA so that's curly do as well the big tall plant that you see in the ditches uh come April May that just is huge they all have this little
• 75:30 - 76:00 structure called an ocrea and what that Oka is is just a thin membrane that goes all the way around the stem at each node and it kind of acts as a protective layer as that plant comes off but that's very very common in that species and not common in any other species that we know of around this area so if you need to find out what that is and differentiate it from say prostrate knotweed or other weeds that may look a little bit similar to that it's a good differentiating
• 76:00 - 76:30 Factor Ducks love this by the way so this is one of the plants that they utilize once it puts seed heads on it they will eat the flowers that have the seeds in them and they utilize them for vegetation too uh this is controlled by most of our herbicides um a lot of these pictures were actually taken around my pond there at the house and so uh it's real water loving and loves to be around those Pond Banks all right what's this one does anybody see this
• 76:30 - 77:00 ever does anybody remember what it's related to does anybody recognize that genus Tomatoes potatoes Hors reddish all those good things so this is in the nightshade family and this will have a massive underground tuber so control because it's a perennial when do we need to control that one if we were going to use a herbicide
• 77:00 - 77:30 now for perennial weeds when do we need to control the perennial weeds a flowering or after flowering okay we want to make sure that they get a lot of vegetation on them we want to make sure that carbohydrate FL has switched from going up to produce more Leaf tissue and produce flowers to now going back down because with that
• 77:30 - 78:00 carbohydrate flow that's what the herbicide will travel with through the flm and that will go down into the root system which is the part we really want to kill right the picture of the oak tree that I showed on my intro slide uh I love to use that one because it it was taken out our pond out our tank and it's the oak tree with the Sun kind of behind it which makes the shadow of the oak tree into the tank or the pond and it really demonstrates that while the
• 78:00 - 78:30 visible part is what we see it's the part that we get the madest at with a lot of our perennial plants we're more worried about what's under the soil surface and trying to get control of that so yes the landowner may not want to see that big bushy weed but for perennials we need it to get to that stage to be able to control it effectively you can use herbicides like Roundup or anything else and knock the top off it top of it off but it will likely not go into the root system at
• 78:30 - 79:00 early stages there was a question back here right either well it's either at flowering because there's not a whole lot of nutrients going up when it's actually flowering or after seed production so if you can think about a blackberry bush when all those blackberries start to get ripe and they're fully filled that's when we normally recommend hitting blackberries is when when the berries are full because now it's using all the leaf tissue to pull nutrients back down into the root system get ready for the winter and be able to survive to
• 79:00 - 79:30 the next season and that's when we can get control of the root system what else do we have in this picture burm grass absolutely and then this little one spurge good job who said that so that is prostrate or spotted spurge and it's one of our other weeds that is in the spurge family it will have that latex sap as well I know as a kid I always used to pull the tops off of that and then go around poking people with it some people are allergic to that as well so didn't know that at the time
• 79:30 - 80:00 what else do we have here and I know it's a little bit difficult to see but right down here in the bottom corner there's a little bit more of it up here in the top corner so that is annual Bluegrass so annual Bluegrass is going to be a very very common weed in our yards if you have raised beds that have been there for a while it might be a problem in your raised beds as well and it is an annual as per the name POA anua and the cool thing about it in on ID is number one the seed heads look pretty conspicuous I mean you can kind of tell
• 80:00 - 80:30 it from that but even prior to that a lot of our blueg grasses will have a canoe shaped Leaf so kind of similar to what those sges did where it comes down to a V at the stem it will do the same thing in bluegrass but instead of a triangular stem it's just going to go opposite up the stem so it won't have that triangular look to the leaf or the stem itself itself but it does have a canoe shaped Leaf so when it's very young you can help to identify that but right now it's one of the only grasses
• 80:30 - 81:00 in addition to rescue grass and some of our other brones that are green right now and Ry grass I guess too residual herbicides I have had that up there once or twice what is a residual herbicide what's the definition of that so a residual herbicide is one that is going to have some soil activity and maintain that activity through a certain period of time usually 30 to 90 days and for many of our pasture applications we would prefer to have those for many of our lawn and ornamental applications
• 81:00 - 81:30 we don't want to have those can anybody think of why we would not want to yeah it'll impact everything right for three it'll kill the plants that you want you would actually prefer to have a short residual or non-residual herbicide in those settings because we don't know exactly what we're going to plant two years down the road when there could still be a little bit of that active ingredient in the soil at that time awesome yes beautiful Wildflower beautiful pollinator plant annual loves or it can be a short live perennial as
• 81:30 - 82:00 well loves life in the early summer just gorgeous on the roadsides right and it is a sunflower as well kind of intrinsic there it is susceptible to most broadleaf weed products so any 24ds or glyphosat-prozess that I did want to address real quick and that was that an individual had come to this person and said hey I've been using this herbicide
• 82:00 - 82:30 to kill my plants it's not working why would it not be working if somebody came to you with that statement what would your response be I'll get back to you it depends round up no acquired resistance that could be it wrong product at the wrong time do all products kill broad leaves and grass absolutely not in fact Roundup is one of the very few do all products have
• 82:30 - 83:00 soil residual no absolutely not some of them will some of them won't but if you use the wrong product at the wrong time you will not have an effect let me give you an example 24d is a broadleaf weed herbicide is it's a synthetic oxin meaning that it inspires the plant to grow really fast and grow itself to death if we spray that on annual Bluegrass and try to kill it we will not
• 83:00 - 83:30 because it is a dcot only herbicide and in fact it's used in many of our grass crops like sorghums and wheat uh some and corn to get rid of the broad leaves that are in there because grasses have resistance to that herbicide so what I want to get across is that every herbicide product that you see on the on the Shelf at any of our stores just because it's a herbicide does not mean that it kills all plants all the time
• 83:30 - 84:00 you need to make sure that you read the label right find your specific weed that you're looking to kill on that label and then see what Specific Instructions it has for what timing to use what adant potentially to use with that herbicide and make sure that your timing and product Choice are correct uhoh is this a good plant or a bad plant you know I was just talking to a buddy of mine at one of our Ranch and farm roundups last week and he said that in
• 84:00 - 84:30 white rght up north here a little bit they used to have a 40 acre field that they would plant sunflowers every year in white rght and they used it as a production field but they stopped because everybody traveling up and down 160 wanted to stop jump out in the the plants and take pictures with their family or do whatever they ended up losing tons and tons of production in that acre or so that the people would trample down and yeah they just stopped
• 84:30 - 85:00 growing sunflowers because they couldn't handle that populous pressure all right so very common controlled by most broadspectrum or broadleaf herbicides and what about this one it's poison him loock in fact wild carrot is another one of those that comes out this time of year produces a flower this time of year and is one of the few plants that can be a pollinator food source during the time of the year before all of our summer annuals get cranking so
• 85:00 - 85:30 it's a great plant grows on the roadsides a lot it's actually a part of their roadside wildflower mix and so they're purposely putting it out there uh I did want to point out that a lot of the carrots wild carrot hedge parsley Texas parsley Queen Ann's lace um what am I forgetting here Bishop weed those are all fairly minute plants that are in the ecosystem that you will get calls about about is this poison hemlock going
• 85:30 - 86:00 to kill me or my dogs or my cats so just be aware that those calls are going to come in not everything is poison hemlock no matter what wffa or WFAA says it's not all poison himac in fact we have very very few populations of poison himo in north Texas one species that we will actually have a little bit more of and is somewhat toxic as well as spotted water hemlock but you will commonly only find that in bar ditches in the road or on Highline rways where they cross over
• 86:00 - 86:30 a Waterway of some kind loves loves water is it okay to eat carrot carrots out in the wild would I have asked that question if it was no probably not so most of our carrots if they are going to be toxic the two places where you will find that toxin are the root system system the lower roots or the lower stem portions very new stems and the seed itself that's where most of the toxin
• 86:30 - 87:00 hangs out so please please please do not go out into the wild and forage for carrots that may end your life just don't do that don't do that at all and I will say that not only us but those carrots can sometimes be toxic to your horses to your rabbits uh to your livestock so please don't feed those as well unless you know for sure what it is there are very few of them that have zero toxicity okay this one is one that I did
• 87:00 - 87:30 a lot of research on back in my Cal my Dow or corta days um marshelder is an annual in the sunflower family as well although unlike most of the other sunflowers we've talked about today this one doesn't have much of a showy flower at all now this one similar to Ragweed which is one of our major major allergens in the world right if you see Ragweed kill it because it is an allergen but this one doesn't have a
• 87:30 - 88:00 showy flower so it's it's in the sunflower family but it doesn't have a showy sunflower to it so not all plants within the same plant family are going to exhibit the same traits as well good old Johnson grass all right so what I want to say is that out in the pastures or even in the ditches at the roadside edge of your property Roundup and out rer herbicides are probably going to be the only two herbicides that I would recommend for trying to control those uh species and
• 88:00 - 88:30 this is the stage where you want to spray it because it is a perennial we need it to have flowed and had seed produced so that it starts pulling those herbicides down into the root system all right my good old buddy this is the one we did the experiments on throughout my PhD and some of my Master's Degree actually so introduced remember I said the World's Fair in 1890 1896 so this one is a tough one though and like I said earlier we have data to prove that its photosynthetic rate is much higher than the plants around it
• 88:30 - 89:00 and the number of leaves that it has is a lot higher than the plants around it so is that edible yes so that is the common name and the scientific name and so four plants common names are generally going to be in regular font scientific names will typically be in italics or underlined one of the two and and is it edible to humans no to livestock until it gets to be about 10 in tall yes in a way but one of its
• 89:00 - 89:30 defense mechanisms is that as it gets bigger it starts to develop way more ligan and hemicellulose than most plants which makes it very tough to eat and it also increases in tannin content quite significantly which dissuades animals from grazing it as well why did they bring it in and it was because they thought it was going to be the next gr Alpha Alpha because they could monitor grazing with that the animals wouldn't overg graze it like they do alphaalpha and bloat with this they thought they
• 89:30 - 90:00 could monitor that and I will say some of my counterparts down in Georgia and Auburn are still breeding low tanin varieties of the species even to this day so they still utilize it as a forage crop the other thing that it was widely used as back in the day and you'll notice it especially in the eastern part of the US is Road bank or roadside stabilization and also land reclamation because it can grow in very heavy metal Rich soils so they would go into Old
• 90:00 - 90:30 landmines or not landmines but mines and restore the land with this product or with this uh plant now this is another graph that I made that I kind of like showing at most of my weed presentations because like when do you spray when do you spray for what well the annuals you're probably the warm season annuals you're going to probably want to spray early in the year for many of our more perennial type species you're going you're going to
• 90:30 - 91:00 want to wait and spray it when those plants are fully developed fully mature either have flowers on them or after the seeds have been or the berries have been developed and then we throw in a couple of our most common Woody tree species that are weeds as well uh honey mosquite and honey locust those are two plants that are the the well is it a weed or is it not a weed well it kind of depends on the situation um Dewberry Blackberry are also some of those that we would
• 91:00 - 91:30 classify do we call them a weed or do we not I love blackberries right they're really good the ones that are out in the wild are not nearly as big or nearly as sweet as what we would do in commercial blackberries but they're still edible and uh we do love them so I control some of the Blackberry Ms in my pastor and leave some of them for us and the kids to harvest and that of course is subject to change I forgot to put that little disclaimer on the bottom of it but depends on the year some years may vary
• 91:30 - 92:00 good question so you might end up spraying twice so many of our ranchers will spray once early to get rid of the Buttercup and the mustards and the henbit and then they'll spray later on in the season to get rid of a lot of our later emerging annuals so plants like goatweed and marshelder can have multiple emergence events through the year so they'll need to hit those later but they're also going after a lot of those perennial weeds that are just now getting to the stage that they'll need
• 92:00 - 92:30 to be sprayed so trees and brush can also be a problem I'm just going to go through just a couple of different ways that we can control those safely now this is a talk built for pasture management although I will say that within reason you can get Trier based herbicides over the counter at some of our garden stores that you can do this same technique with on your property do again realize that Trier based herbicides are very effective at
• 92:30 - 93:00 controlling rose bushes and Rota dendrons and all those good plants that we want to keep around so be very very prudent with your application of these herbicides they don't normally but they can translocate through grafted root systems underground as well so just because you want to get rid of your trumpet creep ER out in the middle of the yard that also has a root Going Underground up into your garden area you may actually have that translocate into
• 93:00 - 93:30 your rose bushes because the roots are grafted in a adjacent area so be very very cautious be judicious with this herbicide application we have special nozzles that we can use to do this application these are some of the most frequently used ratios for that mix and for those of you that can't quite see that that's like a one to three mix or like a one to four and a half mix somewhere in there so it really kind of just depends but uh you
• 93:30 - 94:00 don't have to use straight herbicide there are some ready to use herbicide products on the market like Pathfinder and pathway that are ready to use right out of the bottle and so those are on the market don't have to mix with anything I was talking to a person earlier in the week and uh just kind of demonstrating that in the growth of trees you have to remember that as that tree grows a lot of that tissue within the center part of the trunk becomes
• 94:00 - 94:30 connective and structural tissue over time it does no longer act as zym or flum taking water or nutrients up and down through that tree because of that we don't have to waste herbicide on all of that surface area when we do a cut surface treatment we really are only concentrating on that band of active tissue right inside of the trunk there and we call that the cambium layer and that's where all of the nutrients go down and all the water comes up
• 94:30 - 95:00 throughout the plant and so uh we really can just concentrate that herbicide application around that if you get a little drip off on to the tree trunk itself that's not necessarily a bad thing but we don't have to waste herbicide all the way across that level surface okay so just a few trees that I wanted to go over one of which is one of the mains of my existing and I know that we have a lot of it here in HOAs within North Texas Bradford pair one of my favorite things to say is that if you
• 95:00 - 95:30 don't like Bradford paars just wait five years and it'll fall over anyway can't get rid of it and I don't disagree and this is actually a site right outside of Stillwater Oklahoma where the eastern red cedar also in encroaching invasive plant is trying to compete with Bradford peir so we have like two invasives going after it with each other and all of those dead stems or actually dormant stems are all calorie pair that have invaded that rangeland and so it can be
• 95:30 - 96:00 very very invasive it is a root resprouter so if you try to cut the top off there will be plants that come up everywhere especially if you don't use a herbicide in that process and so it's very difficult to deal with for sure they also brilliant brilliant horticulturalists introduced a non-fruiting species so that it would not produce more seed which then hybridized with
• 96:00 - 96:30 some of our native Pairs and produced more seed we're so smart so smart we check all the boxes right check all those boxes so it's native to Asia the climate the system is great here it doesn't have any of those disease Andor insect pathogens that we that it has to worry about so it can just crank on it doesn't have any kind of holding power and I always like to show this one
• 96:30 - 97:00 because if you all are part of an HOA or if you can encourage another solution to Bradford pair as developments go in eastern red bud state tree of Oklahoma yaho American Plum Mexican Plum and Carolina Buckthorn are all very similar in growth habit the Red Bud grows pretty fast and that's one of the reasons why they choose Bradford pair is because it is so fast growing but one of the reasons that Brad forar always falls over in a storm or a light Breeze is
• 97:00 - 97:30 that it grows really fast and it doesn't have that much time to get that structural component built up all right does anybody recognize this one lustrum there you go private non-native right okay so privet at least on the edss or Ed map that's the early detection rapid response um they only have it there but I know for a fact it's way more than there right so that's one thing on distribution Maps you do have to be cautious about is those are only
• 97:30 - 98:00 counties of states that have reported this species as being in their County that takes a person like myself a person like Karina one of our Texas Parks and Wildlife folks uh one of our USDA conservationist to report that before they will add it to the map so it may actually be in these geographies they just don't have a report of it yet so uh very important to kind of take those maps with a grain of salt this one is a
• 98:00 - 98:30 tough one because yes you can pluck it out of the ground with a plucker hand cutting is a thing brush mulching but I beg you please do not do any of these techniques without using all the tools in your toolbox that are available just because the p folks the insect folks coin the term integrated Pest Management first I will say that we recommend and utilize integrated
• 98:30 - 99:00 vegetation Management on a regular basis and we need to utilize all the tools in our toolbox to get control of these species especially the ones that do rapidly resprout yes and no so the question was if you cut a say 4in diameter privet trunk and cut the the top off and then treat the stump will that take care of it I will say that a lot of times especially with these rapid resprouting trees that's going to be privet that's
• 99:00 - 99:30 going to be honey locust that's going to be calorie Paar all of these that really really rapidly resprout honey locust is another one make sure that you do a herbicide treatment of a standing tree basal treatment is what we call that where you treat the top or sorry the bottom 18 in of the stump all the way around the stump with a herbicide and typically diesel or some other basil oil
• 99:30 - 100:00 that will help penetrate through that cut or through that bark before you cut it down and let it sit for about 6 to 12 months and that's the other part that a lot of people don't like they want to treat it and then like two weeks later come back and cut it down no no no no it will not have translocated down through all that root system yeah most of the privet axillary buds are in that top foot and a half to two foot of the trunk itself so there's
• 100:00 - 100:30 not a lot of deep yeah well and the other thing you have to realize too is that just because you got the main privet trunk we didn't talk much about the soil seed bank but that is a thing right so you may have gotten the main trunk there may have been other seeds that emerged and started new plants that were in that once you have a tree whether it's an Easter R Cedar a honey locust a CRP Myrtle a lustrum you are going to have
• 100:30 - 101:00 seed in that soil seed bank around that close proximity that could very easily come up for the next 5 to 10 years so you have to be aware of that and be ready to plan for that as well so I wanted to make just one more quick point and that is that there are several of our native tree species that look a little bit like privet yopon Holly included uh just want to make sure that we get those identified correctly before we go manipulating them because we do want to keep our native trees for sure Rose we have good roses we have bad roses
• 101:00 - 101:30 McCartney Rose Cherokee Rose multifloor rose are all some of the bad ones depending on it depends right and so we have we do have control mechanisms for those I will say that we do have some native roses as well like I talked about with the Dewberry and blackberry those are native to this area so just be cognizant and know what your overall objectives are uh with that management and then I wanted to do a quick wrapup we have all of these
• 101:30 - 102:00 tools but you have to match which tools are going to work with which species tools that you can use for a lot of our broadleaf weeds like the little screwdriver plucker for the dandelions will not work on a privet okay you have to match the tool with what species you're going after the other thing I wanted to talk about just briefly number one always read and follow your labels on your pesticides
• 102:00 - 102:30 number two if you Google it and you can't find a pesticide you might have a problem okay just because the company markets it and says this is an organic option this is a non- pesticidal option this is something that will work and the book actually talks about some of these don't necessarily rely on non- science-based Solutions it needs to be a registered
• 102:30 - 103:00 pesticide to be able to be utilized and recommended by us if you try to go find a corn gluten Mill pesticide label unless I'm mistaken you cannot you can find a registration of corn gluten Mill and it will have a small herbicidal part to that summary what I read in that herbicidal summary is that it took only 1785 pounds per acre of corn gluten Mill
• 103:00 - 103:30 to kill weeds does anybody have an estimate of what that would look like on somebody's front lawn let me let me give it a comparison so normally we recommend about 100 to maybe 300 PBS per acre of fertilizer a really really high rate of fertilizer so that's like four or five that folks just because it does have some herbicidal properties on a few different key species does not mean that it's a viable herbicide to use across the board in
• 103:30 - 104:00 fact corn gluten Mill in the literature they said that in scientific trials it actually did not have different herbicidal effects than strong rates of nitrogen fertilizer let that sink in for just a second what do we use nitrogen fertilizer to do grow stuff right so corn gluten Mill the main component of corn gluten Mill is nitrogen and there is some other stuff
• 104:00 - 104:30 in there but just be very very cautious about non-labeled recommendations that you make we as an organization Texas A&M AGR life extension and as a subsidiary the Texas Master Gardeners can only recommend science-based Solutions so just because Bob new heart or I don't want to break anybody's heart but Neil spurry or anybody else puts it in a book doesn't mean that it's a viable option
• 104:30 - 105:00 and not just an anecdotal situation okay please be cautious about what you recommend because it's a reflection of us it's a reflection of the Dallas County Master Gardeners Association and you want to be able to provide solutions that are something that you can stand behind Okay not that's all I'm going to say about that part I will say that there are some small sections in there about solarization and occulation is that occulation sorry and those are viable
• 105:00 - 105:30 options that are scientifically based okay so there are some things in there but another one that we have very little data on is any kind of concentration of vinegar solution to kill plants that's one that's recommended in a lot of our home remedy books in a lot of our anecdotal type books what I will say is that the ammonia that you use and the vinegar that you use for cooking is about 3 to 5% what they recommend for herbicidal activity is 40% plus do you know what
• 105:30 - 106:00 all vinegar at 40% plus will kill everything everything for real and it will not only kill what's above ground you got to think about the soil environment as well and you're going to learn a little bit more about that this afternoon but there are a lot of living things in that soil environment that will be impacted when you hit the ground with 40% vinegar solution okay the vinegar is not residual and in
• 106:00 - 106:30 fact vinegar itself instantaneously kills that tissue so it will not translocate at all throughout that plant so folks use it to get just an home remedy or an organic option to get the berer grass out of the garden well as we were just talking about Bermudagrass has stolin for days underground even if you hit every leaf tissue on the top top you're going to be fighting that forever and what are you doing to that soil microbe environment the herbicide is a herbicidal agent to kill green plant
• 106:30 - 107:00 tissue it's going have minimal impact on the rest of that environment for soil microbes and for soil stability so just think about that kind of stuff when you read it in a book does not make it real just like if you read it in the online does not make it real okay so with that I think that's everything I had um I know that I am not your agent but anytime you want to please give me a shout please reach out to Katarina first
• 107:00 - 107:30 she's always your go-to even though I'm here today I'm not here Katarina is brilliant in her own right for sure I would definitely reach out to Karina we ready to go outside and play