I am here doing these conversations with living with fire.
So May is Nevada wildfire Awareness Month and this is the time when we work with local, state, and federal
Firefighting agencies partners and with community members and we help educate Nevadans on how to prepare for wildfire now.
We typically do this through a series of in person events throughout the state. And unfortunately coven 19 had a different plan for us. So instead, we're doing these zoom to Facebook Live videos.
Really excited about today's talk. Not only do I think it is. It's going to be incredibly informative, but also timely.
But I also get to hang out with one of my favorites that extension. This is Melody Hefner, she is the urban IBM and pesticide safety education coordinator welcome Melanie
Hey, how are you
Great. How are you doing?
Melody Hefner: I'm tired of zoom. Are you tired of zoom?
Totally
This is our last. This is our last zoom video so
So melody. Can you tell me what is involved in the your role.
Oh my goodness, I, I provide education to homeowners Master Gardeners green industry people and certified pesticide applicators throughout the state on integrated pest management.
And pesticide safety integrated pest management is just integrating all the different ways that you can control a past and using two or more of them to
Help you really gain control of those paths. I teach some of the classes myself, but I also coordinate that training program and I pull in people from the green industry. Other extension personnel people from Nevada. Department of Agriculture and and just get a really diverse
Group of people to present to the audience's
Needs, these are these are great talks that the public should know about. For sure.
And so I am really, really excited to have you on. Would you mind telling us the difference between a noxious and a nuisance weed?
Um, well terminology is really confusing because so many people use so many different terms. So the term elite itself is is very subjective. If you're a wheat farmer and you've got a rose bush growing in your week filled that rose bushes weed any other setting it might not be a weed.
invasive weed. So that's another term that people put around and those are weeds that invade our natural habitat and they're not native plants and they can do detrimental harm.
And nuisance weeds are the weeds that we deal with. And one of the ones we're going to talk about today is cheatgrass and that's a nuisance weed noxious weeds is
That is a designation that's done by each state and they have a noxious weed list and once a week is listed on that state.
Listing, you are required to eradicated, if possible, and prevent it spread. So on your property, you have to take care of that weed and prevent it spreading
on public lands, whoever manages the public land is responsible for trying to eradicate that weed and certainly to prevent it spread. Now sometimes
Noxious weeds are so widespread. I bet you all your audience has has got a puncture vine or goat's head.
That's a state listed noxious weed so technically you're supposed to control it and prevent it spread. If it's on your property and
The tricky part is no one wants to set themselves up to fail so widespread weeds like cheatgrass
Never get put on a state noxious weed list or very rarely are put there because they're so hard to control and eradicate you really don't have a hope of doing that.
So they put weeds that they hope that they can control yellow star thistle. Some things like that. But they really don't want to put these weeds that they don't have a hope of ever controlling
Okay.
And so, can, can people get in trouble if they don't
Get rid of
Technically you can the Nevada Department of Agriculture can write you a citation. Usually they want to work with people they want to make sure people are educated that that is one of the things they really work hard on and so they tend to
Send a letter saying, Hey, did you know that you have told white top growing in your front yard, and that's a state listed noxious weed and and you need to control it. And here's some fact sheets for you so
They don't have the people power to run around writing tickets and and they don't have the people power to inspect everybody's yard, but it is a State law that if you are growing those things on your property, you are required to take care of.
Interesting.
Would you, so we're going to get into cheatgrass here and cheatgrass is considered an annual and our audience might not know what an annual is, can you tell us the difference between an annual and a perennial?
Sure, an annual the name implies, starts its life from a seed to a seed producing plant and it can do that in one year or one growing season.
biennials take two years to produce see they grow that first year form a little rose at di back, come back the following spring and send up the flower shoots and produce seed.
Perennials live for three or more years. And a lot of our noxious weeds are perennial weeds, because they spread, both through their roots and by the production of seed.
And so they are very, very competitive and they they reproduce very easily. I'm cheatgrass is an annual but it's one of those sneaky annuals.
It is called a winter annual. And so what it does is it sprouts in the fall, and it doesn't grow very much in the fall. It just sprouts and gets the root system growing and then it dies back
And one of the reasons she grasses so competitive, is it comes back in the spring earlier than everybody else. It can start growing it soil temperatures of about 46 degrees Fahrenheit.
Other plants don't grow until soil temperatures are 55-60 degrees. And so it can start growing us all the available moisture and all the available nutrients and just outcompete all the other plants growing around it because it can start growing so early.
Thing.
Well, we, we know that cheatgrass is a an invasive annual grass and it is all over the state of Nevada.
And it is bad for fire because it spread so quickly.
And because of this, the living the fire program recommends that
Homeowners remove all cheatgrass from around their home up to 30 feet.
What can you tell us that residents need to understand about it before they remove or or mitigate it?
Okay, so we talked about. It's the life cycle that it's a winter annual
And it's really, that's one of the primary things about integrated pest management is first identify your pest and then do identify something about its life cycle and try to figure out when it's going to be most susceptible to control
control methods for
Cheatgrass when we talk about IPM, we tend to talk about prevention cultural controls or physical mechanical controls biological controls and chemical controls.
IBM doesn't say don't use chemical controls IBM says don't just use chemical controls. So what I thought we could do is just start kind of at that base sort of the prevention.
So, um,
The, the ways that we could prevent is to make sure you're not. It's also sort of a cultural control.
We want to make sure that we don't bring that material onto our property in the first place.
One of the things that you can do when especially if you've got a new landscape and you're installing new plants and landscape.
Really look at those plants and see. I mean, we've all done this, where we've planted the plant and there was a little weed growing in that container plant.
And we just inoculated our property with that weed and if it's got something like cheatgrass in at this going to spread that
Not doing that as a way of preventing things from happening. Another thing that you can do is, I'm the Nevada. Department of Agriculture has a
Through their noxious weed website, they have a certified weed free producers and they actually certified
The seed that you can get weed free seed certified weed free seed that you like. If you're going to plant wild flowers or something.
But they actually certify like rock mulches to be certified weed free. And so that's the kind of material you want to buy and install on your property. I think they do some
Some organic mulches but then again, I'm talking to living with fire people and we don't always want to put the barks, and the wood chips and everything else on the property so
You have to weigh everybody's situation is different. And so that's the one thing I do want to say right up front is
I can't tell you an absolute of what you can do, because even on your property, you may have some, you know, smaller little areas that you're going to manage differently than some then some other area on your property.
So, um, the other thing that you really want to do with cheatgrass and a lot of these other weeds cheatgrass tumble mustard tumbleweed.
Those things love disturb sites. So if you're going to disturb the ground on your property have a plan and make sure you get something growing there again, that will compete with these weeds.
And so
When you mean by disturbed?
You're talking about, like, oh, digging something up or
Yeah, somebody decides to remove their lawn. You got to have a plan for that area or they decide to remove the sagebrush in an area. You got to have a plan for that, or where do you, what are you going to do there. And if you want to leave it.
Nothing growing there. You can't just leave that disturbed soil everything nature finds way things are going to blow in so you want to have a thoughtful plan from start to finish. If you're going to do a disturbance on your property.
So the other control methods that we use a lot or mechanical controls and we'll go through them all and I apologize in advance because it's going to be very disappointing when it comes to cheatgrass.
Mowing so you can mow cheat grass, it's, it's an interesting plant. I went and pulled some yes it was from the cracks in my driveway. Yes, I have to eat grass going on my property to
Melody Hefner: Um, to grass will
Send out little they call them tillers and so it'll grow off to the side. So if you come in and mow this grass.
It will send out sometimes more tillers to the side and the next time you come to mow it the mower will go right over the top of it and you won't control it. So if you mow it, you may have to mow it several times.
And so that isn't necessarily a good option. You certainly do want do not want to mow it right now, because this is pretty darn viable seed.
And you got to have a really good mulching mower to chop this stuff up. So you're just inoculating. The site with the seed. If you decide to try to mold it right now.
Another great thing to do, and this will work right now is hand pulling just like I went and did but you can't pull it and throw it down on the ground.
It'll put the last little oomph into making these seeds viable. So when you pull it. You've got to beg it up and you got to remove it from your property. I'm
Telling people talk about tilling you got to get it down four to six inches.
And some people, especially people that have pastures, or something else. You know, they inherited this problem on their property. They tend to want to do that, telling
The problem is if you do repeated telling your turn up those seeds you buried before. One of the things you need to know about cheatgrass is those seeds can remain viable in the soil for four years.
So that makes it when you bury that stuff. You may just be putting off the problem. So tilling isn't really a good option for cheatgrass specifically
I hesitate to even mention this because it's living with fire, but a time honored tradition that people control weeds is burning.
We all know that burning can really get out of control. We've seen that happen. And even though people know what they're doing and they're trying to be careful burning can get away from us and a homeowner would be liable for any
Problems that they caused by the burning and I don't even think you can get a burn permit right now. The other thing is that
Cheatgrass is kind of fire adapted so you can burn it and you will destroy all the top growth, but it won't burn the seeds, it'll
Already in the soil.
It won't burn those seeds that are already oil and it's going to burn away all the perennials, or any of the other annuals, the native plants that you want in that area.
And the cheat grass will just take off. It has no competition now so burning isn't a very good idea. So him calling at this point is your best option. I'm sorry. That's a lot of sweat equity. So a lot of people think I'm
Melody. You're stupid. I have a
Grass, and I'm not getting on my hands and knees and pulling those little four inch plants up. Okay, so what is your option.
Well, um, the next control option is is a biological control as we're going up the IP and pyramid.
You can graze this stuff. Early in the season, but once those seed head forms. There's nobody's going to try to chew those those seed heads with those pokey ons. There's just
There's no animal hungry enough to try to do that. So there aren't any identified biological controls insects or diseases that will come in and control cheatgrass
If there were, we'd have already, you know, people would have already been all over that. So there's not really that option. So that leaves us with chemical controls.
Um, let's talk about again that key grasses, an annual so an annual plan has one job and one job, only it's supposed to produce seed.
And you have one dot one job only if you want to control it, because it only reproduces by seed. You've got to prevent that seed production. If you've already got plants like this. And they've already made the seed.
That seed is viable that plan is getting ready to die. You can tell when they're mature because they start to get that purple color on the stems and the seed heads and then it's going to dry down and go brown. If you spray herbicides on this plant right now.
It's not going to uptake them. It's getting ready to die. So you're wasting time and money spraying any kind of herbicide on what's growing now.
And a lot of people really hesitate to use herbicides, but I just want you all to know that.
There's some weeds that you're not going to get good control of them unless you if you have a chemical control component in your management plan. There's lots of noxious weeds tall white top there's just, you can pull
until the cows come home, but those have six to 12 foot roots and you're never going to pull those with that you've got to use a chemical control of you want to control that on your properties.
So just to make sure that there's lots of different chemicals and I technically should not be giving out any chemical names or anything else. But what I do want to talk about is just kind of
A categorization of the chemical controls. If you can use. So I want to talk about post emergent versus pre emergent herbicide. So post emergence you apply on the plant actively growing plant and the best time to apply any kind of
Herbicide on a plant is when its young in the seedling stage, it doesn't have very many routes. It doesn't have very many leaves. The leaves are tough and course they haven't formed a waxy cuticle.
So controlling it as a seedling is the best time to control just about any weed. There is out there.
Well, we don't have ceilings. Right now, we're not going to have seedlings until October when it comes to cheek grass.
Pre emergence are chemicals that you put down and you water into the soil. You must water them in. They need about a quarter inch of moisture or more to be watered into the soil.
They form a chemical barrier in the soil and when the seeds in the soil start to sprout and they have to start to sprout. It will not kill the seed it will kill a germinating seed.
When they start to sprout and those little root hairs encounter that chemical barrier, it kills those plants before they ever emerged from the soil. That's why they call it pre emergent
Now there are chemicals that have both of those components. So it's important that you understand if you're going to implement a chemical control.
It is federal law that when you buy a pesticide implicit in your purchase is you will read, understand and follow the label directions.
You can only apply it on the plants that are listed. You can only apply it on the sites that are listed is just very important that you read that chemical before you buy it.
And when you look at the back of that chemical, you have to peel it back. There's several pages of the label there that you have to peel back and read. So I just want to make sure everybody knows to do that.
Um,
Can I add asked one thing
So when should somebody apply a pre emergence if they if they were to, is there a certain time period or
Well, you've got gauge it by the weather, but in the fall and probably somewhere between September, October.
And it's very tricky with cheatgrass because it can be sneaky and decide to sprout and spring to if there wasn't enough moisture in the fall.
But if you apply that and get it watered in in the fall, then it's not going to sprout in the fall and then go dormant.
Once it sprouts and goes dormant pre emergent won't touch it, it's, it's an actively growing plant. It's okay.
So that's why they have some chemicals that have both the pre emergent and post emergent effect to them.
Um, the trickiest part is you know for homeowners. You can water stuff in unless you're that homeowner that has a half an acre of cheatgrass
Then you're going to want to wait for a meaningful, you know, rain event. And I don't know about you, but there was a 70% chance of rain last week I didn't get a drop up here in Spanish springs. So it's very hard in our area to predict when you're actually going to get meaningful rainfall
So to keep that in mind. Remember that you do have to water it in and
There have been some studies done that, you know, you have several little rainstorms that happen.
It won't get that pre emergent as deep as that quarter inch all at once. And that's what you need to do is get that deep in there so that that it will have a good barrier and prevent the seeds from sprouting
So if you apply it in September, October, you may need to reapply it in January, February, if it only has a two or three months residual
The other thing to keep in mind is, what do you want to do on your property. There are materials that have six to 12 month residual but if you are planning in spring to plant wildflower seeds or something.
You don't want to put that long residual because it just wasted money, putting that seed down it. It's not going to sprout. You've got that pre emergent in your soil.
So you have to be very thoughtful about, you know, what's your, what's your long term plan for that that portion of your landscape before you put these things down.
And I actually have a slope. It's about a 40 degree slope in my backyard and I I considered applying pre emergence back there. However, there is a an organic farm right below my property. And all I could imagine.
Is
I apply this pre emergence to prevent these weeds from sprouting and then it just, we get a big rainstorm. And then all sudden those pre emergent go into my neighbor's yard. So that's that stopped me right in
My that
That is really hard slopes are hard.
To move
It can move with the soil. So if it's a really windy Gary and freshly district soil then that can blow in someplace else. So you just, I, I'm sure your neighbors appreciate that you were that thoughtful about it because they're there is a real potential there for their problems to form.
Yeah, yeah. Once I found out more about pre emergence. Then I decided that's really not my option. And there's a lot to consider.
Oh, it's just, it's this big if them flow chart that you have to go through in your head and and each area, your property is going to be a little bit different. How you manage it. So people have to be very thoughtful about this.
Exactly. So what other ways of eliminating cheatgrass are there for you said that there's pre emergence and then there is a chemical
Post emerging
Emerging
And those you would apply to them. The actively growing once in the springtime and there's, you know, over the counter.
Things, anything that will kill a grass will kill that early on, it's just you have to be so on top of it because it matures so quickly. The fact that it's already mature here in in May.
Is, you've got to be out there scouting in February, if you want to. If you want to do an application of post emergent application to these to these weeds or better yet, even in the fall. The problem is people don't always know
It's really hard to identify those grasses when they're tiny and if there's something you planted there and then the cheek grasses coming in and how do you know which is which.
So in those cases, you might have to hand pole. You might have to go out and try to identify it and hand. Pull it in the springtime. So it's very, it's a very frustrating week to control very frustrating. Right.
Now, are there are there any resources that you can point people to to see if they could learn more about this.
Um, I do have some resources. But before I get there.
If you've removed the cheat grass and you want to keep it from coming back. One of the things I do want to tell you the cheek grass doesn't like to be shaded
And so if you can plant.
Vegetation that's going to shade the soil then that'll help the cheatgrass from germinating we talked about rock mulch and
The unfortunate thing with that is you know it's good living with fire wise. But how many people have seen weeds growing in that rock mulch.
So do you know Dust blows in and the seeds blow in and it's protected by the rock mulching so it you there still we control. You have to do even if you put in that rock mulch, um,
native plants if you're wanting your site. The portion of your site to go with native plants. Once you remove that cheatgrass you may or may not
Have to recede. If you want some native grasses or things like that. So that's something to be thoughtful about, especially if you're using pre emergence. So I don't know, most of these people, most of the people are homeowners and I'm not assuming they have
But I think some of them but up to the the urban inner fight kind of wanted to, you know, to go from wild to their yard. They want an interface there that kind of so those are thoughtful things you need to be aware of to is how you want to make that work.
I actually didn't even realize about the shade.
Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't like shaded grows in in on sunny slopes. It doesn't like really sprout in the shade.
Um, yeah.
So are there.
Any other places that folks can go to learn more about this and
Well, we do have a couple of
publications that I wanted people to be aware of and
We have one. It's a nuisance weed Field Guide and all the offices in the state should have this nuisance weed feel guide.
And I know you have a lot of fire adapted community people, they can contact me, they can contact you, we can get these publications out
To their meetings so they can disperse them. They're made to fit in the back pocket or a shirt pocket or a backpack. So they're really handy. We have
Also a noxious weed Field Guide. And unfortunately, these are not available right now. We're hoping to have them available in the summer.
The state legislature has added seven new weeds to the not just we've list. So we have to add the seven new weeds into this book and then we'll reprint it so we're in the process of doing that. We're hoping to have it available to summer so just keep in touch.
My email is m Hefner, M. H. E. F. And, er at UN r.edu
And these these publications are produced as part of a grant. And so if you contact me for big groups that you have. I'm happy to get these publications to you and that way I can keep track of who's got them and and how they're using them. So please do feel free to contact me right
And then would you be able to give presentations to groups if they were interested
Um, yeah, I can do that. I've done presentations on on identification of noxious and nuisance weeds and I'm happy to do that. I have some can PowerPoints.
Great.
Will be sure to put that your email address in the comments section of this
Is there.
Anything else you'd like to add
No, I'm sorry, such a downer to talk about cheatgrass when your only options right now are
Really hand pulling it but I'm just get out there and give it the old college try.
Well, the good thing is that, you know, some people majority people are home. And this is a great time to get out, get some sun stretch your legs and and also
Monday. Yeah.
It does the cheatgrass out of your yard.
Get the cheatgrass out of your yard.
Yeah.
Well, thank you again melody. It's great to see you.
It's great to see you too. I'm hoping we're going back to the office soon.
Oh yeah, soon.
If we get any questions after this Facebook Live will be sure to ask you, and then
Enter. Sure.
Well thanks again.
Alrighty. Okay. Take care.
You too. Bye bye.
