These Plants Can Cost You Ducks.

[00:00:00]This one can close up a duck hole. This is where the name smartweed can fool you. I hate these things.

[00:00:08]This isn't a total disaster, and this one can make a field look lush and green while silently stealing all of its nutritional value.

[00:00:17]Today, we're talking about five problem plants that can ruin your duck hole if you don't catch them early. I'm Joel Strickland, and this is Surviving Duck Season.

[00:00:29]Hey everybody, thanks for watching.

[00:00:31]Yeah, I know. It's been a while since I've uploaded a video, and I really appreciate many of you have reached out asking, "Hey, are you doing okay? Is everything all right?" Well, we've been going through a lot of stuff behind the scenes. I'm not quite ready to share that story. I know many of you do know what's happened, and I appreciate your prayers. But, I'm really excited about getting back in the game. Over the last 3 or 4 weeks, we've been producing lots of new content for this channel. Let's get into that first video right now.

[00:00:59]Now, there's lots of plants in your natural duck hole. Some of them are good. They provide food for the ducks.

[00:01:06]They provide cover. They also attract food, you know, invertebrates, insects, that sort of thing for the ducks. But then there's the neutral plants. They don't really help or harm anything.

[00:01:18]But today, we're going to be talking about species that we don't like in our duck habitat. These are things that can completely take over if we don't control them. I'm going to be talking about some very common ones that I deal with, and give you suggestions on how to control them. I'm curious, what species are your problem plants that you deal with? Let me know down in the comments.

[00:01:44]Smartweed can be some of the very best duck food you can have, but only if it's the right kind of smartweed. The pink smartweeds like Pennsylvania smartweed and ladysthumb, those are the good ones.

[00:01:56]Those are annual smartweed, but this right here, this is not the good stuff.

[00:02:01]This is swamp smartweed, which is more commonly referred to as white smartweed.

[00:02:06]It's a perennial. This is one of those examples of something that you don't want to have. As you can see behind me, I have got probably 5 acres of solid white smartweed. It's not what we want.

[00:02:18]It can absolutely overtake an area in just a year or so with the right conditions, and that's what's happened here. On this particular piece of property, we had a real bad flood all through the summer last year, and then this year we had a really bad beaver problem that has kept water on the area up until just a few days ago. We're in July right now, and so it gave it the perfect situation to grow.

[00:02:42]>> We've been dealing with beavers for weeks.

[00:02:45]And so we are now going to blow a beaver dam.

[00:02:53]>> So how do you get rid of it? You got to take it aggressively. We're going to spray it. We call it a burn down. Now, we're not actually going to light a match to it. It's just a chemical burn down. What tends to happen when a plant feels stressed or thinks it's going to die, a lot of times they do what's called bolting, which means it quickly makes a seed or a seed pod or whatever the plant may do because it's trying to make sure it can you know, preserve the species as they say. And and so that's it's always better to spray before you get to the flowering stage because a lot of times it will just usher on the quick seed.

[00:03:30]And there's a duck in my pocket.

[00:03:32]>> [music] >> So we're going to spray it with a drone, and then once it is all brown, we're going to come in here and disk it up really, really well. But you got to make sure that the entire plant is totally brown and dead. If there's a little bit of green growth coming back, all you're going to do is you're going to scatter the underground rhizomes that will then cause it to grow back and even more aggressively. So, we're going to spray it, let it let it die back for a couple of weeks, come in and disc it, and then plant something that will quickly overtake the property. Any residual plants that might be growing back will be knocked back. So, we're going to plant some type of grass, which will be in our case will be a millet. It's easy to to take on very quickly, and then hopefully next year we we won't have such a problem. It will probably be something that we'll also have to address a little bit in the next year, but if we can be aggressive with it, knock it back this year, then in the next couple of years we won't have such a problem, and maybe be able to eradicate it on several of our impoundments on this farm. Now, this is a cattail, and most everybody's pretty familiar with cattails. They're found all over the country in marsh and semi-permanent wetland areas. They've got to have water almost all year for them to grow. If you have an area that is more seasonal, like more soil habitat, if it completely dries up, then a lot of times you're not going to have very many cattails. That's the case for me. I've really never had any problem areas with cattails. Only when you start letting water sit for long long periods of time do you have a problem with cattails. Now, most of the problems, like we've talked about with some of the other species of plants, they have rhizomes, roots underneath, and that's what causes the problems. With cattails, it's the same kind of thing. These are the rhizomes. You can see here and here. And when you divide them, that's when you make more plants.

[00:05:30]That's the problem with a lot of these species that come back from the roots, as they say. And there's no nutritional value for ducks. It's good cover, and it's fine if you just have a wall of of If I were to let this water sit and sit and sit for you know, two or three more years without completely draining it off of the property, we would start seeing these cattails go all the way down the bank and then eventually move on into the unit and that's actually what you don't want. They do make great cover if you have areas that you can hold a little bit of water for most of the year around a duck blind where they certainly do hide the duck blind. It's good natural cover. It doesn't knock down very easy because the the leaves are very very stiff and the cattail part is also, you know, very very strong and will last, you know, way after duck season into the spring for the new green grow up. Cattails are like walls. A little wall is good for you. It can help hide you, but a lot of wall boxes in the room and then there's no place for the ducks to land.

[00:06:38]There's just going to be some species of plants that you just don't want. It's just part of the deal.

[00:06:45]Um, God has some for reason. Sometimes we don't always like all the things. We we don't understand that mosquitoes and all kinds of insects have their role that we don't like a lot of those those things, but they do have some kind of benefit. So, we're not trying to eradicate everything, but we do want to to encourage the the types of plants that we want to grow the most and limit the invasive species or the species that we don't consider, you know, beneficial to to our program. This is a cocklebur and it is really one of the plants that I really I really hate them. They make these little spiky balls. Eventually after they flower, there's going to be a whole bunch of little spiky balls and they stick to your to your waders, they stick to your dog and when you go to start pulling them off your dog, it's not a lot of fun for either one of us.

[00:07:38]It's just hitchhiking. The seeds are inside those cockleburs and you know, it's an ingenious design for the plant to be able to propagate itself somewhere else. They also float, so when the river comes up, you know, you can eradicate them on a farm, but then if the river comes up, they're going to float right in, settle in, and then you got a problem all over again. Cocklebur is an annual plant, meaning their entire life cycle is one growing season. So, it only comes back from the seed each year. So, how do you get rid of them?

[00:08:09]Well, mowing them all the way up through the flowering stage sets them back and maybe even eradicates a lot of them.

[00:08:16]It usually doesn't hurt your grasses like barnyard grass and sprangletop.

[00:08:21]You can also spray with a chemical herbicide that has 2,4-D in it if you're just wanting to take care of the broadleaves. Cocklebur is a broadleaf, so that chemical kills your broadleaves and not your grasses. But, if you have things like smartweed, you'll likely hurt it. So, you have to make a choice.

[00:08:38]One of the methods that we've used to get rid of cocklebur is when you first see it, if you already have relatively good habitat, either something that you've planted or it's moist soil coming back up in the springtime, if you start seeing uh little bitty plants, you know, about this high, you can flood it. Uh just get a flood all the way over the top of the plant until it yellows really, really well, and then you can drop the water out of it. Most of the moist soil plants will thrive in that environment as long as they're they're at least, you know, that tall and they can handle it for a couple of days, but the cockleburs don't. In this situation here, of course, we're going to come back in and rework the field up. I would not let this acre just be overtaken by cockleburs. It would it's just like very little value to ducks.

[00:09:29]This is coffee bean. That's what a lot of people know it as. This This an annual plant. It is not any relation to a coffee plant. The The actual true name of the plant is called sesbania or hemp sesbania. The seed pods that come off of it are about that long and they're little little small tubes and there's multiple ones on each plant once the plant gets to maturity.

[00:09:55]If you don't control them, then they get to become invasive and that's what's happened in a lot of the the the southern part of the United States in the wetland areas. These things just thrive like crazy and if you don't control them, they'll overtake an area. This plant right now is about oh, it's a foot and a half maybe.

[00:10:13]Uh they will ultimately, depending upon the uh moisture and all that, they'll get to 10 ft tall. I mean, it's it's very common for them to be 6 or 7 ft tall. I mean, that's kind of the average that we see. They're all over my head and they the stem here of the plant, it continues to get bigger and bigger. It'll be about the size of a dime uh often, maybe a little smaller than that. And so, it's very very very stiff. The problem with these things is it will it it shades out what's underneath it. If you look right here, this plant right here, this is smartweed.

[00:10:48]And in about 3 days, this is all going to be over the top of the smartweed.

[00:10:52]That's how fast this stuff grows. And because these leaves are just they shade everything out and before you know it, you have a monoculture uh as we call it of just a field of nothing but coffee bean plants. Finding an area with quite a bit of coffee bean isn't always a disaster. You know, I just don't want it to become a crop. I don't want my entire field, my entire moist soil unit being coffee bean. 10% is is acceptable.

[00:11:18]>> So, this is an example of a fair amount of coffee beans, but it's just isolated in a very small area. And so, there's there's a clump over there and then there's this there's a pretty good swath right here, but then there's no coffee beans all the way down until you get close to the corner. I have no problem with that. A little bit of coffee beans, like I've said, is not bad because it's a it can act as a really good thermal break for ducks. Um if it's a real tight area, uh they they will land next to the coffee beans and then swim into them. Uh it's it keeps them warm. It It also knocks the wind off of the area because they are like I said, they're like some of them will be 10 ft tall. Uh The other thing about coffee beans that's very interesting in a in a moist soil habitat where it's fairly shallow water, you know, say maybe 12 to 18 in.

[00:12:10]What will happen on a freeze is it it actually acts as a warming mechanism for the the the very shallow thin ice that forms, you know, on a cold morning. Not not like deep frozen, but uh what will happen is the sun hits that that stem and warms the stem up and then it goes down the plant till it gets to the ice and it starts thawing the ice. So, a lot of times in a shallow uh area, you can find the first place to thaw is in the coffee beans and that's where, you know, you can set up on when you're hunting the thaw for ducks in the middle of the daytime. The The danger is you you got to control it. You know, one year of it being like this turns into the next year or the following year of 10 times as much and so, you just got to stay on top of it and treat it, disk it, mow it even at this height. If you were to mow it at this height, there's a good chance that you would knock a lot of it back to where it wouldn't be able to survive.

[00:13:09]This one is also a broadleaf, so you can treat it with a product containing 2,4-D. If you're wanting to selectively control it, you just got to get before it starts flowering. Here Here's an example of a flowering plant right here.

[00:13:22]This little yellow That's for when it starts flowering. You start seeing yellow coming up on the stem of these things, and you know that you you have no time left. That's really the way most of these um plants are. As soon as you start seeing a flower starting to develop, you're just about out of time because, like I said before, uh they'll bolt immediately and start uh trying to make a seed as soon as they feel like that their life is threatened either through drought or from chemical herbicide.

[00:13:52]>> [music] >> One thing about [music] grasses, uh for the most part, grasses in a moist soil environment are a great thing. Uh there's different types of stages that moist soil growth goes through, and in general, if we reset that every 3 to 4 years, it goes back to the grass stage, and then it starts getting more of the forbs, it gets the smartweed, and toothcup, and things like that as it progresses.

[00:14:23]Uh and then at some point you start seeing woody plants like uh willow trees start growing, and then you disk it, and it comes back to grass. Uh but when you when you walk over a levee and you look into your into your habitat, and you see grass all the way across the field, you're you think, "That's awesome." Until you see this.

[00:14:45]And it very quickly becomes a situation where just because you have a field or a moist soil unit full of vegetation, a duck could still starve to death there. This is not grass.

[00:15:00]Well, it is grass. It's not grass spelled k n o t, uh as in tying a knot, and this is definitely not n o t something that you want on your moist soil impoundment. Uh I have got two impoundments that are I'd say 80% it's terrible. Uh we had a a bad flood year last year and it was just the right environment for this stuff to thrive. And this is another one of those species that it grows from the roots.

[00:15:33]And if you were to disk it up, which a lot of things you can disk up and it it takes care of it. This is another one of those things even though it is a grass, it is that's the worst thing you can do is to just disk it up because you're just spreading the seed as it were uh to make it thrive even more. It does not give any other value that I know of other than it just robs the entire uh habitat of, you know, any of the value that it has. Uh you would think that it has some value and I'm sure that there is for something but I I noticed last year when we had one of our impoundments the duck usage went down by more than you know, I I would say a fourth of what had been used in in years past just because it was choking everything out.

[00:16:21]So, what we did on uh this particular unit we haven't addressed yet. This is just a small clump uh but one of our units we've got about 15 acres of just solid uh knot grass. And so, we went in and sprayed it with a drone. And and then uh it's it's died back and then we disked it up. It's not going to correct it 100% in the first year. It usually doesn't as what they tell us. And so, uh we're going to we've disked it up today and we're going to plant rice on it and then it should choke out any residual from growing back. We may have a little problem that we have to correct next year but it's mostly going to be gone uh after this year. This is a one to two-year fix. It's not like some plants are as long as you do it the right way we should be in good shape next year. Obviously, we haven't talked about every undesirable plant. There's lots of them out there. Uh phragmites is another big one that a lot of people have problems with. Uh but if you know the difference between the good plants and the undesirables, it can help you to make a plan to head off a problem that you could potentially have with those species into the future.

[00:17:30]Now, if you want to know more information about the good plants in a moist soil environment, check out this video right here. I'm Joel Strickland.

[00:17:38]God bless you, and I'll see you on the next video.