S3:08 Sea Level Rise with Dr. Kate McClure Artwork

The Garden Thyme Podcast

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The Garden Thyme Podcast

S3:08 Sea Level Rise with Dr. Kate McClure

August 05, 2022 • Garden Thyme Podcast • Season 3 • Episode 8

Hello Listener,

In this month's episode, we are speaking all about Climate Change and Sea Level Rise with Dr. Kate McClure from the University of Maryland Sea Grant Extension Program. We talk about the effects of climate change that we are seeing right now and what sea level rise looks like.

Dr. McClure also gives us some online prediction tools to help us better plan our landscape for the future.

We also have our:

Native Plant of the Month - Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina)
Bug of the Month - Baltimore checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton)
Garden Tips of the Month

The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Hosts are Mikaela Boley- Senior Agent Associate (Talbot County) for Horticulture, Rachel Rhodes- Agent Associate for Horticulture (Queen Anne's County), and Emily Zobel-Senior Agent Associate for Agriculture (Dorchester County).

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The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Hosts are Mikaela Boley- Principal Agent Associate (Talbot County) for Horticulture; Rachel Rhodes- Senior Agent Associate for Horticulture (Queen Anne's County); and Emily Zobel- Senior Agent Associate for Agriculture (Dorchester County).

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University programs, activities, and facilities are available to all wit...

Episode: S03:E08 - Climate Change and Sea Level Rise with Dr. Kate McClure

Note: The Garden Thyme Podcast is produced for the ear and is designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

: Up beat music:

Mikaela

Hello, listener. Welcome to the University of Maryland Extension presents the Garden Thyme podcast where we talk about getting down and dirty in your garden. We're your host. I'm Mikaela.

Rachel

I'm Rachel.

Emily

And I'm Emily.

Mikaela

And in this month's episode, we're talking about climate change and sea level rise with Dr. Kate McClure, who is a coastal climate specialist with the University of Maryland Sea Grant Extension Program.

:Upbeat Music:

Mikaela

Kate, it's really nice to have you here with us today

Kate

Hi , thanks for having me.

Mikaela

So our scientific understanding of climate change indicates that products of climate change will continue to accelerate into the foreseeable future, and so we thought this might be a really helpful conversation to have, especially because, well, Maryland is very significant in terms of a coastal climate. So we're looking forward to talking with you about what you kind of see in your work and what we can expect to see as homeowners and community members in Maryland.

Kate

Yeah, that's right. We're definitely seeing some of the effects of climate change already here in Maryland, and like you said, those are expected to continue and even accelerate in the future. We're seeing warmer temperatures as well as more intense precipitation events, and as well as you mentioned Maryland being a very coastal state, we're also dealing with the issue of sea level rise.

Emily

You are the coastal climate specialist with University of Maryland Sea Grant extension program. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that job entails and what you do with University of Maryland Extension?

Kate

Sure, yeah. So as a coastal climate specialist, it's my role to work with coastal communities throughout the state on helping residents and decision makers understand and prepare for the effects of climate change. So when we talk about coastal communities with Sea Grant, we use NOAAs definition of coastal, which is any county that touches anything title. So it's not quite all of Maryland, but it's a lot of Maryland.

Emily

It's the entire Eastern shore, at least.

Kate

Yeah, a fair amount of the Western Shore.

Mikaela

I was going to say a lot of the Western Shore too.

Kate

As we know, climate change is happening. There's a lot of information out there, but it's not always the easiest to access or find exactly what you need to answer your specific questions. So a lot of what I do is helping folks find and understand the information they need to make good decisions. So one audience I work with a lot of our local government staff because those are the people who are doing a lot of the work in communities, making plans and figuring out how to address some of these issues on a larger scale than what individual homeowners can do on their own.

Mikaela

Well, that's great.

Emily

So what are some examples of how the general public is kind of feeling climate change now?

Kate

Yeah, so I think one example of that is with the changes we're seeing in precipitation here in Maryland and throughout the mid atlantic. The most intense rain events we're seeing are becoming more intense and that's expected to continue in the future. So if it kind of feels like you're having a really huge, tremendous rainstorms that's happening more than it used to like, that is because of climate change, and that could be a really big issue to deal with both our homeowners and gardeners, farmers, all sorts of folks, because you have those intense rain events, there's just so much water coming down and where does it go? And that can lead to potentially flooding issues and then also just being too much water sometimes for our storm water management systems to be able to accommodate, which can lead to even more flooding issues.

Emily

We had Jen Dindinger on two years ago, I think we had her in 2020 talking about storm water, and one of the things I learned, and I can't remember who was on the podcast or just something that she said offhand was I know growing up I was at this preconceived notion that stormwater still went to the treatment plant and she clarified that it doesn't and it just goes straight out to the bay in our case. So I think these more heavy rain events definitely could potentially lead to more pollution in the bay.

Kate

Yeah, potentially because you have these huge rain events, all this water is then washing more pollutants into the bay, and that's a really good point you made about the storm water going out to the bay, another thing interesting makes this kind of a challenging issue to deal with is that you have these issues because of both precipitation and sea level rise. Because as the sea level is getting higher, that can make it harder for that water to drain out into the bay. So you have water essentially coming from both directions and that can make these drainage issues a bit more complicated to deal with in lowlying areas.

Mikaela

Well, and likewise erosion becoming a significant issue as well. Right, with more velocity of water, more risk of soil getting washed away, especially in bear areas.

Kate

Yes, for sure.

Mikaela

Yeah.

Emily

So along that note, some things that homeowners can do to help combat this would be going and installing things like rain barrels as well as installing rain gardens because that helps to slow down that water and hold it to prevent it from running off into the bay, and to learn more about both of those, you can check out our episode that we talked to Jen Dindinger who was also part of University of Maryland Extension Sea Grant.

Kate

Another way that its really impact people a lot is with more extreme heat events, and being in July, that feels very timely to talk about right now because especially having more intense or frequent heat waves, that can be a problem for human health, especially people who don't have access to air conditioning. It can be that people with air conditioning have to pay more to be able to keep their homes cool, and if you like doing things outside, for example, gardening or really anything else, that those really hot conditions can be potentially dangerous. But then there's also the impact of those temperatures on what you're trying to grow.

Mikaela

Yeah, I do what's called reverse hibernation, where I go into hibernating starting mid June through August.

Kate

That's the way to do it.

Mikaela

Yeah. I don't know why people sleep on winter so much, because the summer is just brutal.

Kate

Especially here in Maryland. I used to live in Massachusetts, and then I get the winter hibernation thing.

Mikaela

Yeah.

Emily

So in addition to climate change, having those temperature swings, I think you're very correct in that that can definitely have dramatic effects on the plants that we're growing in our garden's. So if it's hotter outside, you're obviously going to need to water your plants more, and as we know, and we've seen, there's various thresholds for plants, and while a lot of our vegetable garden plants might still be okay, our landscape plants, definitely, there are some that, for instance, The Blue Spruce is the one we always use as an example, is we're already in its warmer range anyways. So as our temperature climbs, we might slowly see it becoming even more dramatic and other plants may get pushed out of our range.

Mikaela

And actually, I know that the US. Forest Service has like, a climate change tree atlas that kind of shows the projected path of growing range for different trees, so people who are investing in long term species can see whether over the next ten to 20 years, that plant might not be very happy in this area anymore, and actually, speaking of, I know Kate has some great tools online that can help with the projection of temperature and flooding, and I know I'm forgetting a lot of other things that can do, but do you want to talk about those, Kate? Sure.

Kate

There's one tool from NOAA called their Climate Explorer that I really like. It has data for every county in the US. So you can go to the address.

Emily

Well, we'll put the link in our show notes.

Kate

So it's called the NOAA Climate Explorer, and you can put in any county in the US, and it has information on both observed climate variables and what's projected to happen. So you can see for your county things like precipitation and average temperatures, all sorts of different variables. You can look at graphs from and then see projections of what they're likely to be like in the future under both growing and stabilized emission scenarios, and that's because looking towards the future with climate change, how much the climate changes is really going to depend on the amount of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, that are in the atmosphere. The productions are available for a couple of different scenarios of what happens with those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Mikaela

All I did was Google NOAA climate explorer and it was the first thing that came up. Yeah, I find it really cool because I like facts and figures. Numbers help me to kind of predict my life, I guess. So for me, I thought it was really interesting.

Kate

Yeah, and I liked what you were saying, Mikeala, about the tool for selecting trees. That reminded me of working with these coastal communities. I'm thinking about sea level rise. One thing we talk a lot about is what sort of time frame you're thinking about for your decision. Because like, some decisions you make are only going to matter for a couple of years and then you'll have opportunities to make other choices or adjustments or maybe it just isn't an issue after that. Whereas other decisions, like if you're building something like a school, you want that to exist for decades and so the time frame that you're thinking about is much longer, and I think that kind of applies some of these gardening ideas too. Like if you're planning a tree, you want it to be there probably for decades. So that's a case where it would be really worthwhile to think about what the climate might be like in the future, and if you're picking a tree that's good for that,

Mikaela

Would you say that's a big challenge in communicating to groups is just trying to get them to think long term and what that's going to look like.

Kate

I think it's challenging thinking about longer time frames just because we all have really immediate problems that we're dealing with here and now, and while we are already seeing the effects of climate change, considering how they're going to look in the future, can sometimes still feel a bit more distant than the things we're dealing with today. Pandemic and every other issue that we're dealing with our daily lives. It's that balance between the short term and the long term planning.

Rachel

Yeah.

Kate

But the good news is that as gardeners, a lot of the decisions that people might be making now aren't necessarily locked in stone thinking about climate adaptation. There's this idea of trying to being able to adapt and make adjustments as conditions change. If you plant something, maybe it doesn't work out or you figure out in a couple of years that something else might be better. You can make those adjustments. It's really when you're making those investments or decisions that are going to have longer ramifications that I think thinking about climate change becomes even more important.

Mikaela

Yeah, I agree. Well, other side notes. Not to be doom and gloom, but things we can expect climate change to impact is increase in invasive pest pressure, like you said, drier, droughts, more wetter periods and those time frames could be extended past their normalcy lots of things that are going to impact us directly in our backyards.

Rachel

So I think that as Horticulture educators, we see a lot of things in our office and most of the disease issues that we have people bring in are because of those temperature swings that we see either like a really dry period or the April, May and June where we get a huge influx of rain, and the problems that are associated with that, like nuisance flooding and that influx of increased rain pressure in the spring can be devastating to people's landscapes.

Emily

What does sea level rise look like from like a practical standpoint?

Kate

So many places on the coast in Maryland and throughout the Chesapeake Bay region and everywhere we're seeing more and more of what's called high tide flooding or sometimes it's called nuisance flooding or Sunny Day flooding, and this is when you have flooding, and it's not because there's been any rain or particular storm. It's just an unusually high tide that causes flooding on something that happened in Dorchester. There's flooding on roads, also places like Baltimore and Annapolis, it happens regularly, and so that sort of flooding from higher tides is happening more frequently now because of sea level rise, and it also can kind of give an idea of what the coastline might look like in the future when sea levels are permanently at that higher level, and another tool could make a shout out to called the My Coast Tool, which is an online platform where people can take pictures of nuisance flooding or other flooding events and upload them, and it correlates the pictures, time and geographic information with the local tide and weather conditions from when the picture was taken, and so that's kind of a repository that's collecting these pictures of what do some splitting looks like in Maryland, which could help inform what it will look like in the future with sea level rise thanks.

Kate

Look like in the future with sea level raise. But also that is what sea level raise is looking like today.

Emily

That's important because I think sometimes we hear sea level rise and I think, okay, the water is just going to go up a foot, so there's just going to be a foot of water everywhere. So like what does that sort of mean though, in a non cartoony way?

Kate

Yeah, and the other thing is that water levels are always going to vary a lot. You have the tides coming and going every day. You can also have weather systems that affect the water levels and there will be a storm or even just like wind pushing water in more than usual, and so all those sorts of variables are still going to be happening. Even with sealed price, we're going to be overlaid with that. So just all of those levels are going to be a bit higher as sea levels rise than they are today.

Emily

Okay. So Kate, we've talked a lot about kind of the coastal areas. We're going to have listeners that aren't necessarily in the Mid-Atlantic area and aren't along the coastline. How does this affect them? Why should they care as well?

Kate

Yeah, so people who don't live near the coast are still experiencing lots of impacts of climate change. I mean, these changes in precipitation and temperature that we've been talking about, those still apply, and in terms of how these coastal climate impacts matter to folks inland, if you look at a map and where most people live in the US. It's the vast majority live near the coasts, and particularly as sea levels rise and flooding becomes more and more of an issue in our coastal areas, that's going to affect a lot of people, and those people might need to move somewhere or might need to invest a lot of money into being able to continue living where they are, and either one of those options is something that could have impacts on people who aren't even living directly near the coast.

Rachel

Mikeala is usually our deep diver for facts. I decided to be the kind of figure fact finder today and I was doing some research on population growth and the Chesapeake Bay watershed and it stated that in the next 15 years, the Chesapeake Bay watershed population is expected to surpass 20 million people. That's a huge number.

Emily

Wow.

Mikaela

Well, even inland, thinking about how much flooding I hear happening in Minnesota, they've had some pretty devastating flooding this past summer. So it's not just coastal states, right? It's the Midwest and the south that are also facing extreme weather events that they may normally not have and faced with some real problems if it has nowhere to go.

Emily

That was going to actually be one of my next questions for Kate, which is we're talking a lot about sea level rise in the sea.

Mikaela

Sorry, Emily.

Emily

No, it's okay. I was just going to say, do you know if we're seeing similar things happening around like the Great Lakes or in rivers and are they having water issues the same way that we are? Obviously, like we're dealing with sea level rise here because we have the sea and the ocean that works its way up. But is the same thing happening like way upstream and stuff like that? If you don't know, that's okay. I can also just delete out my question.

Kate

It's an interesting question. Let me take what do I know? The answer, my official answer is going to have to be I don't know. But it's interesting though, because it's not a sea. They aren't having sea level rise the way we are here on the coast, but there are different sea grant programs. There's some of the Great Lakes, and they're always talking about changing water levels. I think different factors govern that, but they seem concerned about water levels and I'm not really sure if it's too high or too low, but it's a thing that they talk about.

Mikaela

Well, I have family in the Midwest, so I get updates all the time. Some of my family lives on Lake Superior and I'm laughing because you're exactly right. The thing she talks about the most is the weather off the lake and the level of the lake, whether it's really high or really low. I think they've been seeing some really low levels, but like this year, it's been fairly normal, so it's so dependent on the year. But they've had some serious flooding in the past as well, like serious rain events in the last five years or so.

Kate

In the Chesapeake Bay region are tidal tributaries, like the little streams that feed into the bay. They can be tidally influenced pretty far up then. So sometimes, if there are higher sea levels, can't lead to flooding further inland than you might think at first glance of a map that you're not right on the bay could still be a contributing factor. So one other thing that we haven't talked about yet that I think really matters. For homeowner gardeners in particular. Is that climate change is also impacting the timing of our seasons and when different events are happening. Which I'm sure the three of you could speak much more about some of the impacts we're seeing from that. But just the timing of when you have different pollinators and plants and all these different biological functions happening. That with climate change. That it's changing some of that, and it can kind of lead to some mismatches of the timing of when these different things are happening. Which can have even larger. Sometimes impacts that are harder to predict. It's one thing to say, oh, it's getting hotter, so then this plant might not be able to grow here anymore. But when you start talking about these biological interactions, there's this whole added layer of complexity that I think can really make a lot of difference.

Rachel

Emily and I were on a training, and we were talking about squash vine bores and how, you know, there's this adage that, hey, plant your squash in June to help avoid squash vine pores, and Emily and I are both like, that doesn't work for us because we know we're getting at least two generations of squash vind boers now,

Emily

I think that's a great example, Rachel, and the one that I always give the disease pathogens or insects that get blown up from the south every single year, some of them with climate change may be able to start over wintering in our area because we're right at that cusp of the northern and southern range of a lot of stuff.

Rachel

But I think we're also seeing that with tick populations, and Emily, I know you love ticks. They're still active through the winter because we're not getting those 30 days of hard freeze.

Mikaela

EPA has a whole study on how and it might be more related to lymes. Like, it's not the ticket itself, but it's the bacterium that they harbor. It says the bacterium that causes Lyme disease are all strongly influenced by clumatic factors, especially temperature, precipitation and humidity, and that we can expect the range of Lyme's disease or incidences to expand from the area they are currently in. But I think what they're trying to get at is that like, the Mid-Atlantic is a hot spot and then there's a hot spot in the Midwest and those areas will probably continue to expand with climate change.

Rachel

Yay.

Kate

So what climate related to plants that I learned recently? I probably should have known way earlier and probably everyone else already knows, but I wasn't aware of the hardiness zones for plants. But it's really based on the winter temperature of how cold it gets. I always assumed that the higher, like summer temperatures were influencing that, but it was interesting to me that that's what it's based on.

Mikaela

It's funny you say that because I was debating whether to bring this up. So there is now coming out heat hardiness stones and I believe USDA, it might be the American Horticultural Society, and so they have heat hardiness zone maps now, and what we're finding is of course, with climate change, the number of days that we have heat over 86 degree Fahrenheit is increasing, and the reason that number is significant is because at 86 degrees, that's when plants exhibit physiological damage from heat. So of course the more days we have of that higher heat, the harder it is on plants, especially the ones that aren't able to handle all of those heat days. So there you go. You can complete the cycle now. You have hardiness zones, but you have also heat zones.

Emily

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, Kate. We learned a whole bunch and we hope our listeners learned and enjoyed this as well. So thank you so much.

Kate

My pleasure. This was fun. I appreciate the invitation.

:Bird Chrips:

Mikaela

It's the native plan for the month with Mikaela!

Mikaela

I'm kind of psyched about my choice for this month though. It's Staghorn sumac, which is Rhus typhina and so this might not be a super popular pick, but I don't know why everybody else is sleeping on this super lovable shrubby misfit kind of family. It does belong to the cashew family and species in this group have particular significance in medicine and herbal uses. Few other things that belong to this family just because it's interesting mangoes,

Emily

I love mangoes.

Rachel

So Do I.

Mikaela

And poison ivy, which we don't love.

Rachel

No, we don't.

Emily

Wait, poison ivy and mangoes are in the same family of plants.

Mikaela

Yeah, they're in the cashew family.

Emily

So weird and also really cool. Plants are amazing.

Mikaela

Plants are amazing. So the Stankhorn sumac is the largest of the native species that grow here in Maryland and it's somewhere between a tree and a shrub. Some people consider a small tree or a large shrub, whatever, it's in a weird range. But rather than growing singly like one tree stem, these grow in thickets and they have strong rhizomatous habits like many other sumac. So they actually form little colonies of sumac, which makes them great for providing ground cover and for erosion control and that kind of thing. So this forms these dense grows of stout branches and they're filled with these huge compound leaves, and compound leaves are something that's considered when it has many leaflets on one rakus, and the rakus is just the thing that runs down the middle, so they can bear anywhere from 13 to 31 leaflets. It's a huge leaf and they're about ten to 15 inches long, depending on the specimen. But the most distinguishing characteristic is the clusters of upright flowers and they seem pretty nondescript when they actually bloom, which is in June and July. But then they start to bear these really bright red fuzzy berries starting in August, and these are very obvious. They almost look like the flame of a candle. That's kind of the shape that they're in, and they're high above the canopy, so you can usually see them pretty easily. These berries make sumacs a plant of high wildlife value because almost everything eats them, and the dense colonies that they create are excellent habitat for animals, especially upland birds, Bob white quail and turkeys are a couple of ones that come to mind. So while it's also a popular choice with native bees, this is a larval host plant for the luna moth, so it just keeps getting better.

Rachel

Yay!

Mikaela

I know I love luna moths, so I think I need to plant some of these immediately, and so if I haven't convinced you yet, Sumax also have really great fall color in a wide variety of reds and dark oranges. So not all sumacs grow well in the cultivated landscape, so they don't always make a good ornamental kind of plant. But they are extremely tolerant of tough urban conditions as well as dry soils, steep slopes, and they handle full sun to part shade areas, so it makes it a really good choice for embankments and erosion control may be areas where you aren't able to mow the grass because it's too sleep or it's a ditch or something like that. This makes it a really good spot for that. So the only word of caution, like I said, some people are sensitive to members of the cashew or sumac family and so they may have adverse reactions to the sap, and that's only if you're pruning it and cutting it and stuff. If it's in the wild and you're not touching it, you're fine. But as I mentioned before, this family does include poison ivy, so that's probably where it gets that characteristic. So just wear gloves when you're handling it's. Definitely not as bad as poison ivy, so I don't want to freak anybody out, but it's just a word of caution.

Emily

Cool. I'm glad you said that because I was going to ask if the poison sumac was similar enough to this, if people needed to be cautious around, like handling sap and cutting some stuff.

Mikaela

No, it's very similar to like, milkweeds and that milky, sticky stuff that's what it kind of looks like, and I think there must be some kind of toxin in that that makes some people react badly to it. I have never had a bad reaction to just the sumac itself, just poison ivy.

Emily

It's a good reminder to always wear gloves anyways when doing gardening.

Rachel

Yeah.

Emily

Awesome.

Mikaela

That's my name of plant for the month. I hope everybody will appreciate Sumax maybe a little bit more.

Emily

How fuzzy are the fuzzy berries? Like, I'm going to Google it.

Mikaela

Didn't want to say this is part of the plant of the month, but there's a lot of medicinal benefits from the berries as well. So some people actually make teas and lemonades out of it, but you can't put them in boiling water because for some reason, the heat releases a toxin in the berries that can give you diarrhea. So they have to be cold, steeped. So, like, lukewarm cold water only, and then you just, like, strain it out and use it, and lemonade and stuff. You put sugar in it. I have not tried making it myself. I've had it before. It's pretty good. Pretty tasty.

Rachel

Cool.

Emily

You're right, though. They are fuzzy. Look at that.

Rachel

They're really cute.

Mikaela

They're very persistent, so they actually will last into, like, the fall and winter. The berries will hold on for a while

Emily

if they don't get eaten by birds.

Mikaela

Exactly. They'll probably get eaten by some.

Rachel

So when you mentioned this was, like, in between a shrub and a tree, is it like 15 to 20 foot highish

Mikaela

The staghorn can reach, I think up to about 30ft tall.

Rachel

Okay.

Mikaela

Which would be a super mature specimen. But, like, smooth sumac, which is not that much different in appearance, only gets to, like, 20ft tall. The wind sumac is probably one of the smaller ones at about, I don't know, 10ft at most, and then, of course, low growing sumac or roose aromatica only gets, think, about four or 5ft tall.

Emily

Now, I know a lot of these pseudo short tree shrubs prefer dappled light or part shade. Is this one the same?

Mikaela

No, they'll grow in full hot sun. I mean, that's one of their characteristics, is that they can handle super dry, crappy soils, but I think they must learn to adapt to dappled sunlight because they form these colonies, and they're often along roadsides or in. So you'll find them a lot in hedgehogs, kind of that transition area between the field and tree.

Emily

Awesome. I like this. This was a cool native plant at the moment.

Mikaela

Yeah, I love sumacs. Everybody hates them. I don't know why.

Emily

Do they have, like, a messy seed, maybe?

Mikaela

No, I think people might call them trashy because they grow on the roadsides and stuff like that, and they aren't like a single stem tree that you can train into the landscape. It's definitely more of, like a conservation kind of landscaping, but I kind of want one planted just for looks in my yard.

Rachel

Maybe there's a negative connotation with sumac and associating that with poison sumac and maybe they're just like oh,

Mikaela

That's true. I think you're right. It's good to be cautious about plant identification. It could easily be mistaken for poison sumac. One of the biggest differences is that poison sumac will have white berries and they're not fuzzy, they're a little bit larger, whereas the steakhorn and the smooth sumac will have those clusters of red berries.

:buzzing nosie:

What's buzzing? It's the bug of the month with Emily.

Emily

So this month bug of the month is the Baltimore Checkers spot which is the Maryland state insect, and this is the type of butterflies. They are gorgeous. So they're slightly on the medium to largest size butterflies and that their wingspan is about two and a half inches and they are striking in that they are kind of checkered in a black, orange and white pattern. So their wings are going to have a black base to them with orange spots in two broad borders. The inner one is going to be white and the outer one is going to be sort of an orange to yellowish orange coloration, and Google it if you've never seen one of these before, they're beautiful. I've sort of only seen a handful of these out in the wild because they're not endangered but they're a little bit more on the rare side. But you can normally see them as they're fluttering along because they're a little sporadic in the flight. But then the sunlight catches that orange and white and you just kind of zoom in on them. They're very pretty butterflies. The caterpillars are rather unique looking. They have a black head and a body that's covered in alternating bands of black and bright yellow lines with a spine like protrusion arranged in alternating bands.

Emily

And one of the neat things about these guys is that when they get to their fourth install, they actually overwinter by rolling themselves up and leaves down on the ground. So these guys will overwinter in a larvae stage and then come out in the spring and then they'll feed and then the pupae and I actually think they're pupae are some of the prettiest chrysalis out there. Like I know a lot of people love the way the monarch one has that like green with the gold band. These ones are white with bright orange and yellow and black markings.

Mikaela

They look like a sculpture. They're beautiful.

Emily

They're super pretty chrysalis. Baltimore Checkerspot despite being Maryland state insect, actually has a pretty good range to it. So its range will extend from southern Canada to the eastern United States to the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina, west across the Great Lakes. So I tend to say think like southern Canada all the way down to like northern Georgia ish and then across from the Eastern shore to think like Minnesota down to like Missouri. If you put a box around that kind of area, that's the range that they're in. They will have one generation per year, and when your generation is active depends on whether or not you're in the north or the south. So if you're in that southern area of their range, they're going to be active May through June and if you're in the northern area, they're going to be active June through August. Now, Maryland is kind of weird and that we're right at the border of both, so we can kind of have active populations anytime during there. But as climate change happens, we'll probably get pushed more into that southern brooding kind of time period of them. So the Baltimore Checkerspot caterpillars host plant is exclusively the white turtle head at the very beginning of their life stage.

Emily

So that first and second install exclusively want to feed on white turtle head. But as they grow, they'll move off to various other host plants including things like arrow, wood, vermina, narrow leaf plantain persimmons and honeycomb. So in order to prevent the high mortality from falling off the plant or from parasitisms, the caterpillars themselves, when they hatch out, will form small clusters at the edge of leaves and will oftentimes roll them up and kind of put some webbing. So it's not as complex as say like the eastern tent caterpillar or the fall web worm webbing. But you might have some leads start getting curled and some webbing in them if you've got these guys feeding on your plants, and then they will hatch out and start their feeding, and then again, that fourth in star stage will hibernate enrolled up leaves down on the ground over winter and then emerge in the spring to complete the life cycle. So their life cycle does take a whole year with them over wintering, as a caterpillar, the adult Baltimore Checkerspot butterflies will feed on a wide variety of flowering plants that bloom during kind of those active seasons that they're in.

Emily

So you'll commonly find these guys on milkweed, even though they don't lay their eggs on them. Dog banes and others. Several species of mountain have been known to kind of bring these guys in. Wild rose as well as wild BlackBerry are common feeding plants for the adults. To combat predators, those newly hatched caterpillars will build a communal web at the end of their host plant leaves where they're more protected from specifically the parasitic wasp because that tends to be their higher prediction once a butterfly. However, the Baltimore Checker spot is poisonous and bad tasting. So similar to the monarch getting in those like toxins from the multi plant, the Baltimore Tracker spot caterpillar sort of do the same off of some of their either the white turtle head or other host plants that they're feeding on, and this protects the butterflies from birds, and again, they've got that bright warning coloration to it as well. So that is my bug of the month for August

Mikaela

That was a good one, Emily. I'm actually surprised because I thought the larvae were host specific to turtle head.

Emily

So they are in the first few instars, but I found the larger instars feeding on other plants. But they typically find the eggs, like early on in their life stage, they just want to eat the white turtle head. So think of them as like Rachel kids that only want to eat.

Mikaela

They graduate. I think I just write them off because I figure I'll never see one. But this is one of those few species where the caterpillar is super cool, the chrysalis is super cool, and the butterfly is super cool.

Rachel

Yeah.

Emily

They're definitely cool. We tend to find higher populations in kind of central and western Maryland compared to the Eastern Shore. We just don't normally get as many numbers here, and maybe that's just because turtle head isn't as common here as it is. I know I've got two or three turtle heads planted in my shade garden, specifically with the hopes of providing habitat for these guys, but again, my garden alone cannot cause them to cross the Bay Bridge.

Rachel

Exactly.

Emily

Bay Bridge traffic, but I think they definitely are a cool one.

:Horn Nosie:

Rachel

Get your tip of the month here with Rachel.

Rachel

So it's a really good time to water your newly planted trees or shrubs. If you planted things in the spring because it's so dry, they need that extra boost of water, allow water to soak into the surrounding soil and the rupal. Don't water directly on the leaves and make sure that you're not watering in the heat of the day. Try to water early in the morning or in the evening so that you're not getting sun sculpt on your plants and you're not promoting those bacterial and disease issues that you can see if you're watering directly on your plants. Fall Web Room is a late summer caterpillar. It's about one to two inches long, and it creates the tent webbing on the ends of branches, and they're going to be outright about now. These are on site, they cause little damage, and what these caterpillars do, they like to just strip the leaves off of some trees and you're going to be okay. If you have them, you can cut them off or you can open it up for the birds and feed some stuff. You're going to see other numerous caterpillars right now, including the orange striped oak worm, the green striped maple worm, oak skeletonizers, saw flies are also feeding on various shade trees, and no control method is necessary for these.

Rachel

You will see some of your stinging caterpillars, like the puss moth caterpillar or saddleback caterpillars, and they feed on a variety of plants. If you see a hairy caterpillar, don't touch them because they will pack a little sting and it's not very pleasant, another good tip is to avoid mowing your lawn during extremely dry, hot weather. Mowing during this time wounds the grass blades and it creates more surface area for plant moisture to escape. We don't want those grass blades to dry out faster than they should. Brown patch is a really common fungal disease of tall fescue that creates a thin brown area, and that's really common in August because it's hot and it's dry. Grasses usually will recover from this in the fall and no chemical controls are necessary. This disease is typically worse on lawns that are over fertilized and over irrigated, so keep an eye out for that as well. If your hostile leaves are yellowing or scorched, you can remove those leaves. In many cases, this is caused by hot, dry conditions or diseases like anthrax. If it's disease related, remove the leaves and discard the leaves in a black trash bag.

Rachel

Put them out for trash disposal. Do not throw them in your compost bin. If you're still in the garden like I am, harvest your tomatoes when they first change color, and then you can ripen them on the kitchen counter. That's a really easy method to make sure your horn rooms or your stink bugs don't get them brown and green. Stink bugs are really active on tomatoes and peppers in August, and they'll cause a white or cloudy spot directly under the skin of the fruit, and these spots can become hard, but you can cut them out with a sharp knife on a tomato. Sometimes the pepper is a little harder to cut out, but they still are edible. You can always try hand picking your stink bugs and squishing them. Squash bugs are really rampant in a garden right now too, and we always know. I talked about in July how much I hate them, and right now they've probably overtaken your squash. So if you're fighting them and just sometimes it's a losing battle, just take the squash out and get that bed ready for the fall. I've already started thinking about my fall garden, and by mid to late August, I'm starting to plant my lettuce and radishes, kale, brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, and getting my garden ready for those plants.

Rachel

You can also plant a late crop of basil, cilantro and dill, and you can do one last crop of snap beans the first week of August. It's also a really good time. If you have any herbs that are starting to look not so good, start harvesting and drying those. You can also mix them with some olive oil and freeze. There's an ice cube trace to keep them for the winter, and if you have any diseased plants in your vegetable garden, go ahead and take them out and put them in a black trash bag. Let them sit in the sun for a little bit, and then throw them out and start prepping for the fall. That's all I have. Well, that's all we have for this episode, listener. We hope you enjoy it and we'll tune in next month for more gardening tips. If you have any garden related questions, please email us at umegardenpodcast@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook at gardentimepodcast. That's garden. T-H-Y-M-E for more information about the University of Maryland Extension and these topics, please check out the University of Maryland Extension Home and Garden Information Center website at go. Umd.edu thanks for listening and having fun getting down and dirty in your garden.

Goodbye.

Up Beat Music

Rachel

The Garden Thyme Podcast is a monthly podcast brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Mikeala Boley, senior Agent Associate for Talbot County. Rachel Rhodes, senior Agent Associate for Queen Ants County, and Emily Zogel, senior Agent Associate for Dorchester County University.

Emily

:Up beat music:

Mikaela

Sorry about that, guys. I don't know what's happening.

Emily

We're just having all the technical details.

Mikaela

All the issues today.

Emily

I'm sorry, Kate. We're normally a little no, we're not normally. Technical difficulties don't tend to normally be this high, but we do tend a tangent this much. I think that's the safest way to put it.

Kate

Have you been hearing the angry baby in the background?

Rachel

No angry babies.

Emily

It was very quiet.

Rachel

Poor angry baby. Yes.