The Garden Thyme Podcast

A monthly podcast where we help you get down and dirty in your garden, with timely gardening tips, information about native plants, and more! The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. https://extension.umd.edu/. This institution is an equal opportunity provider.

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The Garden Thyme Podcast

S03:E10 Bats!

October 06, 2022 • Garden Thyme Podcast • Season 3 • Episode 10

Hello Listener,

It's Spooky Season! In this month's episode, we sit down with Leslie Sturges of the Bat Conservation & Rescue of Virginia to talk about bats. We chat about how much we love bats and why you should also. She tells us all about the types of bat you can find in Maryland (9:53), Whitenose syndrome (17:03), how bats rear their young (23:24), and echolocation (25:50). We also put some of the vampire and other bat myths to rest (40:30).

We also have our:

Native Plant of the Month - American Persimmon (51:15)
Bug of the Month - Twisted winged parasites (45:01)
Garden Tips of the Month (58:25)

If you have any garden-related questions, please email us at UMEGardenPodcast@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/GardenThymePodcas. For more information about UME and these topics, please check out the UME Home and Garden Information Center and Maryland Grows Blog at https://marylandgrows.umd.edu/.

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).

Theme Song: By Jason Inc

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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).

Theme Song: By Jason Inc,

Episode: S03:E10 Bats!

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.

:upbeat music:

Rachel

Hello, listener. Welcome to the University of Maryland Extension Presents, the Garden Tyhme Podcast, where we talk about getting down and dirty in your garden. We're your hosts. I'm Rachel.

Mikaela

I'm Mikeala.

Emily

And I'm Emily.

Rachel

In this month's episode, we're talking about bats.

:upbeat music:

Rachel

So today we're going to talk about bats. It's that spooky season. And what do we think about scary pumpkins, toxic plants and bats? We're hearing from Leslie Sturges. She's been a wildlife enthusiast her entire life. She is housed and bred snakes, turtles, lizards, frogs, and insects before becoming a zookeeper and then professional park naturalist. In 2001, Leslie opened Bat World Nova, a satellite rescue center of the Bat World Sanctuary, so that she could pursue a lifelong love of bats. Then in 2011, she founded Bat Conservation and Rescue of Virginia, then known as the Save Lucy Campaign. Over the past 20 years, she has cared for well over a thousand bats and has maintained a colony of bats that visit schools and other venues to educate the public about bats and wildlife conservation. Welcome, Leslie.

Mikaela

I know, and I'm wondering where I was in school when you had your colony of bats that went around to other schools. That might be the coolest thing I've heard of for school children.

Rachel

I know.

Leslie Sturges

Well, I've been doing it for a long time, and I've mostly been to schools in Maryland, in Northern Virginia, so maybe somebody, you know, did see me. I'm sure nobody ever remembers me. They remember the bat, but that's the important part.

Mikaela

Well, we love bats, and obviously you love bats. But how can we explain to people why bats are important and why they should also love bats as much as you?

Leslie Sturges

Well, because they're cute, they're fuzzy, they fly, and they are possibly the most important nocturnal plant pest predator out there in North America. And if you like anything to do with nature, you like leaves on the trees, you enjoy flower gardening, you like to eat agricultural products, then you need to think about because they're out there helping us with all of that, for sure.

Mikaela

They play a really critical ecological role. Right. We just don't see or hear about them as much because they're probably doing all their business at night while we're sleeping.

Leslie Sturges

Exactly. People say, I never see bats anymore. And sometimes I think, well, when are you looking? You're not going to walk under trees. And they're just sitting there like, hey, I'm a bat. Look at me. So they're very good at hiding. There are people who've had colonies of hundreds of bats in their attic and not known for years because they're pretty good neighbors. They're very quiet. They don't smell very much unless you have a super lot of them. They don't bother people. They avoid us because we're kind of big and scary to most animals. So they're wonderful little neighbors who are out there eating bugs all night long, and people don't know them well, so they tend to associate all kinds of terrible things with them because they don't know them well.

Rachel

You know, we have a little colony that hangs out behind the shutters on one side of our house, and I just kind of let them be. The shutters aren't all the way tacked down to the house, so that's their bat house. They're out at dusk eating all the bugs. And, you know, that's just the way they are.

Leslie Sturges

That's really wonderful of you to be so tolerant, because there's all kinds of terrible things you can read on the internet about how bat guano is toxic, and somehow they're flying around spreading rabies wherever they go, and none of that stuff is really true about them. So if people can tolerate them where they are, like, we don't expect anyone to share their living quarters with wild animals, because that would be crazy. But if they're on the exterior of your building and you can tolerate them being there, you can also put something down to collect that delightful guano, and it goes right in the vegetable garden. So it's terrific fertilizer. It's all nitrogen.

Rachel

They feed my hydrangeas, and we're good at it.

Leslie Sturges

I wonder if what they're eating helps change the colors.

Rachel

Who knows? But I think it's a wonderful learning experience for our children that we can live together as one with nature, and we don't have to be so caustic and be like, you know, these animals can't be here because what are they hurting?

Leslie Sturges

Right? Well, and I think that's true of so many things in nature, especially now as our development and our living kind of sprawls out and out. And then it's sort of unreasonable to expect wild animals will just pack their little suitcases and go someplace else. That's just not how it works. They don't even have suitcases. But people are unreasonable. They're like, well, it's my yard. It's my house. And animals don't understand that nobody's they don't have deeds or whatever. So I think that's fabulous.

Mikaela

I think you bring up a really important point, Leslie, is that with development and loss of ecosystem and habitat, how can homeowners and humans better interact or live and coexist peacefully with bat populations? Like, do you have any good advice?

Leslie Sturges

Yes, I do. Maintain your peace of the world in as green manner as possible. And that includes planting natives wherever you can, getting rid of monoculture lawns, keeping a nice healthy water feature going. I mean, hummingbirds will love you if you give them a water feature. And then the bats come in at night.

Mikaela

We swear, we did not tell you to say that. Right? We did not coerce you to say that. Those were your own words.

Leslie Sturges

They are always my words, because it's true. I mean, it's not just because I'm talking to you people about who love green and growing things. It's like everybody. We rely on the natural world. And we forget that because we're inside buildings all the time, or when we're outside, we expect our grass to be two and a half inches tall and green. I think we've sort of lost sight of the vibrancy of nature that can happen in our own backyards if we just let it. And by doing that, we're helping not just bats, but all the wild animals, all the birds, all the little turtles and toads and everything. You can imagine you're helping them and also reducing the amount of pesticide people are using. Bats are bioaccumulators, so every pesticide laden insect they eat is going into their body fat. And people read the label and it says it's nontoxic to mammals, but if you're a little mammal and it's building up and building up and building up in your body, and then you turn around and nurse your little baby, that gets expressed in breast milk. And so there are some downstream effects of using broad scale pesticides, such as people who spray mosquito control you can hire them.

Leslie Sturges

And I don't know about Maryland, but in Virginia, there's very little regulation on what they can do. So they're out there broadcast, spraying for a mosquito, which could be controlled by better water management. So I think there's just so many things we can do. And then another thing where children can really help a lot is turn off the lights at night. Nobody needs as much light as we put out there into the atmosphere. I mean, it affects migratory birds, it affects bats, it affects possibly insects. And we kind of need them even though the bats eat them. Everybody eats bugs, but bugs pollinate.

Mikaela

There's been a lot of noise recently about that with the bird migrations as well. Just whatever steps. And I think there's certain degrees of different kinds of lighting systems that are better than others. But no light, of course, is the preference.

Leslie Sturges

Right, No light is great. And interestingly, LED lights seem to actually have a deterrent effect, like they can push wildlife away. There's something about the wavelength and a lot of LED light that is not great. I mean, LED light is preferable to yeah, it's like a weird wavelength I haven't looked into too deeply of all the reasons why it's not great, but of course, it's better sustainably. So there's always these trade offs we have to make and think about, but we need to think about them. And I think that's the important part. If people are thinking about those things, we can come up with even better solutions because we're pretty smart.

Mikaela

Yeah, I think that's a very low input thing people can do around their properties.

Leslie Sturges

Absolutely. And you do not need a security light that goes off every time a fox comes through your yard. I mean, you just don't what does it tell you? Hey, look, we have foxes here. And then you get all worried about that. And don't complain, it just snowballs. So what you need to know is what's happening in front of your front door or you light your driveway out of your garage. But, yeah, you don't need to light up your whole backyard because some animal flew in front of your security light.

Mikaela

So especially in the Mid-Atlantic area, what kind of bats will people be running into? Because not that I could identify it when it's zooming past my face, but it's kind of interesting to see what kind of species we might find in our area.

Leslie Sturges

So it kind of depends on where in the Mid-Atlantic you're standing. The farther south you go, the higher the diversity is. And one of my pet peeves is when people refer to bats as like, some monolithic group, because they're not, they're vastly different. And so all of our bats in the Mid-Atlantic, I'd say towards the southeastern part of Virginia, you're up to about 16 species. And then when you get up to the farther north, you're at about nine. But that shifts with seasons. So, like, in the winter, we've got most of well, half of our bats are hibernating in caves, others are tucked away in hibernation, but there's a few migrants who are out coming through and some are awake during the winter. So that's a hard question to answer. So it depends on time of year and where you're actually standing. But I would say for where you are, about nine species is sort of what we give what it's changing, climate change is changing things. And we're starting to see a few species make their way north that we didn't see in the 20 years that I've been doing this. So now we're seeing much more evening bats and Brazilian freetails.

Leslie Sturges

So, to start with, the most common, you've got the big brown bat, and that's probably the one who's behind the shutters, because they love shutters. And big brown bats are about two and a half inches, nose to tail, but have a 13 inch wingspan, right? They're 80% wing. So whenever you're looking at a bath, just remember this tiny little furry animal.

Emily

You know what they say about bats with big wings?

Mikaela

They're good flyers. That's what you meant, right?

Emily

Yes,

Leslie Sturges

They are excellent flyers, highly agile and able to do amazing things with those wings. So that's the big round bat and that's our year round back. That's the one behind the shutters in the summer who might be hibernating along the basement line. In the winter, they're just here and they actually wake up in the winter fairly often. So they're the one you might see out flying around on a warm winter evening if you keep your eyes open. I trip over things a lot because I'm frequently looking up and I'm in any kind of motion I'm like, because then the next most common one is called the eastern red bat, and that's a very different bat. So if you think about the big brown bat, that's brown, and they live in colonies, and they stick together, and they use the same roosting site for decades. It's called psych fidelity. And then we have this eastern red bat, which is a foliage bat, and it lives out in the trees in the leaf foliage. During cold times, it can drop down into the leaf litter and actually uses leaf litter. So if you need an excuse, leave the leaves because there might be red bats in them.

Mikaela

We're all for that.

Rachel

Yes.

Emily

Now, do they have a preferred tree that they like to nest in?

Leslie Sturges

Well, there's some study that shows that they do like more mature trees. Some studies have found them more highly associated with pines, some with hardwoods. They don't tell us. But I used to take summer camps down to our creek when I was a park naturalist. And there was a bat who lived in a sycamore tree. He was a red bat. And every time we took the kids to the creek, he would come flying out of that tree, fly around, and go get a drink. And without fail, some camp parent would be like, it doesn't have rabies. And we'd be like, no, it's getting up to pee. But he was like a regular, and he clearly lived in that sycamore tree. So, again, I think that these questions are they might have preferences, but it also kind of depends on what they're doing and what they need at the moment. Okay, so red bats are probably any time you go for a walk in the woods, you're walking under tens, dozens of them. You just can't see them because they're beautifully camouflaged to look like a dead leaf hanging on a twig. And they're the only bat that we have that can have more than two pups.

Leslie Sturges

So they have up to four, and the mom is totally responsible for feeding them. There is no parternal care with our bats.

Mikaela

Yeah, exactly.

Leslie Sturges

And not only are they deadbeats, mom doesn't want anything to do with her children.

Emily

She's a strong, independent woman

Mikaela

raising her pups.

Rachel

She can handle it by herself. She's fine. She's got it.

Leslie Sturges

And when you see how they behave during mating season, you don't blame her at all. They are weird.

Emily

I feel like this is another one of those examples of I think was it Sam that we were talking to about bees? And he was just like, yeah, males are just good for reproduction. And this might be another example in nature where males are solely for reproduction.

Leslie Sturges

Well, in their defense, so a lactating female bat eats her own body weight in insects every night. So for, say, a big brown bat, that's somewhere between 14 and 18 grams of insects. Males and non reproductive semi-adult bats eat half their body weight. So there are no slouches in the bug eating department. They have a reason for being. And then if you go down to South America, I could go off forever on these awesome bats that have like, a pack structure and the males bring food into the young.

Mikaela

That's crazy. So diverse.

Leslie Sturges

It is so bats. 1400 species, give or take. We're up over 1400 now, so yes, second largest group of mammals on the planet.

Emily

I did not know that.

Mikaela

You know, we love fun facts. That's a great one.

Leslie Sturges

I always tell folks, you don't get to be the second largest group of animals on the planet unless you're doing really important things. They are. They've got the tropical ones, have plenty of pollinators, seed dispersers, and then ours, who are pest control, pest control, pest control. Cultural treatment of bats has really changed, I would say, as our technology has given us the ability to study what bats are doing. It wasn't until we had really good acoustic detection ability and also transmitters got small enough for radio tags, so now people can see what they're doing, which we couldn't before because it was a needle in a haystack situation. I think fruit bats make it a little easier for being big, and we're grateful that you can see them and see what they do and they talk a lot so you can find them. But still, I think it's as our technology has caught up with bats that people are starting to understand what a huge impact and role they play in all ecosystems, where they're found awesome.

Mikaela

Well, going back to your introduction where you talked about whitenose syndrome, like, I remember when we were really discovering how detrimental that fungus was to bat populations. We don't hear about it as much anymore. Is it still a really prevalent issue or what progress has kind of been made on that, if any?

Leslie Sturges

So I think, again, it's sort of an issue with the fact that it's vast. If seven plus million robins, drop dead. You would hear about it all the time because it's moved across the country. It's rolling its way west in western ecosystem. Bats don't hibernate in the huge aggregations that they do in the east. So it's less of a huge visible thing. Like people aren't walking into caves and finding the floor four inches deep in dead bats, which is exactly what happened. We lost 90% of our cave dependent bats in the eastern part of the northeastern in MidAtlantic. The south doesn't seem to have been hit as hard. Those bats tend to be a little more migratory and they also don't have these cold cave systems that we have. But you start going a little further to the west and you're in the Ozarks, and yeah, they got hit just as hard. So it's not that it's not here anymore, it's that the bats aren't here anymore. So with fewer bats, you're not getting these huge die offs because they're already dead.

Emily

Can you quickly define white nose syndrome. For any of our listeners that don't know.

Leslie Sturges

Yeah, white nose syndrome is a fungal issue that affects bats hibernating in caves. The fungus that causes it is Pseudogymnoascus destructans. You may be able to find somebody else saying it better you can cut in. But anyway, it is actually an invasive fungus. It's originally a soil fungus and somehow got introduced to the cave systems in the Northeast. It actually came into a single cave in New York and it grows on the bats while they hibernate and it causes skin lesions where they don't have fur. And those erosions on the skin, well, it's an infection. So obviously the body is going to react. If you are hibernating in a cave and you're 7 grams and you got yourself up to say, 9 grams to get you through winter, and then you keep semi waking up to try to clear this fungus from your body, you're going to burn through your fat reserves. So that's problem number one with white nose syndrome. The other thing is the lesions and the disruption it does to their skin surfaces causes them to become dehydrated and severe electrolyte imbalances and things like that. So who knew that bats do a lot of gas exchange and hydration exchange across their wing membranes, but they do.

Leslie Sturges

So this fungus should not kill things, but it kills bats. I do think that we have to accept that we will probably never know how it got here, so let's worry about what to do about it. And then so what we want to do about it is support that summer population, the remnant bats, the ones who are out there having the babies and needing to raise their babies. And one of the big things that people can do is to when they discover bats in a structure time that exclusion. So you're not disrupting their ability to rear their pups because people want to throw them out as soon as they find them. And if that's after May 15 in this area, you're destroying an entire year's reproductive potential of that colony because either they're going to abandon and abort or the pups are going to die in your attic, which is gross.

Mikaela

Well, and I know where you kind of use this term for insects, but is there any like, resistant bats? I mean, are they finding genetic markers of resistance?

Leslie Sturges

There are some small glimmers of hope up in the Northeast where it first hit, they are finding, because what researchers do is they put a metal or plastic band on the wing of the bat and when they started doing that band returns were vanishingly rare. Well, now that so many bats are dead, it's not so rare to find a banded bat. And they are finding that some of these banded bats are persisting, that these particular females are living years and years and years. So it does appear there is some resistance in the population. It does appear that some populations are rebounding slowly, which means that there may be some resistance in the juveniles, but we're not seeing the kind of recruitment we really need to replace the population. Got you. And that has a lot to do with the fact that bats only have one or two pups a year, once a year. They don't have litters like rodents do. Well, large body rodents also don't have big litters, but they are not working on the mouse, not in mouth when they're working on them. Right. And actually that reproduction is much more closely related to or familiar to us because it's the way we reproduce.

Leslie Sturges

We don't have very many young and okay, let me rephrase that. So bats grow up really quickly for a mammal, that's as complicated as they are. But if they make it through their first year, they have a really long lifespan. So for the size of them, for a big brown back, can live to be 15 or 18 in the wild. Wow. Yeah. And it gets better because little browns who are the poster child for white nose syndrome, they were once the most abundant bat in eastern North America, but that's a seven to nine gram bat. And there have been band recoveries of those guys at over 30 years old.

Rachel

Wow, that's really awesome.

Leslie Sturges

It's amazing. And they only have one baby a year. They're so tiny. But imagine, so they're 7 grams. The babies are like a gram or almost or over a gram at birth. So if you think about relative to the mom's size, these babies are huge. So they have very big babies,

Mikaela

Poor mom and bat.

Rachel

Yes, I was going to ask you that. What is the rearing cycle like for a bat? Is it like a bear where they're with their mom for a couple of years or does she just like toss them out after six weeks?

Leslie Sturges

It's actually kind of interesting because I raised them, so I'm very familiar with the rearing cycle of bats. So they made in the fall and if they're cave bats, hibernating bats, they do a swarm and it's a meet and greet and the moms show the young where to hibernate and the males and females do their thing. And then the moms go into the cave and drop into hibernation holding that fertilized OVA over the winter. Those fertilized OVA, the fertilized ovum anyway, they hang on to that. They emerge in the spring. And when conditions, when food is there and they're on their way back to their summer, their maternity roost or their favorite tree or whatever, that's when they start their gestation. So it is super cool.

Rachel

That is really cool.

Leslie Sturges

And then because summers don't I mean, summers last a long time, we think. But for a bat, that baby has to grow up, learn to fly, learn how to match its flight and hunting ability to its ecolocation. We haven't even talked about echolocation yet. So that baby has to learn to do all of that in enough time to get fat and start the cycle all over again. So a bat pup goes from this totally dependent little naked one to 2 grams baby to flight in it about six weeks.

Mikaela

Wow.

Leslie Sturges

Now, it's still nursing a little bit from mom to keep it going while it figures out the whole hunting thing. But at some point she's like, all right, that's it, we're done. So I'd say in about eight weeks. They're pretty much independent, but they're probably still hanging around with mom. And I have photos of pups that are full size, still nursing on their mom. So it's pretty amazing. And mothers are very tolerant because bat teeth are sharp, and once they shed those milk teeth, they've got full canines. They will not let go. They're like eating.

Mikaela

So let's talk about echolocation a little bit and how bats kind of use that to navigate is something they're born with, or you mentioned maybe they have to learn it.

Leslie Sturges

So they can echolocate. They're born with it. What they do with it is a pretty steep learning curve. So if you think about echolocation as sort of an additional way of seeing, because our bats are chasing tiny insects in the dark. And in order to do that with eyes, your eyes would have to be huge. And bats aren't huge, so they can't have huge eyes. So they use echolocation, which is a way of seeing with sound. So they're literally shouting. And for our bats, they're shouting through open mouths. There are bats who echo locate through their noses, but our guys do it through their mouths. So every photo you see yeah, that one has to me, when you see those photos of a bat flying around with his mouth wide open, it's not looking for a human device, it's shouting.

Mikaela

Yelling out into the void.

Emily

I was really hoping it was a vampire. I personally want to be a vampire, so I was sort of hoping, but I feel like you're going to tell me that that's not real.

Leslie Sturges

Yeah. So, like, if a bat lands on you and bites you in the neck, you have a serious issue. You need to get to the hospital because bats don't do that. Sorry. I mean, baby bats, when they're learning to fly, will land on random things, but the whole neck biting thing just it's not gonna I'm sorry. It's not going to happen.

Mikaela

It's not going to work out.

Leslie Sturges

I'm sorry.

Emily

My Halloween dreams,

Mikaela

That's probably good news.

Leslie Sturges

For the best, you know, and vampire bats themselves. Jerry Carter, I think he used to be in Maryland for some point in time. He's a vampire bat specialist. Look him up. The socialbat.org. I won't take us off into vampire bats, but they're super cool and everybody should study them because they're really neat. They have friends. Well, we think all the colonial bats have friends. But anyway, back to the echo location. So what they're trying to do is use sound to gather information. Unlike us, we use sound to give information, but with bats, they're using it to gather information. And what they're looking for is an insect or an obstacle they need to avoid. They can navigate in complete darkness, so it's very sophisticated, and they can discriminate on something as fine as a single human hair. But if you're a little bath and you're starting to fly so bats grow up in trees or in high roofs. So a little bat taking its first flights is just going to take off crash land and then have to climb all the way back up. So they're very busy just trying to figure out the whole flying thing.

Leslie Sturges

So then they have to learn to match their echo location ability to their own speed and their own navigation. So that's a pretty tough thing to do because they're trying to do it in the air without crashing down. Yes, they can do it, but they need to practice. So the way we do it without having mothers around to teach our orphans, we just give them as much time as they need to figure it out. So they will figure it out, given enough time having a mother around to kind of show them the ropes, and they're going to follow her, and they're going to follow their buddies in the roost, and so they've got a lot more social support, so that happens a lot faster. And we know that because we can see the young outdoing things in our wild colonies, that our little people raised babies are still like, I don't really know. Can you come feed me?

Emily

So, Leslie, what should someone do if they find a bat in their backyard or if they happen to come across one that they think is injured?

Leslie Sturges

So the very first thing is do not touch it. Merely touching a bat, regardless of whether it's sick or not, causes that bath to be tested for rabies, which is a lethal test. So don't do that. Sometimes the bats don't need to be rescued. They hit the ground because they're trying to avoid a predator, like a blue jay or something like that. So the best thing to do is when you find one, to reach out to Phoenix in Maryland, us in Virginia, send a photo and we will help guide you. If it's a situation where you think that animal, like if it's an orphan or an animal that you find next to the road and you saw it bounce off the car or something, then gloves, preferably leather gardening gloves. A small towel, like a face towel, and a cardboard box with a little bit of cloth in it or the cloth you have in your hand. So what you do is, with your gloves and the towel, you scoop the bat, you put the bat and the towel in the box, and then. You seal the box with rubber bands or tape, and you do not peak, and you do not try to give it water, and you do not try to feed it, and you just call the rehabilitator. That's how you help all wildlife, not just bats. Please stop trying to help them.

Mikaela

I mean, this is one question I like to ask all of our guest speakers is what kind of resources do you recommend for people for additional information in particular, you know, people wanting to hang bat houses properly or remove them from a house properly? Do you have some good recommendations?

Leslie Sturges

So, yeah, there's so much good information out there on bats. You just have to stay away from any sort of pest control or wildlife removal information. Even some public health information is not exactly accurate. But for bat houses, we don't see a lot of occupancy in the Mid Atlantic. Now, when we had little browns, we did absolutely they liked boxes. Our big browns tend to like things a little cooler. So mounting bat boxes in the northern part of the Mid Atlantic is so-so.

Leslie Sturges

I highly recommend it's a commercial organization. But Batmanagement.com has a lot of information on bat exclusions and on bat boxes and on bat detectors. I mean, they've just put a lot of work into having information out there. Maryland Department of Natural Resources has excellent information on bats and on exclusions. And in Maryland, people have to have a permit in order to do bat exclusion work. And they are not allowed to exclude between, I think it's May 1 and September 1. So if people are looking to move bats out of an attic or from, say, behind a shutter or whatever, please bear in mind that during those dates, the bats are either exceedingly pregnant or they actually have young.

Leslie Sturges

So that's why we don't want to move them. What's perfectly acceptable is to secure the living quarters. So wherever those bats are, they're not in your part of the house. And that is something you can find, like a contractor whose experience with bats.

Mikaela

So keeping them in the attic separate.

Leslie Sturges

Right.

Mikaela

The rest of the house.

Leslie Sturges

Okay, exactly. We don't want them in people's bedrooms, because then that does trigger post exposure and rabies testing for the bat. It's not good for anybody. Keep them away from your cats. Keep your cats inside. I tell you, I love cats. I have two. They're rescues. Cats catch bats. People don't see it because cats are doing it at night. But bats tend to drop out of roost and they hug the ground because they're adapted for a predator that comes from above. They are not adapted to a predator that jumps off the ground and snatches them and then carries them around meowing loudly, proud of themselves. But, yeah, the cats are a huge issue for bats resources. Bat Conservation International, they're the granddaddy of all bats conservation organizations. And then, of course, there's us. Virginiabats.org. There's plenty of good Maryland sites. Again. Well, DNR is one, and then BatWeek.org. The last week of October is international. Bat week. We have no idea.

Mikaela

That's awesome.

Leslie Sturges

Sharks can't be the only ones with a week.

Mikaela

Exactly.

Leslie Sturges

So, yeah, there's lots of crafts and activities and things available through BatWeek.org. And then there's also Project EdgeUbat, which has a lot of stuff geared for classroom use.

Mikaela

Oh, man, this is great. Thank you. Well, we can include maybe some links to these organizations in our show notes.

Emily

What is the best time to go observing bats? Like, if you wanted to see bats, what time of the year should you go out? Obviously, like, you're not going to see them during the daytime, but like dusk and dawn. Or do you need to wait until night? Full moon? No moon.

Leslie Sturges

You need to go outside right now at about 8:00. If you can park yourself near a nice, quiet, medium sized pond and just watch what happens, you're going to see that. As a matter of fact, last weekend we went out to a little lake here in Stanton, Virginia, called Tam's Lake, and we watched possibly as many as two dozen eastern red bats foraging and interacting over the water. So you can do this. You don't need a guide. You just need to think about where the insects are going to be most. So right now they're fattening up and getting ready for winter. Either migration or hibernation. They're starting that process, so they're really hungry. Migrants are starting to move around on the landscape. We have juveniles who are now fully actualized bats, and they're all coming together over water sources where insects are hatching. Or even if you have a nice open field, even over a ball field, if it's ringed with trees, you're going to see bats if you go out there, just like sun's down, but not fully down, give yourself about half an hour prior to dark, dark and you're going to see bats.

Leslie Sturges

A lot of people can just step outside in their backyard and see bats around here, so it's now hard to find them. And it's just wonderful to watch them move around in the sky and see what they're doing.

Mikaela

We see a lot of bats when we walk our dog at certain times of the year. And it's all in this loblolly pine area. I would have thought they'd need more hardwoods, but it's this kind of alleyway that's mostly loblolly's.

Leslie Sturges

So the alleyways so if you're walking like on a Stream Valley trail, so you've got a canopy over you and there's water right next to you or something like that, where you've got a nice open corridor. They use those a lot. And anything I think we do to help bats is making trails next to streams because I see tons of them. And for a lot of misnetting studies, they'll set up the nets in that sort of habitat because bats like those little corridors. So, yeah, that's another great place.

Rachel

So, Leslie, I have a question. Do bats have a favorite insect?

Leslie Sturges

Well, I think that depends on the species.

Rachel

Yeah.

Leslie Sturges

So it is not mosquitoes. That's a myth I really would like to see put to bed. So, for big brown bats, they're a beetle specialist. That doesn't mean they won't eat native stink bugs and katydids and things like that, but they seem to really rely on those sort of seasonal hatches of different insects, like June bugs and May beetles. May beetles are huge, but I've seen big brown bats eat them. So click beetles sort of beetle hatches are their thing, whereas with our red bat, it looks like it's primarily moths, which is why you'll find them hunting around lights more than just about any other species. That doesn't mean big brown bats won't eat moths, they're opportunistic hunters. But they do seem to have specialties and if you even look at, like, the structure of a red bats face, it's shorter, their teeth are smaller because moths are much softer bodies than a beetle. And big brown bats have some serious bite power and very long canines because they're apprehending beetles in flight. Yeah, so they do seem to have specialties. And our little bats are the ones who probably are really big predators of smaller, lighter bodied insects that come off the waterways and huge hatches.

Leslie Sturges

So if you think about the mosquito eating and gnat eating and all that sort of stuff, that probably happens more over wetlands where you've got 50,000 of these insects suddenly forming clouds in the air. And if you drive out on a country road and all of a sudden it sounds like rain hitting your car because of all the bug clouds you're driving through, there are often bats in those clouds. It's got to be energetically, worth their time to eat it. And that one mosquito that's bothering you on your desk is not worth their time.

Rachel

So what I'm hearing is that it's really important for homeowners to create a diverse landscape, not only to encourage bats, but you have to have that food source for bats. So planting for moths or making sure that you have some type of decaying wood for some of our beetle species and all of those little tiny things that we often talk about just all gel together.

Leslie Sturges

Absolutely. That is, I think, sort of the crux of our habitat management needs to be much less monoculture and much more diversity and preferably natives. There is actually a study, it's pretty old now, but it showed that birds preferentially picking nonnative berries, were getting a much higher sugar diet than birds who are eating native berries. So that also comes into play with insects. The insects aren't getting the nutrition that the bats need. We used to talk about food chains. It's a food web, it's all intertwined, but at the base of it are plants.

Mikaela

That's wonderful. And of course, we also have to ask the question, what's some of the craziest questions you've received from the public about bats in particular?

Leslie Sturges

I think some people's assumption that bats poop out of their mouths.

Mikaela

They didn't know that was out there.

Leslie Sturges

Yeah, bats hang upside down. Well, we stay upside down. I'm sure they think we're upside down, but they hang head down. But they're very clean animals. They actually groom like cats do. So they spend a lot of time in their roost sloughing their fur and bathing their wings. So no, they're not going to poop on themselves or poop through their mouths. What they do is they have very interesting behaviors for our guys. Often they just sort of push away from the wall so everything falls away and down and they're constantly pooping. So they're very practiced at keeping themselves clean. And then same with, you know, when they have to pee, they just pee. Our tree bats, actually, you can watch them do their little push ups. They push off their wrists so everything falls away from them. And then somebody mentioned earlier, strong mamas. Well, so with red bats there are three or four babies are literally laying sort of crosswise on their bellies while they're really young. So she kind of has to do crunches to lift them up so her head can get to them and give them their little baths when they get old enough, then they start hanging by their own feet. But still she's just like it's amazing how much strength these animals have to have in order to sort of become a living hammock for their nursing, growing babies.

Mikaela

That's crazy. I love it.

Leslie Sturges

Yeah, it's wild. And then our colonial bats, big browns. When their babies are little, they're tucked under the wings so you can't even see them. We call them baby bumps, but they're in constant contact with their mothers, just constantly nursing until they're like pretty much have fur and then they can go thermal regulate for themselves. But the bond between mother and pop is pretty amazing. So questions, crazy questions about that. The landing on your neck. Oh, I still hear from some communities that it's that rats turn into bats and that's not true. And then the vampire mythology is still pretty well entrenched in certain communities. So no, bats do not turn into vampires, no matter how loud you yell "Bat" if anyone is a fan of What We Do in the Shadows.

Emily

Nice. I was thinking of okay, I love the show.

Leslie Sturges

To me, we talk about culture, meeting, biology. So the whole vampire bat thing, the vampire myth predates the discovery of vampire bats. Okay, so yeah, so the whole Bram Stoker thing with the bats and that was like just something that he sort of put together because there's no blood drinking bat in Europe.

Emily

I wonder if it was just like what's an animal that flies at night kind of mentality.

Leslie Sturges

At that point it was known that vampire like vampire bats had been discovered and it was known that they drank blood. So I think it was a pretty easy connection to make. So yeah, but if you think about it, blood feeding is so rare in the animal kingdom. Yeah, it's mosquitoes, a couple of bats, a bird or two. But this is what I tell people about this. If blood was good food, if it was easy to make a living as a sanguivore, we would do it because we'll eat anything. I mean, we eat the most ridiculous things and say, oh, that's delicious. In fact, blood is so nutritionally depleted that vampire bats have to have super special bad apptations and to be able to pull it off. And they can't hibernate, so they can't live any place with a cold winter.

Emily

That's an interesting fact.

Mikaela

Interesting.

Leslie Sturges

Since this will air around Halloween, we might as well put some vampire myths. Yeah.

Mikaela

I like that. You know what, to be fair, Leslie, the October episodes are always our favorite ones to do. So I'm so pleased that you're able to come talk about bats. Thanks for coming on.

:upbeat music:

Emily

So this month's Bug of the Month, I think is a very creepy, cool group of bugs. This is the group known as the Twisted Wing parasites, which is order, strep, citrus. There's about 600 described species and about 109 of those are commonly found in North America. And I'm going to put commonly in quotation marks there because these guys are not actually very commonly seen or found. I actually don't know a ton about disorder because they are endoparasitic, meaning that they spend most of their lives inside of other insects.

Mikaela

It's a bug eat bug world.

Emily

I know. Very creepy, right? Wait until I haven't even gotten to the creepiest part. This is going to make you guys scoring some of the stuff about these guys. So they do date pretty far back in our fossil record about 10 million years ago, and they're thought to be related to beetles. So they have a very unique life cycle because they are internal parasites of other insects, particularly bees, wasps, grasshoppers, leafhoppers and other members of hymenoptera. So it should be noted that these guys are only parasites of other arthropods and they are fairly host specific in that one that specialized to be a parasite of bees is not going to also be a parasite of grasshoppers. Only a few species, parasitized, bristle tails, and those ones will have a more free living adult stage. So for the most part, these guys are internal parasites through most of their life cycle. They are what we call hemiometablytes, meaning that they are kind of unique because they go through that larvae pupae adult stage. But their larvae stage has multiple different forms to it. So most insects will have larvae stage that is like their caterpillar and they will look like a caterpillar through the entire larvae stage.

Emily

They'll become larger as they molt and become different instars, but they generally will always look like a caterpillar. These guys don't. So upon emerging from their mother's body, the young larvae called Plandea, has six legs and crawl around a lot. They will search for a suitable host. Species that parasites, bees and wasps, for example, will climb on the top of flowers and wait for the pollinator to arrive to feed. When a host arrives, they're going to jump aboard and they're going to burrow into the host's body. They're going to quickly melt until their second stage, which is when they're going to do that larvae form change. So they're going to go from having traditional larvae structure that we think of to basically looking very pupillike. They're going to lose their legs, they're going to lose their eyes. They're going to modify their mouth because they're basically just feeding on the blood of that host insect.

Rachel

That's so gross.

Emily

So gross, yet so neat, right?

Rachel

Yeah.

Emily

So this isn't necessarily like the traditional parasitic wasps where they feed on all the eternal organs and eventually kill the host. These guys reduce the quality of their host life, and actually some have been found to make it so that their hosts are sterile, so that they can't reproduce. Because they draw so much energy, the host insect basically loses the ability to reproduce itself, but it doesn't flat out kill the host the same way. Like the parasitic wasp larvae feeding on, like the caterpillar, kills the host. So after pupating infinite host, the males, which are winged, will emerge and they'll fly around searching for a mate. They, for the most part, don't have functional digestive system, so they're very, very shortlived. They're rather small. They're about one to 7. When he finds a suitable mate, they will reproduce. They do not reproduce in a very loving way. He basically stabs through her exoskeleton and basically releases his sperm into her for her to fertilize her eggs with. And he will basically find a small portion of her body that is hanging outside of the host. So if you want to get some mild jitters, you can do a Google search for these and you'll basically find pictures of bees and hornets that will have part of the female sticking out of plates in the back of its abdomen.

Rachel

It's gross, people.

Mikaela

It's gross.

Emily

I have basically creeped you guys out, but I actually love really cool. I haven't even gotten to the creepiest parts. The eggs that are fertilized for the embryos will hatch out, and the first stage larvae can move freely within the female circulatory system and will slowly start to consume her own organs before she dies. And they will emerge from the part of her that is sticking out, where they will crawl off of the host and then go find their own host. So, yes, that is the twisted wing parasites. It's worth noting that they get their name because, similar to flies, the males, which are, again the only ones that have wings from most species will only have one pair of wings, but flies is where their front pair of wings or wings, and their hind pair have been modified. It's the opposite in these. So they have modified wings for their first pair, and their hind pair is the one that's more traditional for flight. So hopefully that was an extra spooky, creepy bug of the month for you guys. I know Rachel looks like she's got a cat.

Rachel

You know, I can handle a lot of stuff in the world. You know, I worked at a vet's office for a long time, and I can handle some pretty disgusting things. Maggots and bot flies are not one of those things. And now this.

Emily

Like, I almost did the bot fly for this, but I think it just seemed cool. I don't know if it's, like, creepier, the fact that part of her body, like, hangs out in between the plates, or the thing about the larvae moving around in her circulatory system I just thought was really creepy.

Mikaela

Yeah, it's a good one. You have plenty to choose from for creepy insects for October.

:upbeat music:

Mikaela

All right. It's a native plant of the month. I'm super psyched, I got to tell you guys. I know I feel like I say this every month, but I'm like, this is one of my favorites.

Emily

They're all your favorite, Mikaela.

Mikaela

It's the fall, and native fruits are, like, really showing all their stars. This is the month of abundance and harvest, and so I like to celebrate by talking about one of my favorite native fruit species, which is the American persimmon, which is Diasporous, Virginia. So it's also known as the common persimmon, Possumwood possum apples. It's got, like, a thousand different names. So this tree is a treasure, let me tell you. Producing fat orange fruits the size of, like, Ping pong balls. They produce them throughout the summer, so you can see them when they're green fruits. They're young and way not ready to eat yet, but by October, they're turning orange. They are palatable, maybe. So this tree is pretty nondescript for the rest of the year. You probably wouldn't even notice it. But the female trees will produce these really delicious fruits, and they become very sweet and palatable after, usually a frost or two, but before they fall to the ground. And actually, sometimes I've harvested good looking fruits on the ground as long as they aren't, like, rotted or damaged or anything. So it's really easy thing to kind of tell. If it doesn't look like you'd want to eat it, then I wouldn't eat it.

Mikaela

But this means that the harvest window is pretty small, so don't miss out this year. Keep an eye out. And those fruits will fall kind of intermittently. It's not like after the first frost, they all fall at once. They drop them periodically. That's kind of how native plants work, is they don't all ripen at once. It usually goes over the course of time.

Mikaela

So, as you may have noticed. I just mentioned the female tree. And that's because persimmon is one of those species that is diaacus. Which you'll see that term dio in the scientific name of this plant as well. Because diaishe trees and shrubs produce female and male reproductive parts on different specimens. Meaning you could have an entire grove of persimmons that are male trees. And they're completely useless because there won't be any fruits a. Because male don't produce them. And you only have one of the gendered trees, so you won't have any fruits to play with. So to reap the benefits of this tree, I think it's worthwhile to have at least one male specimen for several female specimens. And obviously, the female trees are very easy to spot this time of year because they will have the fruits. So that means there's got to be a male tree somewhere nearby. So these are pretty easy to grow, especially in medium or average soils. They prefer full sun, but I've seen them in pretty shady environments, actually. So they're usually along the edge of forests, or I see them along the edges of roads as well, so somewhere where they're getting a little bit of sunlight.

Mikaela

But the trees do have a pretty long list of tolerances. So they tolerate clay soils, they tolerate drowdy or dry soils, as well as rocky, and they also tolerate allelopathy from other trees or plants. So black walnut is a common one that does that. And allelopathy just means it's like a chemical released by certain plants to outcompete others. And so it can kind of tolerate some of that chemical interaction, and they can tolerate some pollution, which is why you see them often on roadsides. Now, what I would say is that I would probably not harvest persimmons for eating from roadsides just because of this pollution issue. You just don't know what the tree roots are absorbing and putting out into their fruits. So it's better to know where there's a plant on someone's private property where you have permission to harvest. So you guys know I love Fun Facts, and it's October, our favorite episode, so get ready, man. Here are my fun facts. The name Die Spiros is actually Greek for food of the gods. And that's because when they go through that frost period when they are finally kind of palatable to eat, they are really delicious.

Mikaela

And do you remember the song Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies?

Emily

Yeah, it's from the Nutcracker, right?

Mikaela

Exactly. It's part of the nutcracker. So persimmons are the sugar plums, and they're often referred to as such, so that's one of their other names that they often have is sugar plums. So most commercially available trees are actually Asian varieties, and they're bred for their fruit, and so they're a little bit larger, and they're less astringent. And astringent is a term we use, meaning bitter or tart, and that's usually a plant's defense mechanism. But that, astringency in the native fruits, goes away after the frost period, which is why that's so important to mention. So those Asian varieties usually don't have to have the frost period in order to eat. But I still think the native version is so much better because of course, native plants are great. So the fruit is quite sweet and pulpy when ripe, so it's often used in baking as well. And it can be a substitute as like applesauce and bananas. In fact, there's a lot of recipes out there available for persimmon bread, sort of like banana bread because it's like the same texture. Just don't forget to remove the large seeds. They're very easy to see, so it's usually pretty easy to clean them out, but they do have large seeds.

Mikaela

And finally, persimmon wood is very dense and beautiful since it belongs to the Ebony family. However, you will not find any seaworthy boats made of persimmon because the wood is so dense it would just sink. So it is much better used as decorative kind of wood. The tree itself does not grow very quickly or straight enough to be like an important lumber tree. So it's more often used for handles or bowls or something more decorative. But the wood is definitely beautiful. And so those are my fun facts. And that's all I have for American persimmon. But definitely be on the lookout for these trees. They're so cool. A lot of really valuable benefits to the environment that they provide.

Emily

They are one of the host plants for the luna moth.

Rachel

Oh, another reason to plant it.

Mikaela

Yes. So the leaves are pretty large too, so that makes sense that they would use it to eat.

Rachel

I automatically went down a rabbit hole because of its name. So I'm like, why is it called Possumwood or Possum apples? It's because it's preferred by possums to eat it.

Mikaela

I'm telling you guys, this tree is fabulous. But it's kind of funny because it's sort of hard to identify because it doesn't really have a lot of interesting features until the fall where the fruits are more obvious. Like the leaves don't have a weird shape. You know, the bark is like a normal color. It's not a very tall tree. It doesn't have any weird flowers. It is average looking until the fruits, because the fruits are amazing and they are like a bright orange. They're really pretty. That's all I have. Sorry, I got really excited about that. This one just a really cool tree, though.

:upbeat music:

Emily

So Rachel do you have any garden tipes for us?

Rachel

Here we are, we're in the grips of fall and you have tons of leaves littering your yard and the sidewalks and the road. But did you know that leaves are free? Fertilizer? Fallen leaves offer a double benefit. Leaves form a natural mulch that helps suppress weeds and at the same time can fertilize the soil as they break down. So why spend money on mulch and fertilizer when you have a free source in the form of fall and leaves. Simply let leaves lie where they fall or move them into your garden beds to protect those plant roots, suppress weeds, preserve soil moisture, and eventually break down and return nutrients to the soil. If you don't want them to matt up on your lawn, you can always just run your lawnmower over and break them down a little bit to break up the denseness of them. Or you can just rake them and pile them into your flower beds. They're a great way to suppress weeds and reduce that mulch cost. And as Leslie mentioned, red bats live to stay in the leaves, so just leave them for the back.

Emily

There's a lot of our big flashy moth moths that pupate in the leaf litter as well.

Rachel

Exactly.

Emily

That's the other reason we don't recommend burning them.

Rachel

So fall is the perfect time to reduce your loan size. If you've been thinking about creating a new garden bed, now is the time to do it. To build a new bed, you can use sheet mulching. You just cut the grass really low and cover it with sections of newspaper and then layer it with organic matter such as compost, some of those leaves, some grass clippings, and top with a thick layer of straw or other type of mulch. Or you can register for the chip drop method that we talked about in our June episode on Pollinators with Sam Dregi because that's another great option and method of creating a new raised bed or flower garden. It's also the ideal time to divide perennials that have died back. I prefer to do this in the fall rather than the spring because it allows for new plants to set a good healthy set of roots before the heat of the summer. And you'll need to do this four to six weeks before our first frost. And our first frost for the Eastern Shore of Maryland usually hits around November 15. So usually the first week of October, the second week of October, that's our prime time to start lifting up our perennials and dividing them.

Rachel

If you're going to divide your perennials, you want to take a spade, fork or a shovel and make sure that you're pretty far away from the plant, probably a good six to eight inches, and dig around the entire plant and lift it up out of the ground. I usually have a tarp laid out and then that way I set the root ball of the plant on top of the tarp, shake off any excess soil and divide it from there. And that, of course, is dependent on the size of the perennial. If it's a big perennial, you're going to have to dig a big area. It's a small one. You might not need a tarp. So I love having flowers in my garden and I'm sure everybody else does too, not just. Because of their beauty, but their intrinsic value and pollinator habitat. If you have flowers that have dry down, now is the time to save those seed heads. And for annual flowers like zinnias and marigolds, you want to make sure that they are fully dry before you cut them off and put them in your CRISPR. If they're not fully dry, they're just going to be moldy and disgusting.

Rachel

So you can just cut off the seed heads and put them out on an extra screen and let them sit in your garage or a dark room where it's a consistent temperature to let them dry down. And then that way while they're on the screen, you're not going to lose any seed heads and make sure that you label whatever bag you put them in so you know what you have next year. Perennial seed heads are also fun to save. You have black eyed Susan's cone flowers and Lavalia. It's bulb season on the east coast. We have tender bulbs and hardy bulbs. Tender bulbs cannot withstand freezing winters, and they are usually planted in the spring for summer color. And then we have hardy bulbs that are planted in the fall for spring color and can withstand our winter freezing temperatures. So if you planted any tender bulb, Gallias, amarillus, cana, gladiola, bagonia, elephant ears, kaladium, it's time to dig those up and prepare those for winter. You don't want those to freeze because you won't have them for next year. And the University of Minnesota has a really, really great website on caring for tender bulb.

Mikaela

I have a quick question, Rachel, and it might be relevant to other people who are listening to is it good practice to share bulbs? They're mostly clean. They don't come with a lot of dirt, but they are dirty and I can't see any disease or anything. But is it good practice to be sharing bulbs, especially with like Asian jumping worm and things like that?

Rachel

Especially with Asian jumping worm prevalent and hitting our little Eastern Shore area? I would not be sharing bulbs. I don't even know if I would sharing plants at this point. I have a few people in our little town that have brought in Asian jumping room from things that they've gotten from a friend that they've planted in their garden. Now. Emily is the expert on Asian jumping room.

Emily

So I would almost say. And you can correct me if this would be wrong. But I would almost say if you wanted to share bulbs or plants. I would take them and wash them so when they're still on your property. I would take the plants and wash them in like a five gallon bucket in the roots to get as much of that soil off and then replant them in fresh potting mix the store and the same thing with bulbs. So I would dig them up and gently wash them, not using soap or scrub brush, but just your fingers to get as much of the dirt off of them. And then I would put them out to dry before you put them away for the winter. Because I don't think having them wet for. Like. The five minutes it takes for you to wash them. As long as you have a place to let them kind of dry off. Don't let them bear. But let them so that you're not putting them away wet so they don't grow mold. But I think that would be okay for you to kind of be able to share plants and bulbs in a way to reduce the spread of jumping worms.

Mikaela

Well, and maybe Rachel can correct me if I'm wrong, but you can also store them in, like, sawdust or maybe pete moss or something, like after you've washed them off, maybe that's a good way to store and share them and to help kind of get them dry, because I'm sure the sawdust will suck some of that moisture out, too.

Rachel

Yeah, and that's what we usually do with our tender bulb. It's always, like, in a mesh stack with some peat moss or even, like, milk crate with peat moss or sawdust and to overwinter them. That's a really good question. All right, so now's the time to plant those spring bulbs. And when you're picking out bulbs, you want to select high quality spring bulbs because the flower bud has already developed in the bulb that is offered for sale. So size is important. The bigger the size matters. Size matters here.

Emily

You know what they say about big bulbs.

Rachel

You get big flowers.

Mikaela

Yeah, big flowers.

Rachel

So you want to look for a bulb that's lump and firm. You don't want to pick out a bulb that's mushy or bruised, because that's a recipe for adding disease into your flower bed. And you want to make sure that the root base is nice and intact. And you can keep those bulbs stored at about 60 to 60 to five degrees until you're ready to plant them. Usually October planted bulbs need to establish a nice, healthy root system prior to the onslaught of winter. So it's kind of like moving your perennials. You want to try to get your bulbs planted in time for our first frost, which is November 15 ish in that range. So give yourself a good four to six weeks lead way time. So that's right about now to get those in the ground. If you're doing a fall vegetable garden, there's still time to transplant some lettuce, kale and collards to have a good cutting. Now, you're not going to be starting any seeds right now. Sorry, folks, you missed that window. If you haven't cleaned up your summer garden, please get it done now. Disinfect your tomato cages, your steaks, any of your garden utensils that you're using, like your trouser shovels.

Rachel

Now is the perfect time to do disinfection for our spring and make sure that garden bed has been covered with a cover crop or lasagna garden or even some leaves just to keep that soil in place. And if you haven't done one in the last three years, do a soil test. Make sure your garden doesn't need any winter amendments before you plant for the spring. So if you want to know more about testing your soil, go to the Home and Garden Information Center website for the University of Maryland Extension. And we have a really great page on there about testing your soil and links to local soil labs. I think that I say this every episode, use the soil lab in your area. Do not send your soil off to another region.

Emily

Those are some great tips, Rachel. So much that I know I have to do this October in my garden, and I'm so happy it's finally cooled down. So I'm actually excited to go do stuff in my garden again now.

Rachel

I think October is one of the best months to work in your garden just because it's not hot and you don't have mosquitoes.

:up beat music:

Mikaela

Well, that's all we have for this episode. Listener we hope you enjoyed it and we'll tune in next month for more garden tips. If you have any gardenrelated questions, please email us at umegardenpodcast@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook at gardentimepodcast. That's garden thyme. 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 HGIC. Thanks for listening, and have fun getting down and dirty in your garden. Goodbye.

All Three

Good Bye.

:up beat music:

Mikaela

The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Mikaela Boley, Senior Agent Associate in Talbot County for Horticulture rachel Rhodes, Senior Agent Associate for Horticulture in Queen Annes County and Emily Zobel, Senior Agent Associate for Agriculture in Dorchester County.

Emily

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Leslie Sturges

I have bats here, so do you want me to quickly? Yes. Hang on. Let me go grab some gloves and get a bat.

Rachel

This is so exciting. It's like Christmas.

Mikaela

I know.

Leslie Sturges

Oh, look at that cute little bat.

Rachel

Oh, my gosh.

Leslie Sturges

Me.

Mikaela

Now, what kind of bat is this, Leslie?

Leslie Sturges

This is a big bat.

Mikaela

It is big.

Leslie Sturges

So yours is really big because it's forced perspective. If I wasn't here, he would look in relation to my fingers. He's not so big. This is Curly, and he's one of our education.

Mikaela

And you do a good job.

Leslie Sturges

He's like, Get away from me now, Carly's. Like, when I come out and do this, I expect Melbourne delivered to my face immediately. Oh, gotcha. Yeah.

Mikaela

I get compensated.

Leslie Sturges

Exactly. He's still asleep. That's why I'm taking full advantage of him.

Rachel

He's so handsome.

Leslie Sturges

Look at you. He's so cute.