Marissa Schuh , IPM Extension Educator Models suggest that significant cold has passed , things are starting to green up and soil is warming . While this warm winter is causing growers stress about what diseases and insects will do this spring, this early spring can provide rare windows for weed control. As with everything, what happens will vary at each farm and with each weed, but it might not all be bad news. Early season weed flush. Photo: Tom Peters For example, much of Minnesota had minimal snow cover for most of the season. For annual weeds that shed seeds, if those seeds were left on the soil surface, those seeds were easy picking for birds and rodents for most of the winter. For those seeds in our soil’s weed seedbank, each species will be looking for different environmental cues to emerge. We are likely to see many weeds emerge earlier than usual. For example, common lambsquarters germinate when temperatures are as low as 43F, but most will germinate when daytime temperature
Marissa Schuh , IPM Extension Educator. Reviewed by Anthony Hanson, Field Crop IPM Extension Educator. The National Weather Service's Seasonal Temperature outlook for March, April, and May suggests our dud of a winter has wrapped. Many people are wondering how this will impact insects, and as always, it depends! Here are some things to think about. National Weather Service Each species of insect, both beneficial and pest, has a different strategy for riding out the winter. While this winter was overall pretty mild, we still had a cold snap in January, and we still got below-zero temperatures many nights. We had minimal snow cover, but we still had plenty of freeze thaw cycles. Each one of these factors will impact each insect that spends the winter in Minnesota differently. We likely had enough cold snaps to make sure insects that don’t typically spend the winter in Minnesota weren’t able to spend it here. Insects like corn earworm , potato leafhopper , and black cutworm w