(bright music) - We film our "Prairie Yard & Garden" shows during the summer before they air the following winter.

That means it is usually pretty warm or even hot when we are out and about.

Our producer, Mike Cihak, takes good care of us and makes sure that we have a cooler of cold water along during filming to keep us safe and hydrated.

We take good drinking water for granted, but let's go visit with someone who works hard to make sure our water is safe and protected.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Prairie Yard & Garden" is provided by Heartland Motor Company, providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of Truck Country.

Heartland Motor Company.

We have your best interest at heart.

Farmers Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative.

Proud to be powering ACIRA, pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

And by friends of Prairie Yard & Garden, a community of supporters like you who engage in the long-term growth of the series.

To become a friend of Prairie Yard & Garden, visit pioneer.org/pyg.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - Growing up on the farm and milking cows, we never took a family vacation.

In 1986, my parents had been married 41 years, and we all met at a resort in Minnesota for our first real family vacation.

We had such a great time, and this year, we hope to have the fifth generation attend the family vacation at the same resort.

Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes, has such a reputation for quality water, and today we are visiting with Jared House who works to protect this great resource.

Welcome, Jared.

- Thanks, Mary, I'm happy to be here.

- Tell us about yourself and what you do.

- I am the administrative manager for the Grant County Soil & Water Conservation District.

Our office is out of Elbow Lake.

I'm the Grant County Water Planner.

So I deal with a lot of water issues within the county that also are issues with the state.

- How much water does Minnesota have?

- Minnesota is very fortunate.

We have...

I know everyone says we have 10,000 lakes.

It's actually 11,842 lakes that are greater than 10 acres in size.

That's a lot of lakes, a lot of recreation to be had.

We even have over 69,000 stream miles, stream and river miles in the state and over 10 million acres of wetlands.

There is a lot of freshwater in Minnesota.

- What is meant by water quality?

- Well, water quality is the condition of our water, whether it be chemical, physical, or biological.

We assess water for those three parameters to make sure that it's healthy for the ecosystem and also healthy for all of us who live here.

- How is that measured?

- So there are various things that we do to measure water in the state.

It depends on what we're looking at, whether it's a lake, a stream, a wetland, or even if it's groundwater.

The state has procedures that they've put together in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency that has consistency, wind sampling, and it makes it for faster sampling, having those procedures in place.

The samples might be just going out into the middle of the lake, sticking a jug in the water, and sending it off to the lab.

It might be a technician will have a probe that they can measure things like pH or we call dissolved oxygen, the stuff that the critters in the water breathe.

And it also might be a physical disk that you lower into the water to look at the water clarity.

Another thing that happens in the state that I think is great is macroinvertebrate, which are those little critters that don't have a backbone, but you can still see with the naked eye.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency will go out and assess waters to make sure that critters are actually living in there.

'Cause if they're living in there, we have clean water.

And some of those critters are more sensitive to pollution and other contaminants.

- How often are they measured?

- The state of Minnesota has moved over the last 10 years to what's called the watershed approach.

There are 80 major watersheds within the state.

We're currently standing in the Palmiter River Watershed, and this watershed is to give you a general context and size, it goes from Otter Tail County all the way down to Swift County, and empties into the Minnesota River.

The water is being assessed intensively for a two-year period every 10 years.

There are other organizations, like Lake Associations and Soil and Water Conservation Districts, that'll go out and collect samples for a particular resource, say Pelican Lake, which is just over this hill here.

They might do it annually, they might do it semi-annually, but they try to keep the bigger picture 'cause it's really hard to capture water quality when you're assessing it only every two years.

So they might try to fill in some of the gaps.

But the approach is working because, again, we have 11,842 lakes in Minnesota.

It's really hard to assess all of them every single year all of the time.

- What happens to all that information and data?

- So the data's compiled by the Minnesota Pollution Control and the Department of Natural Resources.

They take that data and they compare it to what we have within the broader spectrum of the state or standards.

But they take all that data that was collected and they compare it to that standard.

And if it's lower than the standard, then we know that the water's doing really well.

But if it's higher than that, we call that water-impaired.

And that means that we need to, people like myself or the staff in my office, need to spend a little extra time on that body of water to try to help get it back to meeting that state standard.

- How does water move in Minnesota?

- So that's a great question, and I love answering that question.

And it all stems from the water cycle.

When it rains, the water has several places it could go.

The first place is it could be soaked up into the ground.

It could go into deep recharge for our aquifers where we draw groundwater.

It may just stay shallow within the ground and head its way towards, say, this wetland back here.

And anywhere you hear people say there's natural springs, that's where water's moving underground and moving towards those areas.

Some other places it might go, and one of actually the biggest users of water, is the plants and trees around us.

So again, waters hit the ground, it might be soaked up by the plants and transpire back up into the atmosphere.

It might pool into that wetland and it might evaporate back up into the atmosphere if it didn't run off the land, which is one of the last things that that water could do.

If it doesn't go in the ground, if it doesn't evaporate back up into the atmosphere, it'll run off the ground and find the lowest spots.

And that could be our lakes, our wetlands, our streams, and our rivers, and all that water just keeps condensing until we get rivers as big as the Mississippi River, right?

That's just a very large watershed where it's collecting water from that whole big area.

And heading to that point.

- Jared, how has water movement change over time?

- Yeah, so we have the natural effects of the water cycle.

And we, as humans, have come in and we've altered how water moves on the landscape.

Some of the biggest factors are we don't hold water on the land as much as we used to.

I mentioned earlier that we have 10 million acres of wetlands in the state.

It is believed that we actually had more like 18 million acres at one point in time that have either been drained, paved over for parking lots, and it has changed.

The wetlands that we have slow water down.

It holds water, allows it to evaporate, and it slowly trickles to larger bodies of water.

But when we take those out and we channelize our streams and ditches, meaning we make them nice and straight, that water gets there really fast.

Now, I'm almost referring towards an agricultural land with the channelization of streams.

But that also happens in urban settings.

We have ditches that go next to roadways.

We have storm management systems that are direct conduits to our lakes and rivers.

So instead of that water going slowly into the ground, it's being shot down a tube and into a lake or stream.

So we've altered the landscape by pushing more water through it and much faster.

And it's hard to blame us because we exist, right?

And we need to build houses, we need agricultural land.

So it's just having that understanding helps us move forward, I believe.

(bright music) - [Mary] Every fall in Minnesota signals the arrival of great apple varieties.

But did you know we have many delicious early-season apples ready by mid-August?

First Kiss, State Fair, and Zestar are just three early season varieties developed at the University of Minnesota.

First Kiss is known for its bright color and juicy insides.

State Fair is tart, which makes it great for pies and other pastries.

Zestar is perfect for people who love apples with a delicious crunch.

All three varieties are just perfect for a summer or early fall day.

Of course, our beloved Honeycrisp apple is also from the university, but that's not ready until September.

In the meantime, why not visit a local orchard or farmers' market to find out what early season apples are available?

While Minnesota is known for its walleye and sweet corn, our apples should also be a point of pride.

- Well, there's a few reasons for that.

Number one, most of the apples we grow here are bred by the University of Minnesota.

And so they're bred for our climate, which is very important to us 'cause it gets very cold here in the winter.

Apples develop properly in our climate.

Our cool nights in the fall gives them the color, the flavors.

You take that tree and move it to Washington and they just don't develop the same.

My favorite Minnesota apple has to be the SweeTango.

It's a wonderful apple.

It's across of Honeycrisp and Zestar.

It gets its wonderful texture from the Honeycrisp and the flavor of a Zestar.

And they're just...

They're fantastic.

It's also our top seller here as well.

(bright music) - For more information on Minnesota apples and all the delicious crops grown in our state, go to minnesotagrown.com.

(bright music) What does your office do to help monitor and improve the water quality?

- So in the past, we've helped monitoring with the Palmiter River Association.

They have staff that will go out and help the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency monitor a lot of the water quality.

And our office has assisted in times of need.

But primarily, my office works at restoring or coming up with solutions for holding water onto the land.

The wetland right behind us, for example, was built in 1988, or I should say restored 'cause it had been historically a wetland that was drained for farming purposes.

But the landowner here, Ted Johnson, wanted to restore that to as close to the natural state as we could get.

And so we put that in and our office helped with the design on that and helped with finding the funding to do so.

My office helps with remeandering streams.

So again, we mentioned one of the things we've done is straightened or altered the hydrology.

So the water movement.

And if we can restore that back, it's called sinuosity.

If we can make that stream a little bit more windy, it'll actually slow the water down and will cause less issues downstream.

We have four regional watersheds within our state, meaning that we have water that goes all over the place.

If it drops here, some of it makes it to Hudson Bay up north of Canada.

That would be the Souris-Red-Rainy Watershed.

The Missouri River Watershed, which is in the Southwest portion of the state, that eventually in Missouri, actually, has a confluence or it meets up with the Mississippi River.

We have the Upper Mississippi, which is the headwaters of Minnesota.

I think that's everybody's pride and joy in the state, or at least it was mine when I was younger.

And then we also have the Great Lakes Watershed, which water will eventually move through the Great Lakes and make its way to the Atlantic Ocean.

So we're sending water all over the place.

And so if we can help or my office can help restore some of that, the rechanneling or reinforce some shoreline habitat, help build wetlands, it'll actually help all of those places 'cause they're all downstream of us.

- How does water quality affect fishing and our other recreational activities?

- Well, we're Minnesotans, and it's ingrained in us to love water, at least that's the way I look at it.

Growing up in Minnesota, I've always enjoyed going out and fishing, boating, tubing.

Just like our plants on land, they need soil to grow in where they get their nutrients.

They need sunlight and they need water.

Well, aquatic plants, they have an abundance of water.

As long as the basin doesn't run dry, they may get plenty of nutrients from runoff or other material within the lake, but if that water's cloudy, they may not get the light that they need, and that can actually impact how much vegetation you have, which impacts habitat for fish and other little critters in the water.

So each lake is unique in how productive it is, meaning how much vegetation, how much biomass it can produce.

Kind of trying to find a balance of keeping those nutrients down, keeping the water as clear as we can so that the ecology can just take over from there.

- [Mary] What does the term erosion mean?

- Erosion is the Earth essentially breaking apart and being transported somewhere.

In the water cycle when it rains down, the water itself can erode that land and send it to a different place.

And there are several factors that go into how erosive an area might be.

And it has to do with what kind of vegetation cover is out there.

We're standing in a field right now, there's pretty good vegetation cover, so that soil might be held in place pretty well.

We might not transport it down to that wetland.

The other thing we look at is the weather.

Weather patterns have been changing.

We get higher-intensity rain events in shorter periods of time.

Another factor is slope.

So the steeper an area is, there's more potential for that water to gain energy and erode way, or your soil, or your grass, or whatever's out on the land.

And the last factor I wanna talk about is sediment.

The soil texture, what's made up in our soil.

Soil's made up a sand, silt, and clay.

Sand, large sand, is harder to transport with that water and move off the land.

Clay is very, very fine.

So fine that it actually layers itself up and can be a barrier to water and actually be in... and help from prevent from erosion.

It can be sticky, for a lack of a better term, and holds stuff in place.

But that silt area, the medium-sized soil particles, are really easy to be picked up and moved and sent downstream.

Every area's gonna erode a little bit different, but we can anticipate these things as managers and protect vulnerable areas.

- [Mary] So then what is shoreline restoration?

- So in Minnesota, when we have lakes, again, lakes can vary depending on their depth, how much they move up and down throughout the year for the water level.

And so shoreline restorations and designs are created to help protect the shoreline from those bounces and even from ice heaves.

So on Pelican Lake, my office has made that a priority within the county and within the Palmiter Watershed.

When we were doing our water planning for the state, we determined that Pelican Lake is on a tipping point for becoming impaired.

Meaning that if it becomes impaired, it's gonna be a lot harder to handle the water quality issues.

So we said we need to spend a lot of time here, and there is a lot of erosion happening along the shoreline.

So we are putting in, we're helping landowners design and put in rock riprap and vegetation, different types of vegetation along that shoreline to hold that bank in place.

How do we restore lakes after they've become impaired or if there's too much sediment in them?

And you'll sometimes see it in aerial photos where you see a big plume of sediment into a lake.

That's because all that sediment's slowing down and dropping out.

But it's very, very costly.

And a lot of times, in our smaller lakes within the state, we don't have the funding to do that.

And it's not really efficient because it's just gonna keep building up again unless we address the problem upstream.

As for phosphorus in lakes or when a lake's impaired for too much nutrients, once it's tipped to being really, really, really productive, meaning there's a lot of algae, a lot of plants in there, it's really hard to remove the phosphorus, especially if it's a shallow lake 'cause it just...

The phosphorus, just the nutrients just keep getting mixed up, and mixed up, and mixed up.

So we try to cut it off before that happens because it's more efficient to protect the lake than to have to restore the lake.

Algae is actually native to the area, to pretty much all water body.

There are many different types of algae.

We have green algae, which is actually a type of plant.

But the one everyone's concerned with is the cyanobacteria or the blue-green algae.

A quick fact on that.

They're not actually algae, but bacteria, and they're bacteria that are the most efficient at taking those nutrients and propagating or making more of themselves.

And that's why we get those big green slime areas because they get all that phosphorus that they soak up and make the water all cloudy and can be very nuisance for all of us.

- Is water quality a rural issue, or an urban issue, or both?

- Well, it's rural, it's urban, it's shoreline, it's everyone.

We influence the water and we influence where water goes.

In the cities, we have asphalt or we have impervious surface everywhere, lawns everywhere.

Kentucky bluegrass, for example, isn't very good at soaking up water, so it can actually act like a harder surface and a lot of water can run off of.

And agricultural lands, it's the farmer's job to be more productive, to provide food for everyone, or energy, or wherever their products go.

And doing so, making the land productive, they may alter the watershed for the worse, it might be for the better, but as we've seen in the state of Minnesota and actually across the world, generally, there's some effects that happen when you alter the watershed that we have to address.

- What are some of the things that I, as a homeowner, and our viewers can do to help improve water quality?

- There are many things that you can do.

If you live in an urban area, when you're mowing your grass, don't mow your clippings into the road because it's just gonna get washed in the storm drain and sent out.

And that clipping is green, meaning there's still nutrients in involved there.

The other things you can do for water quality if you're on shoreline, make sure you keep some of that shoreline natural or have some sort of vegetation, trees, to hold that soil in place because a lot of times, if you alter that shoreline, we might not be able to come in and fix it and you might lose a large chunk of your land, and that just influences the water quality as well.

(jaunty music) - I have a question.

What are some good hardy apples I can use to make cider?

- For making cider, you can use a choice of apples.

Typically, with wine grapes, wine makers will use a single variety, like Chardonnay, to make a Chardonnay wine.

But traditionally, in apple cider making, they'll use a blend of apples.

Some are sweeter, some have more tart acidity, some have some tannin in them.

It makes it a little bit bitter, gives better structure.

If you're interested in making cider from Minnesota apples, I would pick a selection of apples, and the three I can really recommend right now would be the Chestnut Crabapple, as well as the Frostbite apple, and the Canada release, the Kerr apple.

This apple here is the Chestnut Crabapple.

It was released by the University of Minnesota in 1949, it's one of the earlier apples.

It's very cold, hardy, and it's very productive.

People don't normally think about crabapples either for eating or for using for cider, but this one is a great candidate.

It's got almost everything you need.

It's got sweetness, it's got good tart acidity, and it also has tannins that sort of bitterness to them that gives the cider more character and more structure.

There's also two other apples that I can recommend for making cider.

One is the Kerr.

It's not a University of Minnesota apple.

It was actually developed by a University of Manitoba in Canada and they grow very, very well here in Minnesota.

Another really great apple, the Frostbite apple.

Frostbite was one of the very early releases released in the 1920s.

Frostbite has a lot of sweetness to it.

It has good appley flavor.

It doesn't really have any tannin.

It's got sort of a soft mouth feel to it, but it's very productive and very cold, hardy, and something that any home grower could grow in Minnesota.

All three of those together would make a delightful cider.

- [Announcer] "Ask the Arboretum Experts" has been brought to you by the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska dedicated to welcoming, informing, and inspiring all through outstanding displays, protected natural areas, horticultural research, and education.

(jaunty music) - Jared, how can we, as homeowners, conserve water?

- So conservation of water is... We have two different things going on in the state.

We were talking about water quality earlier and now we have water quantity.

So the amount of water we use.

'Cause if we use less, then we have less chance of polluting it.

There are several things a landowner can do to conserve water.

There are several programs in the state right now assisting with moving more towards a native garden, or conservation, or less-mow/no-mow grass, for example.

Taking away a little part of your property and making it more natural can do a lot to conserve water with groundwater and filtration, and again, secondary benefits with our pollinators and other insects.

Switching to a grass instead of a Kentucky bluegrass, that's so water-demanding and nutrient-demanding to a fescue that is a little bit better at conserving water and handling more drought periods.

- Okay, how about even watering methods?

What can we do there?

- Targeting, targeting, targeting.

If you have a mist-based sprinkler system, mist is very fine and can evaporate very easily.

So you might actually be use losing more of that to the atmosphere than you want.

Drip tape works wonderful and slowly let that water be sucked into the ground because water moves faster into the ground if it's already wet.

So if you're just flooding it with a bunch of water right away, it might just run off and never make it to your roots anyway.

- [Mary] I've heard about rain gardens and we've talked about rain gardens, but tell us how they help.

- Rain gardens are great, what I consider urban practice.

We can use them in rural areas, but they're very good at targeting a smaller lots or parcels where you can take away a little bit of piece of your land, make a beautiful garden that'll take the water from either runoff from a parking lot or from your shingles and directed into a very shallow basin that's intended to take away one inch of water in 24 hours.

So if you were to have a, let's say, 1,000-square-foot roof and it rained an inch of water, we would design that rain garden so that it would soak up all that water within a 24-hour period.

In addition to the shallow basin of that rain garden, we pick beautiful native plants that go in there to help soak up that water, create those deep roots kind of like we have with shoreline or in our buffer strips to hold that soil in that basin and to soak up that water and help transpire it back up into the atmosphere instead of all of that water running off your land and into the storm drain.

And rain gardens can be custom-designed.

You can make them in wonderful shapes.

I know some soil and water districts that have made like star shapes or moon shapes depending on what the landowner wants, as long as it's designed to that standard of one inch for 24 hours.

There's a lot of different things you can do, including a variety of beautiful Forbes or flowers that we can add in addition.

Another thing you can do on your property is collect the rain off your roof for use for your gardens, whether it be vegetables or flowers.

I have eight of them at my house where every downspout goes to a rain barrel and I have created a little cart for my wife with a little transfer motor on there and a battery so she can water her plants and just hook up to that rain barrel and then move on to the next when one runs dry.

And it's great 'cause it doesn't take much water to fill up a rain barrel.

Your roof has a such a big surface area that a little bit of water will fill that barrel up that you can use all throughout your yard.

And not only are you conserving the water by holding it back and using it, but you're not using, say, chlorinated water from the city or any other things that happen to be in the water to treat for you to drink.

You're not introducing that to the plants.

You're able to use the natural rainwater that's already available to all of us.

- This has been so interesting.

Thanks for talking with me today about all the water conservation and quality things that we can learn about.

- Well, thank you, Mary.

I very much enjoyed this.

This was a fun, fun time, and it was fun to get out of the office a little bit today.

(lighthearted music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Prairie Yard & Garden" is provided by Heartland Motor Company, providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of Truck Country.

Heartland Motor Company.

We have your best interest at heart.

Farmers Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative.

Proud to be powering ACIRA, pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

And by friends of Prairie Yard & Garden, a community of supporters like you who engage in the long-term growth of the series.

To become a friend of Prairie Yard & Garden, visit pioneer.org/pyg.

(bright music)