Making It Grow Minutes

Two vegetable scientists, Powell Smith and Mark Fortnum, traveled through South Carolina and Georgia on a search for old timey collard plants, especially ones in flower.

At the Coastal Research and Development Center 2023 brassica field day we saw a field with several hundred different collard green plants growing in it. There’re two major types of collards.

Nationally, South Carolina is the top state for producing turnips greens and second in collards, kale and mustard greens.

Hello, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. There are 50 species of cotton in the genus Gossypium — basically they’re seeds with fibers attached. Only a few are commercially important.

I visually see changes in agriculture and society on my daily commute to Sumter. From the older compressed modular storage units of cotton, today’s extraordinarily complex cotton picking machines press the cotton into round units and wrap them in a protective covering before depositing them in the field, all the while continuing to pick cotton from the plants at the front of the machine.

Making It Grow celebrated thirty years of being on air with SCETV this year. The show was developed and hosted for much of that time by Rowland Alston, a Clemson Extension agent and son of an agent.

The early mechanical cotton pickers dumped their filled bins into carriers which were then emptied into wagons in the field. Workers drove these wagons to the gin daily and waited for hours as each was emptied and credited to the farmer.

This year's cotton crop seems phenomenal. It’s the closest thing to a snow-covered landscape I’m likely to see in these days of changing weather patterns.

Hickory tree leaves are the larval food source of two hundred moths or butterflies; and one is particular is spectacular in both the larval and adult stage.

For people, shelling them is a laborious process and the tools used include hammers, vises, and a peculiar item called the Texas York Nut Sheller.

It's hard to harvest at home.

Twenty some odd years ago, Edward and I dug up a hickory seedling on his family’s farm. The foot tall seedling had a six-foot long tap root that fortunately took a turn and didn’t go straight down. We brought it home and heeled it in near the house.

One of the most beautiful of fall trees is the hickory. With leaves the color of slightly browned butter it is quite a standout.

Magnolia grandiflora, our southern magnolia with large, glossy leaves is part of many nature-based decorations for holidays and special occasions.

The relatively modest Christmas decorations at Historic Columbia’s Robert Mills House reflect what would have been accurate during the 1820’s.

Our dear departed friend Extension agent Tony Melton grew up on the sandy soils of McBee. Although those soils grow great peaches, they did not produce plentiful crops. Tony said Christmas was special for his family but, with eight children, presents were minimal.

The holiday decorations at Colonial Williamsburg are knock your socks off beautiful, but not historically accurate. Christmas decorations weren’t a big deal during those early times and citrus and pineapples would have been prohibitively expensive.

Christmas morning was a magical time for the three McNulty kids who lived on Woodleigh Road in Columbia.

At the South Carolina Botanical Garden, the goal is not just to offer visitors a rich experience in seeing a wide panoply of native and introduced plants that grow in three hundred acres which duplicate ecosystems from across the state, but they also preserve and protect endangered plants.

Recently we filmed a segment about so called carnivorous plants with Trent Miller, manager of the Natural Heritage Gardens at the South Carolina Botanical Gardens at Clemson.

Recently, we went to the South Carolina Botanical Garden to film their newest project – the Birding Garden. The people who take up birding are dedicated and persistent, the garden staff noticed that every morning binocular-laden folks were gathering in a particular place below the Visitor’s Center, scanning the tree line for views of year-round or migratory avians.

Our small state has wildly divergent plant communities and the Botanical Garden’s topography and soil types allows many of these to be replicated. At the garden, experts in ecology, conservation, botany, woody and herbaceous plants teach core classes.

The South Carolina Botanical Garden is on the Clemson campus but since 1992 has been designated as the State Botanical Garden.

At a home in Saint Matthews, dating from 1880, the yard is now naturalized. But in the fall, you can see where the formal beds from probably a century ago were the planted. Almost overnight, usually after a good, drenching rain, twelve to fifteen inch tall brilliant red spider lilies, Lycoris radiata, pop up and continue blooming for almost a month.

I don’t think the person who gave the common name Hurricane Lily to what I’ve always called spider lilies, Lycoris radiata, meant to cast aspersions on them.