Making It Grow Minutes

Even if you don’t have a large yard, you can use a small raised bed or even containers on a balcony to give your kids a hands-on experience growing vegetables, cooking and eating them, and learning about their history and importance. The South Carolina Botanical Garden has series with these fascinating topics – The Great Pea Race which Thomas Jefferson and his friends started, Wartime Secrets of C...

The South Carolina Botanical Garden is on the campus of Clemson University. The Garden is open for people to walk in and enjoy, with rules requiring masks and social distancing. In our coldest months, the magnificent camellia collection is alluring. But the beauty doesn’t stop there.

We are entering the long, dark days of winter which we hope will lead to a safer spring and summer as the Covid 19 vaccines become available. For some fresh, new activities for any children in your life, the South Carolina Botanical Garden has developed a program that encourages kids to get outside and garden by sending packages of seeds especially selected to grow well in our state, but the suppo...

A sharp-eared listener wrote me a nice note saying he thought I’d made in mistake in talking about health benefits of peanut oil. I checked and sure enough I said that as a monounsaturated fat, it lowered your HDL cholesterol as if that were a good thing. Well, I had it backwards. We want our HDL cholesterol, the excess which can be eliminated by our liver, to be a high number relative to the LDL...

George Washington Carver developed several soups using boiled peanuts and they are delicious but somewhat bland, and you need boiled peanuts. I’ve found an exotic soup that is vegetarian, as we all have some family members or friends we need to prepare such a dish for. This one uses butternut squash which is the dickens to cut up but I’ve found it already peeled and cubed in some stores. You cook...

Fifty-two year ago I went on a high school “educational” tour to Europe. In Amsterdam, we stayed on a government training ship for their naval recruits -- this was no luxury cruise ship, believe me. But the food was delicious. The Dutch colonized Indonesia in the late fifteen hundreds -- spices were among goods Europeans wanted, nutmeg and cloves came from this colony.

While looking up information about peanuts, I found an NPR story that included a YouTube video of Burl Ives and Johnny Cash singing “Goober Peas,” a song about the Confederate Army. Burl Ives tells the tale of Mr. Goober pulling up a peanut plant and giving it his name, while Johnny Cash said his grandfather called them ground peas.

There are two main types of peanuts – bunch and runner. Runner peanuts have long underground stems with shells containing seeds growing the length of that runner, and these peanut plants cover the entire surface of the field. These are the ones I see growing in fields in Calhoun County.

Peanuts start off growing like many other plants. Farmers plant seeds, individual peanuts, when the risk of frost is over. The plants emerge, grow about eighteen inches high and those with runner types vines eventual cover the entire field. The yellow flowers that bloom are self-pollinating.

Until two thousand and two the United States government had a quota system on how many acres could be planted in peanuts. Since that program ended, South Carolina farmers have gone from 10,000 acres to over eighty-thousand acres today. Peanuts grow better here than soybeans and are more profitable, and, of course they are important to plant in rotation with cotton as they have the ability to fix a...

When the tremendous benefits of George Washington Carver’s regime of rotating cotton with peanuts resulted in huge numbers of peanuts being grown, it created a dilemma. There wasn’t much demand for peanuts – we weren’t making peanut butter sandwiches or roasting peanuts or using them for candies. But Carter developed mind-boggling uses for this plant. Paint pigments, different types of paper, swee...

The Incas selected and developed peanuts from a wild ancestor 4000 years ago. The Spanish and Portuguese invaders carried the seeds to Africa, Asia and India where they quickly became part of those peoples’ diets and a crucial ingredient in many recipes. They were reintroduced to the New World as a food for the people captured in Africa and sent to the Americas as slaves. It wasn’t until Dr. Carve...

George Washington Carver was born a year before the emancipation of enslaved people and was raised by a white family who treated him as a son. A somewhat sickly child, he concentrated on education but opportunities were limited for him. Eventually, he studied art at a mid-western school and through those connections was the first black student accepted at Iowa State University, earning an advanced...

My husband has been heating up the kitchen, giving our little window unit a real workout, as our grocery store has beautiful green peanuts for sale, perfect for boiling. He fills up a big pot with water, peanuts, and salt, a little apple cider vinegar, a couple of jugs of hot sauce and then starts cooking them. It takes about four or five hours! It takes a lot of salt, more than if you were cookin...

I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. On our visit to film at Riverbanks Zoo and Garden, we learned about displays designed to reflect the native areas of a specific animal. We started out at the sealion and seal exhibit. Obviously, there weren’t plants in the water, but curator Melody Scott Leach has planted the surrounding areas to resemble the wind-swept California coast...

I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. During our filming with horticulturist Melody Scott Leach at Riverbanks Zoo and Garden, we learned about what animal exhibit specialists call furniture. This means plants or other items placed inside the animal enclosure. For example, the rhinoceroses need shade but these massive animals could easily destroy trees by rubbing against the...

I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. As part of putting our toes back in the water during these difficult times, Team Making It Grow is looking for outdoor places to film. Recently, we visited Riverbanks Zoo and Garden in Columbia. There’s a special branch of horticulture for areas that involve animal exhibits. Melody Scott Leach fills that role there and she gave us a fas...

I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. At our recent filming at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, we met several people who help our friend Katie Dickson by volunteering, working year round in summer’s heat and winter’s cold. We talked with some of them who said they get more in sharing friendships and learning than they give with their valuable skills. Many, many public gard...

I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Team Making It Grow is going back out to film interesting places to share with our viewers. Public gardens seem like just the ticket in these times, especially now that the temperatures are lower. Our first trip was to Magnolia Plantation and Gardens where our friend Katie Dickson is in charge of seasonal displays for lots of WOW. We be...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. In an effort to stop the potential extermination of native birds being used in the millinery trade, Congress passed the Lacey Act in 1900 which made it unlawful to transport illegally procured animals across state lines. Meanwhile, a new threat emerged as Florida’s homesteaders’ act gave them preference to land under co...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Although we often think of Theodore Roosevelt as a relentless hunter of trophy animals, he combined that a passion for understanding the habit, habitat and lifestyles of not only those but other animals in nature. As he waited for transit to Cuba during the Spanish American War, Roosevelt renewed an earlier interest in...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Dixon Lanier Merritt, American humorist wrote: A funny old bird is a pelican. His beak can hold more than his belican. Food for a week He can hold in his beak, But I don’t know the helican.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. I wonder how many more hummingbird feeders we’ve added to our gardens since the pandemic started as birding resource sites report there’s been a huge interest in ornithology recently. Sadly, there was an equal fascination with hummingbirds during the times when features and even entire birds were used as adornments in t...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. One early falsehood spread by manufacturers of hats adorned with feathers was that the feathers were gathered from the ground. But as whole birds or parts of birds began to adorn hats the specious nature of that story was revealed. The Empress of Germany Bird of Paradise measuring over two feet from beck to the end of i...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Woman were blamed for their heartlessness in wearing hats covered with the feathers and body parts of cruelly harvested wild birds. But with time, knowledge of the consequences of this practice prompted many socialites and educated women into campaigning against this practice. We spoke earlier of Boston socialite Harrie...