Making It Grow Minutes

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Gourds were human’s earliest containers. Their diversity in size and shape let early peoples select them for a variety of purposes. Some were cut in half and filled with food, hot rocks were added to cook those contents. Others with flat bottoms and long necks held and easily dispensed liquids. Early on they were decora...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. As a non-traditional, i.e. older, student, I took one horticulture class with David Bradshaw and my life was changed for the better. Among his infectious passions is an interest in heirloom seeds and he helped establish an heirloom seed repository at Clemson. One website offers his purple martin bird house seeds, our to...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Bottle gourds have been used by ancient and modern peoples for over ten thousand years now. For religious rites, they’ve been crafted into masks, musical instruments, or sounding devices. From a utilitarian standpoint, bottle gourd uses are incredible diversity -- a container, a dipper, wheels, even flotation devices. W...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. . In many cities these evenings, people go outside at seven and make noises to communicate their appreciation for front line workers in the covid 19 pandemic. My daughter and her boyfriend in Los Angeles have been participating. Casey, a trained saxophone player, has alternated between blowing two flutes at one time (a...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Many specialty good growers rely on high end restaurants to pay top dollar for their meticulously produced crops, often produced on a small acreage farm. With the ban on indoor dining, many restaurants have closed their doors as takeout orders don’t fit with their fine-dining experience. Consequently, their suppliers ar...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. The Clemson Extension Horticulture team interacts with professional fruit and vegetable growers as well as home-based clients. Although restricted by safety guidelines during these times, Extension office phones are working and hort agents are available to solve residential and commercial problems. Agents are also offer...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. During a recent interview, Commissioner of Agriculture Hugh Weathers detailed the breadth of agricultural activities considered essential during this time of national crisis, and that there is no evidence that food product can transmit the corona virus. His staff, most working remotely, is still performing all activitie...

We’ve talked a good bit about how Clemson can help women get up to speed with timber property management but don’t think that’s in anyway all Clemson’s doing. If you search Clemson Extension Forestry and Wildlife Management Resources, you’ll see a variety of programs related to the forestry industry which has a 21 billion dollar impact on our state’s economy and provides close to 100,000 jobs. Top...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. There’re many benefits to owning timberlands besides the income from harvesting your trees. Some families enjoy hunting or while others gain income by leasing hunting rights to others. Wildlife ecology goes along with hunting in some cases when owners plant food crops and conduct prescribed burns. For many it’s the joy...

Driving across our state we’ve all seen places where invasive species have overwhelmed our woodlands. In the upstate, kudzu or English ivy are most likely the culprits. In some Midlands forests, trees are completely engulfed by Asian wisteria – still sold and planted to this very day. One of the recent workshops offered by Clemson Extension at its Women Owning Woodlands events was options on contr...

Across the United States, 30 percent of our timberlands or forests, is owned by the federal government. Ten percent is owned by local and state governments. Sixty percent is privately owned. But in South Carolina the amount privately owned is a whopping 85%! Providing education to these land owners is a critical responsibility of two state agencies -- Clemson Extension and the South Carolina Fores...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Janet Steele is a regional Clemson Extension forestry agent based in Orangeburg. She came to Sumter recently to tell us about new program she, Clemson Forester David Coyle and others are offering. In South Carolina eighty-five percent of woodlands are privately owned by companies or families. Eighty percent of married w...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. The family, Solanaceae, has the common name of nightshade, which sounds like something to avoid like the plague, includes some of our favorite vegetables. Besides tomatoes, other members are peppers, eggplants, and potatoes, and still an important agricultural crop, tobacco. Flowers include Datura, brugmansia, petunias...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Mated female bumblebees overwinter in sheltered underground locations, emerging in early spring to find a nesting site, collect pollen to lay eggs. Newly hatched bees take over the pollen and nectar gathering and the hive increases. Although social insects, bumblebees are relatively docile and generally not a threat. Th...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Field grown tomatoes can be effectively pollinated by wind but the addition of powerful buzz-pollinating insects, bumble bees and the much-maligned carpenter bees, improves the outcome. When growing tomatoes in greenhouses, the producers can either use mechanical pollination or maintain colonies of bumblebees. Effective...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Tomatoes need movement for pollination. Their pollen containing anthers have slits or pores in them which release ripe pollen when stimulated by wind or vibrations. As wind moves the flowers pollen is released and falls on the female stigma. The best insect pollinators are not honey bees but bumble bees and carpenter be...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Growing the delicious garden tomato becomes more and more elusive for me and others as well. Back in the day, my parents would put a few tomato plants in amongst the foundation plantings and we’d have plenty of those summer treats. Now with increased disease and insect pressure, I‘ve become an aficionado of cherry tomat...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Although the AC Moore Herbarium list of South Carolina’s plant distribution shows Ogeechee lime, Nyssa ogeche, as documented in only Jasper and Beaufort counties, there is a specimen growing at Moore Farms Botanical Garden in Lake City. It’s obviously a female tree, which has mostly female flowers but also some perfect...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. If you like the pine resin flavored Greek wine retsina, I have a honey suggestion for you. At Honey Travelers Single Flower honey page, they talk about forest or honeydew honey. Honeydew is the substance that aphids excrete – it is the bane of many gardeners as it coats the surface of lower leaves this sweet substance u...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. I’m not very picky about honey although Maynard Door near Sumter gave me some special honey he didn’t mix in with others as its flavor was so delightfully floral. Lots of people are honey aficionados and have their favorites for different purposes. There are even listings for honey varietals, just like wine! For example...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. If you look at the USC Herbarium’s plant distribution list, you’ll see that only in Jasper and Beaufort Counties has Ogeechee lime, Nyssa ogeche, been documented. It’s greatest distribution is in a swath of Georgia and the upper panhandle of Florida. Bee keepers take hives into these sites, sometimes floating them on pl...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. The rarest of the North American Nyssa trees is Nyssa ogeche. The species name comes from the Ogeechee River in Georgia, a blackwater river, like our Edisto River in South Carolina. It, too has beautiful bald cypress trees growing in it. But In its massive drainage basin, you’ll also find this Nyssa species, with the co...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Nyssa sylvatica has two varieties. On drier sites, you’ll find Nyssa sylvatica var sylvatica. In wet areas, often growing with bald cypress, the variety biflora is found. Both exhibit beautiful fall color, have small flowers very important to pollinators and produce fruits relished by birds and certain mammals. Also, th...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Today we fret over hollow trees, although educational websites say that those trees can be almost as strong as a tree still filled with heartwood. Trees near trafficked areas or buildings should be evaluated by an arborist. But for wildlife, hollows serve as homes for bats, birds, mammals, and reptiles. We’ve been talki...

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. I’m still excited about George Ellison’s column in the Asheville Citizen Times “Why the blackgum has a hollow trunk” -- do look it up --as it paints a wonderful picture of how something that sounds bad – a rotten tree – was critically important in frontier life. The most popular use for cut sections of these hollow trun...