Making It Grow Minutes

Amanda McNulty shares how Christmas tree ornaments gathered over the years can stir warm memories of loved ones, both near and far.

Amanda McNulty reflects on the romance and beauty of Christmas trees once lit by candles.

Amanda McNulty embraces the spirit of the season by sharing the joys of visiting your local Christmas tree farm.

Amanda McNulty explains the origin of her passion for colorful Christmas tree lights

Amanda McNulty reminisces about putting up her Christmas tree in her 19th century home.

Cedar apple rust is a fungus, but its brown cases become jelly-like blobs with protrusions that look like something from outer space.

Our eastern red cedar is one of the junipers whose berries are used to flavor gin.

Native Americans used eastern red cedar for canoes and ceremonial buildings.

Before the ubiquitous Fraser firs that don’t grow well here, many people got an eastern red cedar.

Eastern red cedar has long been used to line chests and closets to protect wool items.

Bird and bat guano have both been used as valuable sources of fertilizer. The most valuable guano is found in caves protected from water.

Agave growers get higher yields of tequila precursors when the plants aren’t allowed to flower, imperiling bats that depend on the night-blooming flowers.

Do you enjoy tequila? Thank the bat community.

Host Amanda McNulty explains how you can help protect our state's bat population.

Host Amanda McNulty explains why bats are important mammals worldwide.

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.