Making It Grow Minutes

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 topic of the week, the ancient bottle gourd, Lagenaria sicenaria. For over fifty years, he’s been selecting seeds with the best characteristics for this purpose. Purple martins travel to South America in the winter and come back in spring to mate and raise their young. Natural nesting cavities are few and far between in our urbanized country; purple martin condominiums offer a safe place for these birds. Members of the swallow family, they’ll delight you with their aerial acrobatics as they catch and eat insects on the wing.

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. When dried, they are especially light weight and have undeniably made contributions towards improvements in the lives of humans. The eventual shape can be manipulated when the fruits are young by tying vines or twine around them to achieve a certain shape, or hung for a straight neck, or sat straight up on its base for an upright vessel. In some Papua New Guinea cultures, they are used as unusual body protection devices, called kotekas, which we might consider primitive but are not so different from equipment worn by football players.

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 common ancient practice) and a digeridoo. Eliza Frezil shakes a tambourine. All three instruments have ancient origins – the digeridoo most probably eucalyptus trunks hollowed out by termites. The flutes from plant stems and bamboo, and the tambourine originally a dried gourd whose seeds made the shaking sound. Gourds are the source of more nature-based musical or sound-making implements than any other natural object. Lagenaria sicenaria, the ancient bottle gourd, still grown today, probably originated in Africa but 10,000 years ago was already in the New World and Asia.

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 are taking quite a hit. Some of them are now offering ways for us to enjoy their products and help keep the afloat. At the South Carolina Department of Agriculture home page, the first image is a field with the phrase COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Outbreak. Click there for a listing of topics. One is how to find local farm-fresh food, including farmers markets, individual growers, and you-pick operations. These outlets have rules to ensure food safety and correct physical distancing and some require orders made in advance.

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 offering a variety of programs on line, from environmentally sustainable landscaping to step-by-step instructions on renovating your lawn, check out the Clemson Horticulture Facebook page. The Ag Service lab will accept soil samples in zip lock bags from residential customers and the Plant and Pest Diagnostic Clinic also is operating. Please call your local extension office for information on what is required to submit materials to those agencies by mail or private carrier. The Home and Garden Information Center agents are answering phones all day long advising clients on plant and food problems or questions.

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 activities necessary to keep human and animal food and fiber production, inspection, and distribution safe and operating at levels that can supply demand. If you search South Carolina Department of Agriculture, the first image is a field with the phrase COVID-19/ (Coronavirus) Outbreak. Click there to get a listing of related topics ranging from loan programs for producers to listings of farms, retail markets and other outlets legally open to consumers wanting to purchase fresh, locally produced vegetables, fruits, dairy, meat and more, and rules for safely visiting those outlets.

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. Topics range from controlling invasive insect and plant pests, using technology to aid in mapping and employing drones to survey and make management decisions, getting pesticide credits, and visiting farms to see how quickly employing the best management practices can improve your property. The programs are open to forestry consultants, owners, and interested citizens. We all should want to learn about this industry vitally important to the economic and ecological health of South Carolina.

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 of hearing the wind as it sings in tall pines and the voices and glimpses of birds and wildlife; all reasons to enjoy and protect your family’s woodlands which are enjoyed as much by women as by men. Traditionally men make more management decisions concerning these properties, and yet according to the Census Bureau, eighty percent of men die before their wives. We have a Making It Grow Extra podcast with Clemson’s Janet Steele about a program, Women Owning Woodlands, to help females new to forest management gain knowledge.

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 controlling these plants that diminish the financial value of timberland and severely impact the environmental value of these tracts of land. Some of the options discussed were mechanical, using grazing animals to control these unwanted plants, especially on slopes or near water sources, and straight talk on the use of herbicides. If you search Southern Forest Health glyphosate David Coyle, you can find a reasonable article discussing this topic.

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 Forestry Commission, aided by many highly trained private managers. Both entities offer trainings and learning opportunities to individuals. However, as women inherit property from husbands who predecease them, a new need has arisen. Extension Forestry agent Janet Steele, whom you can contact through the Orangeburg Extension office, is working with others to offer Women Owing Woodlands classes, an educational course designed to specifically provide information to those new to these stewardship responsibilities.

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 women outlive their husbands. So often while adjusting to the loss of a spouse, these persons also must learn how to manage their family’s properties; a task which most often had been the purview of their husbands. Women Owning Woodlands began nationally to address these needs and issues and now is being presented in our state, where timber and associated businesses account for $21 billion in our state’s economy. To find out about workshops being offered specifically for this target group, call Janet Steele at the Orangeburg Extension Office.

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 and nicotiana. One important gardening and farming practice is crop rotation. If you plant the same crop over and over again, diseases that favor that plant family will build up in the soil, you should wait at least a year before planting other members of that family in the same spot. Deadly nightshade is one plant you probably won’t have on your list – it was the source of belladonna which women used to get those dilated pupils – or bedroom eyes. In Italian Belladonna means beautiful woman but too much of it can be deadly.

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. They don’t make much honey as the colony, which may reach several hundred individuals, dies when winter comes. Since bumblebees are large bodied, they can emerge and visit flowers when it is too cold for honeybees to be active and are important early pollinators. With habitat loss due to urbanization, these bees need our help. Leave some portions of your property unplanted so that bumble bees and other ground nesting bees can find places for their nesting sites. And plant redbuds – an early food source for the important blueberry bumblebees, too.

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 mechanical pollination requires workers to vibrate each fruiting cluster with devices, sometimes battery-powered toothbrushes. A University of Pennsylvania study concluded that it took 15 hours of manual labor per day to perform this task. Compare that with the perfect combination of bumblebees and tomatoes. A hive of these strong-chested buzz pollinators not only eliminated the toothbrush approach, but the plants produced more tomatoes, up to a 25% increase. Sounds like a no brainer. The caveat is that growers must practice skillful and careful integrated pest management to avoid harming those confined and hard-wor

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 bees. These insects which have super strong chest muscles frequently visit flowers in the nightshade family, which includes tomatoes. Using a technique called buzz pollination, they hold onto the flower with their jaws and with their wings in a resting position powerfully vibrate their flight muscles, up to one hundred ninety times a second. The pollen rains down on the stigma and the bees. The female flowers get pollinated the bees take collected pollen back to their colony for food, and we get big juicy tomatoes.

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 tomatoes which seem easier to grow; although you need a really sharp knife if you are going to slice them for BLT’s. There’re also tasty greenhouse grown tomatoes, with brown skins and lots of flavor available all year. Growers of hot house tomatoes often use colonies of bumble bees for pollination as there isn’t enough air movement inside those structures to be effective. Bumble bee hives are short lived, sometimes only a few months, so growers protect them using integrated pest management to limite pesticides applications.

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 ones, as it produces fruits. Stan McKenzie, aka the Citrus Man, who lives in nearby Olanta, has gone over and collected the juicy fruits this tree produces (they’re used as a substitute for limes due to their bitterness). They germinate readily when planted right away and Stan has a nice collection of them in his nursery. I’m planning to ride over one day soon to get some and plant them in my yard – it doesn’t matter if they’re male or female both are magnets for pollinators.

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 upon which sooty mold grows. But in the fir and spruce forests of Europe, certain aphids feed mainly on these conifer needles and their exudate, is not only filled with sugars but also resinous substances produced by the trees. Aphids are vegetarians so the excess fluid they excrete is practically nothing but sugar-filled sap. The bees collect the excreted substances instead of nectar, taking it back to their hives were it is transformed into honey. This dark complex honey is apparently an acquired taste.

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, the website Honey Travelers has information on a honey competition in the Mediterranean region. The top winner, and this is a weird one, was the Strawberry Tree Honey from Sardinia. It’s described as being relatively dark with a grey-green overtones, a strong odor – not fragrance, and bitter! How different from the Ogeechee honey described as lightly floral and pairing well with strong blue cheeses. And I thought I was putting on the dog when I sweetened a dipping sauce for fried brussels sprouts with honey from the pantry.

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 platforms, to produce this very valuable white ogeechee honey. It’s high fructose to sucrose content helps prevent crystallization. It’s considered a single flower or monofloral honey, and boy, oh, boy, the bee keepers really have to work to produce it. Other plants including other species of nyssa bloom earlier, bees are allowed to collect from those plants but then new combs must be inserted when the later blooming Ogeechee species come into flower. The honey is actually analyzed by pollen to insure its truly from just those trees.