Making It Grow

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Clemson Extension Agent Amanda McNulty talks with Clemson Extension Forestry and Wildlife Agent Janet Steele about the importance of the forestry industry and also about some educational programs targeting women forest landowners.

Clemson Extension Agent Amanda McNulty travels to the USC Lancaster Native American Studies Center and talks with Dr. Stephen Criswell, Director of Native American Studies, about all the exhibits and events they offer the public.

Clemson Extension Agent Amanda McNulty talks with Dr. Matt Hersom, Director of the Campus Farms Research Education Center which includes 8 farms around Clemson University. Their topic: the importance of land grant college’s mission of research, teaching and extension.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Clemson Extension Agent Amanda McNulty talks Clemson University Associate Professor Dr. Jim Faust about floriculture and other research projects he is working on in the Clemson Greenhouses.

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.