Making It Grow

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. A rose I thought was native that’s blooming now, I’ve always heard it called Cherokee Rose. Now I find out that this single white, high climbing rose, with the scientific name Rosa laevigata, is exotic, not native, and in some places considered invasive. Jonathan Windham, a specialist at the Pee Dee Research and Education Center in Florence, who provides information on genetically modified organisms, is also a rose enthusiast.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Knockout Roses took the South by storm as they bloomed happily without requiring treatment for black spot fungus. Sadly, they and other garden roses are falling prey to rose rosette virus. Infected plants can have reddish stems, misshapen leaves and stems, and other growth abnormalities. A tiny, 1/200dredth of an inch long, eriophyid mite spreads the virus if it feeds on your roses.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. A viewer wrote to us about a problem with her roses. I referred her to Clemson’s Home & Garden Information Center where horticulture experts take phone calls helping people with problems in their yard or garden. Just Search Clemson HGIC for that phone number and then press zero to get to a real, live person.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. One of my favorite visits last year was to Pat Henry’s beautiful home in Laurens. You can see this segment by searching Making It Grow/YouTube/Pat Henry’s Rose Garden. Because of vole pressure, she forms a screen wire cage around each plant’s root ball before planting it. This fits in with her overall approach of growing roses without spending hours and hours fighting pests and diseases.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Last year, team Making It Grow visited Pat Henry up near Laurens, SC. Pat is a world-renowned rosarian and partner at Roses Unlimited. She maintains a beautiful yard devoted to a half dozen small gardens devoted to those plants, watered by hand as she doesn’t have irrigation. Amazingly, she doesn’t spray for black spot or Japanese beetles.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. The nightshade family, Solanaceae, includes some of our favorite vegetables (although they’re fruits in the botanical framework). 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. So it’s important to keep gardening dairies and to know what plants are related to each other so you can rotate effectively.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow.  Mated female bumblebees overwinter in sheltered underground locations. In spring, they emerge and collect pollen upon which they lay eggs. The resulting new bees take over the work of collecting pollen and nectar and the hive increases. Although they are social insects, bumblebees are relatively docile and usually not a threat to people.

Clemson Extension Agent and Host of Making It Grow Amanda McNulty talks with fellow Clemson Extension Agent Laura Lee Rose about plants that are great food sources for birds.

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 bees, 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.

Clemson Extension Agent and Host of Making It Grow Amanda McNulty talks with fellow Clemson Extension Agent Laura Lee Rose about edible plants for the home landscape.

Clemson Extension Agent and Host of Making It Grow Amanda McNulty talks with fellow Clemson Extension Agent Laura Lee Rose abut her creation of a rain garden in Beaufort, SC with the help of Beaufort County and Master Gardeners.

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 and release the pollen  then stimulated by wind or vibrations. As wind moves the flowers the 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.

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. 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.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. I’ve been noticing Chickasaw plums on my drive to Sumter recently. I see them on the dry, open woodlands as I drive down towards the Wateree flood plain. They’re modest in size, open and twiggy trees that you wouldn’t call spectacular, as even in bloom their beauty is somewhat ephemeral.  They do make small fruits that are enjoyed by wildlife as they aren’t picky about the damage caused by the plum curculio like we are.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. A much less noticeable member of the genus prunus which is native to South Carolina is Prunus angustifolia, with the common name of Chickasaw plum. In South Carolina, we find it in mixed stands growing in medium to dry soils, often in dense thickets. It has good tolerance to drought, and in its western range is extremely important as a food and shelter source for animals.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Both Prunus serotina, black cherry, and Prunus caroliniana, cherry laurel, contain prussic acid, cyanide, and the wilted leaves especially are harmful to horses and cattle. If you crush the leaves of black cherry, you can really smell that acrid compound. On the other hand, if you rub cherry laurel glossy evergreen leaves together between your hands, they smell just like maraschino cherries.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Cherry laurel Prunus caroliniana is one of our native members of the genus prunus. Unlike its deciduous relative, Prunus serotina, this evergreen plant with dense foliage is somewhat cold sensitive and is found in the coastal plains of the gulf and Atlantic states from North Carolina to Texas. In past centuries, this fast growing plant was used extensively for hedges.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. We have several native members of the genus Prunus in South Carolina. We’ve talked a good bit about the one that’s getting attention now for its unsightliness – black cherry, Prunus serotina, the favorite larval food source for the eastern tent caterpillars whose webs are highly visible. 

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Our native black cherry tree, Prunus serotina, produces showy, elongated racemes of individual white, perfect, flowers in early spring. These flowers have pollen and nectar coveted by insects and are pollinated by native bees, flies, and honeybees. In early summer they ripen and have a sweet, pungent taste. If you’re interested in foraging, you might want to look in the old cookbook Charleston Receipts for the cherry bounce recipe.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. The wood that comes from our native black cherry tree, Prunus serotina, is the most prized in the forestry/timber industry. The wood has the beautiful deep red color valued by furniture makers, is strong, and is easy to work. The Allegheny Plateau of Pennsylvania and New York is the region that produces the majority of quality timber.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Prunus serotina, black cherry, is our most important and largest native cherry tree in North America. It has a huge range, from the middle of Canada to Florida, over to Texas and Arizona and even with a subspecies that extends into Mexico and parts of Central America. Its importance in the forestry/timber industry is based on the beauty of its wood, which has that deep red color so beloved by furniture makers and for those fortunate enough to use it for paneling or flooring.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. If you take a botany class, you learn that the leaves or stems of certain plants have aromatic compounds. My mother had a Florida anise, Illicium parvifollium, in our yard and she would always crush a leaf when we walked outside and let us inhale that wonderful licorice fragrance.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Fire blight affects members of the rose family – that means apples, pears, and plums. It is caused by a native, not introduced, bacterium that overwinters cankers and becomes active when spring brings warm temperatures and rain. Bees actually spread it from flower to flower and It causes plants to die back from the terminals – often the branch tip looks like a shepherd’s crook.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. The first callery pears were brought to the United States by USDA scientists trying to find varieties resistant to fire blight – a native bacterium that was in the early 1900’s ruining 85% of the western states’ commercial pear crop. Tens of thousands of seeds collected in Asia were planted in Oregon and Washington and resistant individuals eventually became root stock for tasty pears varieties.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Large seedlings that resulted from crosses between Bradford pear and other Callery pear cultivars are easy to spot --thickets of these white-flowered invasive species are in full bloom across the state. Bradford pear itself is self-sterile, it was selected from Asian seedlings grown in this country for its extreme success as a street tree that would flower its head off but produce no messy fruit to litter the street or attract wasps.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. One of our favorite guests on Making It Grow is Durant Ashmore, a landscape architect and nurseryman in Fountain Inn. If you run into Durant this time of year, he may be somewhat tight jawed as he takes personal offense at the ubiquitous and now in full bloom Bradford pears.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. This is a mini-botany lesson and it is might be helpful as gardening catalogues are filling up our mailboxes. Although Linnaeus developed the binomial system of classification that identifies an organism by just two names, the genus and species, you’ll find a third name for many plants being sold.

Southern Heritage Crops present a unique opportunity for entrepreneurial farmers to grow and market high value niche products valued by households, restaurants and other markets for their authentic and historical attributes centered on taste and nutritional values.

Dave Lamie of Clemson's Agri-Business team talks with Amanda McNulty about these valuable crops.

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. When we use scientific names for plants, we use two names. The first is the genus the plant belongs to, which is a general group so to speak. The second name is the specific epithet, or species, which narrows it down to one individual plant with its own distinguishing characteristics.