Hello Gardeners, I'm Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow! At this time of the year, people in the Appalachian Mountains once roamed through open forests collecting a veritable feast from the forest floor - chestnuts. Thirty years ago, an older gentleman in St. Matthews, Mr. Cochrane, told me stories about running through the West Virginia mountains filling sacks with these nuts and selling them to help support his family. The timber was rot resistant and beautiful, making the chestnut tree one of the most valuable of our natural resources. But a fungal disease, probably brought in on resistant Chinese chestnuts, began killing our native American chestnuts in 1904, in forty years over 30 million acres were dead. One resistant tree was discovered and sent to North Carolina plant breeder Robert Dunstan. His work makes it possible for us to grow hybrid chestnuts today.
Amanda McNulty is a Clemson University Extension Horticulture agent and the host of South Carolina ETV’s Making It Grow! gardening program. She studied horticulture at Clemson University as a non-traditional student. “I’m so fortunate that my early attempts at getting a degree got side tracked as I’m a lot better at getting dirty in the garden than practicing diplomacy!” McNulty also studied at South Carolina State University and earned a graduate degree in teaching there.