Making It Grow Minutes

Sunflowers are the national flower of Ukraine.

My mother decided to be modern in cooking and discovered premade stuffing mixes. The bread based one had herbs in it and that’s what I grew up having at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Carolina aromatic rice should be kept in the freezer – along with South Carolina corn meal, grits, and other locally sourced items that make mealtime so pleasurable.

For some peculiar reason, I’d never heard of corn bread in buttermilk for lunch until we went to a laundromat in Atlanta next to an old-fashioned drug store and sat next to a gentleman who ordered that.

Most southerners make corn bread in cast iron skillets as the crust you get is superior.

Corn sticks are about the best kind of cornbread because the crust is fabulous.

Back in the day, when Silver Queen sweet corn became widely available, it was transformational for corn on the cob lovers. Sweet corn differs from field corn it the actual amount of sugar versus starch it contains when mature.

If you are fortunate enough to have a farming friend who plants lots of sweet corn and lets you come pick it, you’ll learn how to choose the best ears.

In those days, Silver Queen was the finest sweet corn available, and a relative grew several acres of that for friends to come and pick.

Corn is a new world crop, along with tomatoes, potatoes, and cashews.

Most grits you get to cook are from regular modern field corn, and they can be delicious. But make some choices for the best results – don’t even think about cooking (is it even cooking?) instant grits.

One native milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa, called butterfly weed, was super attractive to all sorts of bees, while common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca was the red-headed stepchild and completely ignored.

Monarch butterflies are specialists which puts them at a certain risk. Their larva can only eat milkweed plants – with habitat destruction and the use of certain herbicides on large acreages of crops, milkweed plants, once common across the country, have vastly diminished.

When we were filming the pollinator garden at Irmo Middle School, kids were throwing balls and racing around after their lunch break. Another athletic skill some students develop is based on activity in the garden, trying to capture adult butterflies with insect nets. Monarchs get a sticker applied to a spot on their wing, tags supplied by the national Monarch Watch tagging program.

At the Irmo Middle School, maypops, Passiflora incarnata, found their way to the pollinator garden without being planted. Probably they started when a songbird, many of which love maypop seeds, flipped its tail and deposited that seed when it landed in a shrub growing there.

We visited Irmo Middle School recently to see their pollinator garden. Originally started by science teacher Will Green to help migrating monarch’s use their only larval food source, milkweed, on their trip back to Mexico for the winter, this garden evolved into a teaching facility.

Sometimes laurel thickets are called laurel hells and there are tall tales in the Appalachian Mountains about men and hunting dogs getting lost in them never to be seen again.

Although the common name of Kalmia latifolia is mountain laurel, you can find this handsome evergreen native plant growing, often in thickets, from the mountains to the sea.

Kalmia Gardens in Hartsville was the creation of Mrs. D. R. Coker, affectionately called Miss May. The property, originally owned by the Hart Family who built the 1820’s structure, had become a dump during the depression. Coker dedicated herself to turning a garbage heap into a free, public garden.

Recently, our team went to Hartsville and filmed at Kalmia Gardens. Director Dan Hill took us down the slope on that property which drops sixty feet to Black Creek. Several plants there are glacial relicts – they moved down ahead of the glaciers during the Pleistocene era.