Making It Grow Minutes

During the twenties, thirties and through the forties tons of asparagus vegetables were shipped to northern markets.

My husband’s mother, born in 1901, said that when she was young and sat down at the dinner table with her numerous brothers, sisters, maiden aunts, parents and guests, the children often gave out a collective groan when the cooks appeared with platters of asparagus. “Oh, Momma, asparagus again!”

When Hurricane Hugo came through South Carolina, Sumter County was really hit hard. The magnificent Swan Lake Gardens lost several hundred pine trees exposing camellias and azaleas to unwelcome sunlight. But only a few bald cypresses were lost. If you come across a young bald cypress, shake it and you’ll find that is flexible, even adult trees are not brittle like pines. The ones in water with their interlacing knees have a giant support system in play protecting them against strong winds, even hurricanes. In ice storms, they again have an advantage over pines as they are deciduous and have no needles for the ice to accumulate on and cause the trunks to break. You can grow bald cypress in a regular landscape – they don’t make knees in ordinary soils – just buy a bale of long-leaf pinestraw for mulch.

Dendrochronology is the study of information obtained from tree ring growth. It is used in several different fields – archaeologists can date wooden artifacts, dendrologist – tree scientists – can use tree rings to determine the local climate. But perhaps the most interesting is climate science. Professor Dave Stahle of the University of Arkansas told us at his talk at the Congaree National Park that the Lost Colony, called that because none of the original settlers survived, was ill-fated due to several factors but one fact that scientists have established is that those people who were trying to grow crops to feed themselves had no chance of a good harvest as they sadly were dealing with the drought of fifteen eighty-seven through sixteen hundred. Tree ring analysis shows that fifteen eighty-seven was the driest year in eight hundred years.

I attended an outdoor lecture at the Congaree National Park last month, an appropriate site as Dave Stahle, Professor of Geography at the University of Arkansas, and the world’s authority on bald cypress gave the talk, and the Park is home to the state-record holding cypress tree. Stahle takes very small and minimally damaging core samples from trees and studies them to age trees and document climate change -- he has sampled trees that are two thousand years old. The science of dendrochronology is studying information derived from tree ring growth. These ring samples allow to date exactly what years had normal, above normal, or subnormal rainfall as the rings are larger or very small depending on how much the tree grew. In our part of the country, bald cypress are the oldest trees and provide the most information.

If you feel cramped or overwhelmed, you should visit the Congaree National Park right outside of Columbia. Of its 26,000 acres, the core protected area is fifteen thousand acres.

You can easily see large majestic bald cypress trees if you walk the boardwalk at the Congaree National Park. But retired DNR wildlife biologist John Cely who has explored the Park extensively, you might enjoy his blogs (at Friends of the Congaree Swamp) had found large cypress inaccessible except by boat and took Professor Dave Stahle, the world’s expert on bald cypress, to that area. Professor Stahle took tree cores from the largest of those trees to get information on their age and the climate they had grown in for probably over a thousand years. The oldest cypress trees Dr. Stahle has found are in the Black River preserve in North Carolina and are over 2,000 years old. The size of bald cypress doesn’t necessarily indicate their age; ones that grow in nutrient poor wet soils grow slowly.

If you go to mig.org and watch the Nov. 9 show, you’ll learn about Food Share and how getting fresh food to people became even more critical during the pandemic. When people get their box every other week, they get recipes, too. Forty percent of us have gained weight during the pandemic; lack of exercise, eating “comfort foods,” and finding it harder to get fresh foods. The meal we cooked on that show was delicious, and I looked at the Food Share website to see if I could find more recipes. Boy, oh, boy -- what a treasure trove. I’m going to start fixing some of these meals, get healthier suppers for my family, and expand my repertoire and recharge my interest in cooking at the same time. Who can resist “garlic smashed sweet potatoes with parmesan cheese?”

Christa Gonzalez of U S C Medical School, Columbia, joined Clemson’s Rural Health Agent Ellie Lane on a recent sMaking It Grow program talking about how access to fresh food and its preparation are critical for our citizens’ health. One in eight South Carolinians has been diagnosed with diabetes and each year a larger percentage joins that group. Gonzalez and Lane talked about the Food Share program available in most of our state – every two weeks participants get a box of fresh food – and recipes on how to prepare healthy meals with those items. Gonzalez leads the culinary medicine program at the medical school in Columbia –all students get some instruction in that topic. Extension’s Rural Health agents have on-going programs helping people control diabetes and hypertension; knowing about Food share can be part of that work.

Food Share began in Canada and has now spread across our country as the need for affordable fresh, healthy food has become more critical. Food deserts affect many rural or inner-city areas, and with the pandemic, all these problems have been exacerbated. Thanks the U S C school of Medicine, a grant from Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and a cadre of local volunteers, people in many areas can get a small or large box of fresh, healthy food every two weeks. Two persons involved came to Sumter recently to explain how citizens with chronic health problems can make improvements to their lives using this program -- and we fixed a delicious, healthy meal from a Food share box. If you’d like to see that episode, go to mig.org and watch the Nov. ninth show.

Spartanburg Extension horticulturist Drew Jeffers joined Making It Grow recently to discuss the South Carolina Certified Landscape Professional certification program. Extension experts present self-paced, on-line trainings on such topics as turf selection and maintenance, proper planting techniques, tree selection and installation, disease and insect identification and control, as well as irrigation and environmentally sustainable practices.

One older lady told me she was hesitant to try it but ended up going back for a second helping.

World-renown geneticist, Clemson’s Stephen Kresovich, and other research faculty will combine their crop-breeding talents to develop varieties that will allow South Carolina farmers to produce vegetables in the face of extreme changes in temperatures, rain and drought challenges, and other environmental pressures.

Clemson and the Swink family are joining forces to combat this problem. The family has made a gift of three million dollars to develop vegetables with resistance to higher temperatures and other factors that limit yield.

In recent years, changes in climate have resulted in high night-time temperatures and dramatically reduced the fruit set of many of our important vegetable crops. When it is seventy-five degrees or higher at night, many crops will not pollinate – there maybe vigorous, well-tended plants in the field that are covered with flowers, but the pollination process is impeded by those high thermometer readings.

For six years, Tony has been selecting and growing out promising seeds, trying to develop a more heat-tolerant butterbean.

Tony has said that serving the people of South Carolina has been his greatest honor and joy.

At meetings, in restaurant, while scouting fields for insect and disease problems, he never stopped taking calls from persons needing his advice.

Our recently retired, due to illness, Clemson colleague Tony Melton has many constants in his life. For one, he has never stopped being the humble fellow from McBee, South Carolina, who started picking cotton when he was three years old.