Making It Grow is brought to you in part by the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, Certified South Carolina Grown helps consumers identify, find and buy South Carolina products.

McLeod Farms in McBee, South Carolina.

This family farm offers seasonal produce including over 22 varieties of peaches.

Additional funding provided by International Paper and the South Carolina Farm Bureau Federation and Farm Bureau Insurance.

♪ Good evening and welcome to Making It Grow .

We're so glad that you can join us tonight.

I'm Amanda McNulty.

I'm a Clemson Extension agent, and our show is a joint production between Clemson University and SCETV.

I'm thrilled tonight that I've got two wonderful Extension agents with us.

Jackie Jordan: Jackie is an Extension agent, and I never get it right, so I'm just gonna say Richland and then let you add the others, Jackie.

<Jackie> Kershaw and Fairfield.

<Amanda> Okay, thank you so much.

You just have too full a plate for me to keep up with, and I admire you for keeping up with this so well.

Now that we're... Everybody's been so interested in gardening this year.

Are you noticing more calls from people than usual too?

<Jackie> Oh yes, lots of calls on gardening, growing flowers for the first time this year, and lots of lawn questions, as always.

<Amanda> Oh yes, always those.

So people are growing flowers for the first time.

That's kind of exciting, isn't it?

Okay, well we'll get back with you in just a little bit.

Zack Snipes is our fruit and vegetable specialist, and he's down at the Coastal REC, and he's always got interesting research projects going on.

Zack, one thing that I think is fun, you seem to kind of keep up with what those new high end restaurants want to be growing, don't you?

You usually grow, kind of try some things.

I think there was a pepper last year that they all wanted to grow, and you figured out which one would do the best maybe down there.

<Zack> Oh,yeah.

One of the Cornito Rosso peppers.

It's like a lunch box pepper, but a lot bigger, so folks really like it.

You'll start seeing it probably at farmers markets, if you haven't already, this summer.

<Amanda> Well, I hope after you help 'em with the research on these new vegetables, they occasionally comp you a delicious meal in those fancy places.

<Zack> Oh yeah, I enjoy those meals as well.

<Amanda> Well good, I'm so glad to hear it.

Terasa Lott administers the Master Gardener Program across the state, and it really is a big deal, and one day she's going to send them a letter out and tell them that they get to start volunteering again, and they will be so excited, and she will go "Whew, I'm so glad that we've come through," but for right now, we're all still being very careful.

Terasa does a lot on our Facebook page, and she encourages people to send beautiful pictures or sometimes just unusual pictures from their gardens, and we call them Gardens of the Week .

Did we get some entries this week, Terasa.

<Terasa> Oh yes, we always have entries, and it's so much fun seeing what's going on in your yards and gardens across the state, so let's take a look.

We are starting with Joshua Headley, who shared a close up of two Columbine flowers.

Absolutely gorgeous!

Randy Roja shared a butterfly.

This is the zebra swallowtail, so you'll notice the black and white coloring, hence the name "zebra."

Autumn Parnell has a triple play, I say, because in her photo is our state dog, state flower and state flag.

Sue Davis shared a lovely harvest of radishes, and we are wrapping up with Allyson McCarthy's vibrant native azalea with just gorgeous orange flowers.

Thanks to everyone.

Remember, we can't put them all on air, but we encourage you to visit our Facebook page and see everything that's going on.

Amanda?

<Amanda> Terasa, I wish that we could share the fragrance of native azaleas, because I have a good many, and boy, it's not overpowering, but it's just a really delightful fragrance.

Just if you get a waft of it, it's really heavenly.

I hope everybody will start adding those to their landscape.

They really are quite beautiful and pretty easy to find now in the trade.

Well, Terasa, you are so good about monitoring Facebook and all those things that happen, and people always are asking you questions.

Is there one that you think one of our experts can help us with tonight?

<Terasa> Well thanks, Amanda.

You give me a lot of credit.

Thank goodness I have a lot of help, and there's never a shortage of questions.

Someone asked about an Empire zoysia lawn.

The question read that I have Empire zoysia, and I keep reading information and it's giving me different advice about how high the grass should be mowed.

I'm having someone mow it.

Can you please give me the best mowing height so we can share that?

<Amanda> Alright.

Jackie, I know that you've done a lot of work on turf grass, and first of all, there's so many different kinds of zoysias now.

So if you could tell us a little bit about the quality of the Empire type, when you think it's a good one to choose, and how you would manage the mowing height for it, please.

<Jackie> Sure, Empire is a great wide blade zoysia.

It's got really good recuperative properties, so it grows a little bit quicker than some of the other slower zoysias.

It's still not really fast, but it's quicker than some of the other ones, so it's got some really good qualities.

As far as the mowing height, that ranges anywhere from an inch up to two inches for zoysia, and what you want to do is look at the local environment, because the way that our warm season grasses grow, they tend to send out runners and grow sideways, so if you have a thin lawn coming out of spring and you're trying to thicken it up, make it a little more lush, you can cut on the lower end, because the plant will respond by sending out more shoots, and it will become a fuller lawn.

So in the summer months, if you're trying to increase drought resistance, you want to keep the grass cut at a higher height, because the depth of the root system matches the height of the blades, so by raising that mowing height up, you actually increase your drought resistance.

You also want to have the mowing height raised as you go into fall, so that the plant has more energy stored for coming out of winter dormancy next year in the spring, and then if you have a shadier location, so most zoysias can tolerate areas where they only get four to five hours of direct sunlight, and if you're in that situation where you have a lot of shade, you actually want to keep it on the higher end so that you can take in as much sunlight as possible to photosynthesize as much as possible.

So really it's a range, and it depends on what your needs are.

<Amanda> So is it kind of between maybe an inch or two inches, kind of in there generally?

<Jackie> Mm hm, two inches.

If you start to let it go too tall, then you start to get that brown underneath.

There's a lot of shading out and competition, and so you actually wind up causing more problems on the long end.

<Amanda> Jackie, when I was in school a million years ago, they told us you were supposed to get a special kind of lawn mower that clipped like a pair of scissors for zoysia, and I guess that's pretty expensive, and not many people are going to do that, but should you, if you have zoysia, get your blades sharpened more frequently perhaps, or is that not a problem anymore?

<Jackie> Oh, it definitely is.

You want to keep your blade sharp, no matter what your turf grass is, and most of your new zoysias like the Empire doesn't require a real mower, the one that cuts like the scissors, so yeah, just sticking with a regular lawn mower and sharp blades.

<Amanda> Well, thank you, Jackie.

That was really a lot of help, and I feel there's always a lot for me to learn about turfgrass, and you make it easy for me to understand.

I appreciate it.

We just love to go to Greenwood because it's a beautiful, beautiful city, and in the summertime for, I think, since 1968, they've been having a festival of flowers that includes these absolutely unbelievably charming topiaries.

So let's go talk to Ann Barklow and find out about all the stuff that's happening up there in that great part of South Carolina.

I'm speaking with Ann Barklow, and the last time I spoke with Ann, she was the Director of Horticulture for the city of Greenwood, but she has decided to enjoy other aspects of her life a little more, and is now the Volunteer Coordinator which is just a wonderful position because Ann, I know that you have Master Gardeners and other people who are just plant geeks, and what fun to be associated with people who want to come and share their time with you.

I know you enjoy being with all those great folks.

<Ann> Yep, yep.

It's so much fun.

I still get to boss people around, but they're volunteers that really want to get bossed around, so it's really a lot of fun, and we couldn't do it without them.

<Amanda> A lot of what, although y'all have projects all over town that involve volunteers, but on the Festival of Flowers is a longstanding tradition up in Greenwood.

Tell us a little bit about the history and what all goes on to make that such a special period of time.

<Ann> Sure, well originally Park Seed was here, of course, and they had their grower days where they have the trial gardens, and then, I guess, uptown in the Chamber of Greenwood, they thought it would be good to partner with them, and they started the Festival of Flowers, and it was like in 1968, so it's been going a long time.

And so it's just kind of to bring people into uptown Greenwood.

Then after a period of time, it got a little stagnant, and so one of the members of the chamber went to Disney World and saw these topiaries, and she said "Well, what about topiaries?"

So they went, and they talked to the horticulture department, and they said they would train us, and so we brought our little group over there to Disney, and they trained us how to do the topiaries, and they recommended we start with four.

And we thought, well four is not gonna be anything, so they got 13 of them.

We didn't get them all out, and they didn't look as professional as they do now, but we were learning.

We had a little learning curve, so we've had the topiaries out there for like 12 years now.

I think this is our 12th year, and there's almost 40 of them now, so yeah, so it's really, really fun.

<Amanda> That is a tremendous amount of work, and explain how it begins with a frame.

I guess someone must come in and construct a frame out of metal first.

Is that... or someone has to design it, I guess, too.

<Ann> Yeah, some of the smaller ones like your ducks and your turtles, you can get them pre-made.

You can order them, which we did.

Some of your bigger ones, like we've made a mermaid, a huge mermaid, and we had a guy that had a shop in Donalds not too far from Greenwood, and he would build them.

We'd give him the dimensions and all that, and he would build the frames for us, and so that's kind of how the bigger ones like the gamecock and that sort of thing got made, so yeah.

<Amanda> So you've got a frame that's made of wire and really it's... so there it is, and how are you going to turn it into something that is just covered with plants and plant material?

Tell me how you're gonna go about that.

<Ann> Yeah, the first thing we do is we stuff it with sphagnum moss that we get from New Zealand.

And if it's a big, fat topiary like an elephant, you like barbecue the pig and we'll put a little somewhat of a bladder inside to fill up some of the space, and then maybe six inches around it, we'll stuff it with that sphagnum moss, and we stuff it really, really tight.

We don't use soil or anything, just the moss.

We shut it tight and we use a tool called a dibble that was used to make a hole for a little plug in a plant to go in there.

Now before we do the moss, we put in drip irrigation all through it, and we have different zones that we'll use for the drip irrigation.

Like the elephant trunk is definitely going to dry out faster than his body, so we'll have that on a different zone.

Like your garden zone at home, you'll have the lawn on a different zone than your shrubs, hopefully.

Then so the elephant, his trunk we'll water three times a day during the hot summer, where his body may be only five times a week.

So each one has to have irrigation, the moss and then the plants that grow, and then we use sheep shearers to trim it, trim 'em and make them.

Then we pin some of the... like the ficus vines, we pin them, so yeah.

<Amanda> So when you take them downtown and place them, Ann, there has to be irrigation outlets throughout the city just for the topiaries?

<Ann> Yep, yep, we have irrigation just for them, and then we plug them in and we get 'em going, and we have battery operated timers for the irrigation, so we can set those up to water when we need 'em.

We have to adjust 'em, depending on the weather.

Sometimes it rains a lot, and we'll shut them all off, and other times it's really hot, and we'll increase it, and so it's a constant monitoring when they're out there too.

<Amanda> So it's a microcosm really of a well maintained public space where certain things, the lawn needs more and certain things need less.

It's just compressed down very small, and again, with the volunteers, I believe y'all start early, early, early growing the plugs that you then put in to add that great splash of color and fun and dynamics to the topiaries?

<Ann> Yes, we do.

Actually, as soon as they come back to the greenhouse in July, we're already starting to take cuttings.

And like succulents take a long time to grow, so we'll take some of succulents that were on there and start them early on, so it's year round.

It never stops, the topiaries.

And we start growing plants for the landscape then too.

The volunteers love the greenhouse.

They love working in there, and we have a lot of information.

I try to teach little classes and mini classes and give some of the people opportunities to teach also, so we're always learning.

<Amanda> Well, and I think that really gives them a... it's not just take this and do this , I mean, it's kind of like the Master Gardener course in that people are learning as they do, and gardeners want to learn.

And you're teaching them to share things with other people.

They're learning how to operate the greenhouses and how all that works, and one of the things I think that y'all do that's interesting in your greenhouses is people are also learning a lot about beneficial insects, I think.

<Ann> Yep, yep, yep, yep.

We released a lot of beneficial insects to prey on the other ones.

We had a little with trouble spider mites this year.

They got a little out of control, but we have a predator mite that is just so fast and so good, and so we pit one mite against another mite, and we'll put lacewing larva to eat the aphids.

We've got mealy bug destroyers that are called crypts.

[both laughing] They feast on the mealy bugs, and they like eating the eggs, and it's fun to watch them.

And we've gotten to do that too.

We virtually teach out at the schools too, and we show them those types of things also, and they learn from what we're doing there in the classroom.

<Amanda> Well, what a fabulous way to let children know that, you know, we all get so tired of swatting mosquitoes and worrying about ticks and things, and how wonderful to let them know that in the brilliant design of nature and evolution that there's something that's a problem, but somebody else is going to come along who's gonna take advantage of that problem and recycle it, and the world just keeps going around and around and around.

Great fun.

So in the winter y'all...

So of course the topiaries are gonna go out what time of year, and how long are they out, Ann?

<Ann> They're gonna go out in June.

They'll be out the whole month of June and the first two weeks in July, and then they'll come home, so you have a little window in there to make a trip and see it, and see all the topiaries, and we have incredible landscape surrounding them, even the bases of the topiaries are just an incredible beautiful work of art, and so you can come anytime during June and the first two weeks of July, and if you come from far away, there's the Inn on the Square right in the center of the whole topiary thing, and so people could stay overnight if they wanted to.

Now the second week in June is the big weekend, and that's where they have the topiary and wine walk, and they're going to have a Home and Garden Show, which I'm excited about.

That's pretty new.

And they're gonna have a craft show, and those both will be at the Greenwood Mall, and the Greenwood Mall is really cool too, because it has some great murals and history of Greenwood.

I have to send people there if they're visiting, so the Greenwood Mall will host those events.

<Amanda> Okay, and Greenwood itself has a beautiful downtown.

So many people have come and opened businesses there.

It gives you a sense of hope.

So many downtowns looks sad, and then Greenwood is thriving, and it's a beautiful thing to see.

And then also, you have things all over town that you and your volunteers... pollinator gardens, and then a fabulous monarch way station, I believe.

<Ann> Yep, yep.

We have two monarch way stations, and we've really gotten into the whole hummingbird... providing for hummingbirds.

Instead of putting out feeders, we like plants, so we have those, and it's kind of funny to watch people waiting on the benches for their doctor appointment and have hummingbirds hovering around them and butterflies, so it's quite a nature experience there, and it's just been... Last year was a rough year for a lot of us, and people came in droves last year for the festival and just to be outdoors, and we put together a little scavenger hunt for plants so we can educate people, and there's a Tweet on Main, where there's a scavenger hunt where you can learn about our local birds.

So there's a lot.

It's just nice to get away and get out in nature through everything we've been through.

<Amanda> Well, I think the city fathers and the people involved in the outdoors and the maintenance have all embraced this, trying to make it all as sustainable and ecologically safe as possible, and a wonderful attitude for a city to adopt.

<Ann> It is.

I was very surprised when I started working here eight years ago.

They're just so supportive of this type of gardening, and the crew, the horticulture crew is amazing, not only what they do, but just they're like topiary artists.

The things that they have changed with the topiaries this year, and they gave the mermaid... she had silver hair for a couple of years.

Now she's a redhead.

The horse was a war horse last year and this year it'll be a unicorn.

King Kong is going to have a Barbie doll in his hand along with the airplane, and he'll have those skyscrapers and roads that he's in.

I mean, I don't know how they think up this stuff.

The elephants got huge pots on top, and even the baby elephants carrying a load this year of things on it's back.

They have a lot of fun in there.

It's hard work, hard work, but they have a lot of fun.

<Amanda> Well Ann, I think that your infectious energy and happiness rubbed off on a lot of people.

I'm going to give you credit for some of the great things that happened there, and I'm looking forward to seeing you and all the wonderful work that's gone into making this annual event so exciting.

Thanks so much.

<Ann> Thank you, it's a pleasure.

<Amanda> I'm getting together a group of us who've all had our shots, and we're going to drive up to Greenwood for this wonderful event because I want to see the unicorn and the elephant and all those fabulous topiaries, and they have other things that are happening that we can too.

I hope maybe I'll see some of y'all up there.

I went out in the yard, and I just didn't know what the world was gonna be there, but the baptisia was blooming.

It's a wonderful native plant, and I've got a light yellow and a dark yellow and a purple one.

I need the white one.

I think there are lots of 'em.

Sometimes you'll see them on the side of the road.

It's in the pea family and pretty easy to propagate.

And then amazingly, since I don't have time to do anything, I have some wonderful roses from Rose's Unlimited that don't require any care whatsoever, and some of those were blooming, so wasn't it fun to find some stuff to make a hat when you weren't expecting there to be much there at all?

Terasa, let's have another one of the questions that have come in.

As you said, there's never any shortage of questions.

<Terasa> Never, but before we get to that, I want to say I had a chance to visit the Festival of Flowers and see those remarkable topiaries, and it's just mind blowing, the time and creativity and talent that goes into those, so I too encourage folks to take a trip if they can, but now to the question.

This one's about vegetables.

A viewer wrote in that last year they had tomatoes and peppers that seemed to be kind of discolored and soft, but only on one side, and is wondering if we have any idea what it might have been and tips for preventing it from happening this year.

<Amanda> Gosh, you'd think if they had a fungal infection or something, it would kind of affect the whole fruit, but Zack, do you have any ideas of what might cause a one sided problem, other than Hook losing his hand to the alligator?

[Amanda and Zack laughing] <Zack> Yeah, this type of damage is very common throughout especially the warmer months of the year, very common on peppers, especially larger area peppers like bell peppers and some of your bigger peppers as well as tomatoes, and what they're probably experiencing is sun scald or sunburn.

What happens, especially during the summer, is you have very high UV levels shining on a plant, coupled with very high temperatures, and so what you get is a discoloring of that side of the fruit.

If it's below, I want to say, like 105 degrees or so, you'll just get some discoloration, and it'll be still okay to eat, but if it gets above those temperatures, you'll have the sunburn, but you'll get some necrosis, and you'll actually get to where that tissue dies.

So you see this very common, again, in tomatoes, bell peppers.

You see it in cucumbers.

They'll be kind of discolored and then you'll have some spots where it's like gray and just mushy, so that's very common.

<Amanda> Zack, can it happen at any time?

I mean, during the development, it doesn't have to be like a fully ripe pepper or fully ripe tomato.

Could it happen during the maturation process?

Correct, yeah, you can see it on green fruit or smaller fruit.

It'll start out as a discoloration, but typically when we see it and the damage is worse, is when the fruit is mature, because all those cells in the fruit are just full of their cell structure, and they're full of water, and they're very turgent, and so that's when that damage happens, and it actually boils the cells in there.

So we do see that in almost all soft bodied fruits, and again, it's the temperature coupled with the direct UV light.

<Amanda> Is there something that you can do to try to help prevent that from happening?

You've gone to all this trouble, and you know how hard it is to grow tomatoes.

<Zack> Right.

Yeah, your orientation with the sun is one of the biggest things.

Typically we see it on south facing fruit, so fruit that's facing the sun towards the south.

Also, you know I'm gonna talk about diseases, because I love diseases, but anything that we can do as a gardener to prevent diseases helps.

There's an old fight between plant pathologists and horticulturists.

A horticulturalist will say, "Well, that fruit has sun scald."

Well the plant pathologist will say, "Well, that fruit is a result of disease."

And so what we see a lot of times in peppers, they're very susceptible to Pythium and Phytophthora root rots, so when you have those root rots, you're not gonna have as much leaf canopy or coverage of your fruit, and so you're gonna have a very thin, kind of weak looking plant.

Well that plant is typically gonna make fruit anyway, and so if you don't have as much shade covering the bell pepper or tomato or even your cucumber, then you get more direct sunlight.

The heat builds up, and then you'll see a lot more of that sun scalding.

So proper drainage, planting at the right time of the year, proper fertilization, and then if we do have rainy weather, applying protectant fungicides really helps to keep that foliage clean, so it can do a good job of covering those fruit.

<Amanda> Okay, so the leaves are actually like we put a big garden hat on to protect us if we were going out in the garden.

<Zack> Yeah, I love going to the beach, so I tend to use an umbrella when you're sitting on the beach.

They like to be in the shade and develop in the nice cool.

There are some products, if you're worried about sun scald, that you can spray, and farmers spray some of these sometimes.

One of them is a kaolin clay, and another one is a calcium carbonate product, a liquid product, and basically it just creates a chalky covering or physical barrier on the plant, almost like sunscreen when you go to the beach, and so it prevents that sun from directly affecting the UV rays and the heat kind of building up in that plant.

<Amanda> Zack, some people like to let their tomatoes just kind of ramble all over the field, the surface of the ground, and it would seem to me that the tomato might get more shade if it were trellised up somehow on a wire or in a tomato cage.

Do you think that would make any difference, possibly?

<Zack> Yeah, absolutely.

Trellising is gonna help because it's going to kind of keep all the leaves in a bunch or together versus kind of splayed all out.

So that'll definitely help.

That's going to help with general disease prevention as well, which again, as I mentioned, it is a huge component of this, is keeping that plant healthy, so it makes this all natural shade.

<Amanda> Zack, the people who grow tomatoes commercially for processing, who grow, I guess, mainly a Roma type tomato, don't they at some point have to like spray to get the leaves to fall off, and then I guess I have to get out there pretty fast if it's real hot and sunny, because if the tomatoes are sitting there and you've gotten the leaves to fall off, I guess they're really susceptible to getting burned up.

<Zack> Yeah, yep, very much so.

So they're gonna put that out and then come back very soon and harvest those to be diced and chopped and made into ketchups and sauces and that sort of thing.

Again, we do see this in the summer when temperatures are high, but we do occasionally see it in the spring.

We actually saw it earlier in April.

I got a lot of calls from farmers over a two day period around the twelfth of April, and this is what makes this job in being an Extension agent, you know, it's very humbling, because you think you got most things figured out, and then you get a call, and you're like, "I don't know what's going on, " but I work with so many great farmers and colleagues, and we passed this question and issue around to try to figure out what it was, but the more people I talked to, farmers and other Extension agents, everyone started seeing more and more of this issue, and what we were seeing... At first, we were seeing it in strawberry.

We were getting a lot of discoloration on the, as I mentioned, the south side facing strawberries.

There on the top side of the strawberry would be a pink color, sometimes white and it was very mushy and kind of very jelly like, and so we we thought it was a disease at first, and we started getting more and more calls from around the state, and we put two and two together and figured out that it could be sun damage.

So we looked at our weather station.

We have weather stations all across the state, and they measure UV intensity, is one of the parameters that they measure, and we don't know if it's correct.

It's again, being a part of an Extension agent, sometimes you just kind of put the pieces of the puzzle together, and you kind of go with your best guess, but we seem to think that four or five days before, we had really high UV levels.

We had low UV levels, and we had a spike of three to five hundred units of UV in one day.

Our temperatures increased that day, and our humidity dropped that day, so we had higher light intensity in a shorter amount of time, and so that's what we think caused it.

Again, there's nothing that you can do.

It's just kind of one of those freak environmental things, but we did see that in lettuce.

We saw it in citrus plantings and even herbs and ornamentals, so something definitely went on around the tenth through the twelfth of April.

We're kind of relating it to the sunburn or UV damage.

<Amanda> So Zack, I think this is a good time to remind people that I hope they have great success with their home gardens, but if they're shopping out in stores or going to markets, that our farmers, there's so much they can't control.

It's really hard to get a great beautiful product to the market, so please look for that Ce rtified South Carolina Grown, and support our local farmers whenever you have a chance.

And really, Zack, you think about it, the the carbon footprint is gonna be less too, because they don't have to be shipped so far.

<Zack> Absolutely.

They're gonna taste better.

They're gonna be healthier, fresher, carbon footprint is lower, and as I always say, you sell the best and eat the rest.

[Amanda laughs] <Amanda> Well, thank you for all that information, Zack.

We sure do appreciate it.

<Zack> Yes, ma'am.

Thank you.

<Amanda> Well Terasa, what else is in the mailbox bag of questionnaires that you've been getting?

<Terasa> Well, we have one about irrigation.

It seems that some people irrigate quite frequently, and others rarely irrigate, and this question wants to know what is the magic answer?

How often should you irrigate a lawn?

<Amanda> Well, Jackie, gosh.

Some people just leave their timers on all summer.

I know that's not the right thing to do, but then you've got to figure out when to turn it on and how often to do it, so give us some pointers, please.

<Jackie> Sure, so our warm season turf grasses are actually really tough and drought tolerant.

in fact, they grow better when they get less water, just enough to survive.

If you over water, we're gonna get diseases.

We're gonna have more weeds.

We're gonna have more insect problems, so a good number is about an inch a week.

Now ideally, you want to water very early in the morning, so that the plants have enough water to photosynthesize during the day.

About 90% of the water a plant uses, is used for transpiration to cool itself down, so get that water out early pre-morning, pre-dawn.

Now, an inch a week can be calibrated on your sprinkler system.

There's a really, really great video that Terasa did.

It's on HGIC.

It walks you through the steps on how to calibrate your sprinkler system.

If you're in the upstate and have a heavy clay soil, you want to deliver one inch, one day a week.

That is all your grass needs.

If you're in the midlands to the coast, sandy to loamy soils, half an inch twice a week is ideal.

That will encourage a really good deep root system and a stronger, more resilient turfgrass.

<Amanda> Okay, so do make a record of it, and then again, you've got to take account if it rains, you've got to have that as part of the equation.

<Jackie> If you have a rain gauge that you can cut off for extra water, yes.

If not, don't worry about it.

<Amanda> Thank you, Jackie.

You are so nice about not making us feel guilty about making a mistake occasionally.

Now we're gonna speak with Lowndes McDonald, who is a member of The Nature Conservancy staff here in South Carolina.

I'm speaking today with Lowndes McDonald, who is the Associate Director for Philanthropy for The Nature Conservancy in South Carolina.

Lowndes, what is the purpose of The Nature Conservancy?

<Lowndes> Well, The Nature Conservancy has a really long history.

We were founded in 1951 in upstate New York, and have really come to be known as really the first land protection nonprofit organization in the world.

We started protecting land back in the 1950's and started spreading out from New York.

Our chapter in South Carolina is now 51 years old.

We came here in 1969, so maybe we're almost 52 years old now.

We started here really working on Beidler Forest, and in the Ace Basin, was really kind of the projects that we started with.

It really was steeped in that land protection.

Protect these special places.

Protect these high biodiverse places and these habitats that are essential to our biodiversity, and in our state natural resources.

<Amanda> So Lowndes, in some of the places like the Beidler Forest, does that mean that y'all can purchase land or provide funds?

And then there's another component to that, that I think involves working with private landowners, so talk about those two things, please.

<Lowndes> Yes, so we do both.

Land protection does have several different ways that we can work to protect the land.

One is obviously acquiring it.

We are one of the largest landholders in the United States from a nonprofit agency in particular, but it's not something that we want to do all the time.

We don't have huge staff that can manage these lands and hold them and provide trail systems and things of that nature, so a lot of times we'll partner with other state agencies, federal agencies, counties, and we'll go ahead and provide the funds to purchase the property.

We will sell it back to a public agency, perhaps for less than we bought it for, and put it into public hands, so that they can provide the access to it for public recreation, or they can protect it for other reasons.

We work with DNR, Department of Natural Resources.

We work with state parks.

We work with federal lands and a number of other places.

The other thing that we do, is that we'll work with private landowners to put what are called private conservation easements on their properties, and basically what that does, is it takes away certain rights of land use for that property, so if it's a property, we might say that you can't subdivide it, or that you can't build a certain number of buildings on it, or that it can only be used for certain purposes like timber or agriculture, and that way, the environmental portion of it stays intact in a way that is a conservation value.

<Amanda> And when that happens, if I'm not mistaken, there is an annual cost, or that this isn't just something that's done for free, because you have to then send people back in to make certain that the land is being used according to the agreement that you worked out, and there's not a specific agreement.

I mean, this is a cooperative agreement between the landowners and The Nature Conservancy.

It's not something that you rammed down their throat.

Y'all come up to an agreement, and if you can't agree, you can't agree, but there is a good bit of room for well, I'd like to do this and well, that's fine, but let's see if we can mitigate that .

Would you be doing be willing to do this?

So there's always cost involved, because I have some friends who go in and do surveys for some of the conservation easements, so we can't just put something in it and expect that it's always going to happen.

Everybody's gonna remember everything.

I mean, the original people could die and the next generation not remember, so there is always the thing of going back and checking on how things have been continued.

<Lowndes> Yes, there is an annual monitoring that we are required to do as the easement holder.

So when we purchase an easement, or when an easement is donated to us, we then become the owners of that part of the property rights, and so in order to maintain that, we do have to go in annually, monitor it, make sure that the easement is being applied to, that the property owners are not doing anything that the easement says they can't.

When ownership does change hands, of course, that is disclosed in any of those real estate transactions, and we do meet with the property owners after that transaction, and just talk to them about what our process is, how we do it.

We call the property owners before we go, and monitor their properties.

We take pictures, we send them the pictures.

Sometimes we do drone overheads.

It really is kind of an interesting part of our work, and this year in particular, we're actually working with the Americorps System, and we have a couple of Americorps folks that are coming in and doing about four months of our monitoring.

<Amanda> Reaching out to another generation that already has public services as part of their inherit value system, but you're expanding it.

I think that's terrific.

Good for y'all.

You're always looking for partners, as you said.

Well, as a child who grew up in the days before people had generators, hurricanes have always been a part of our life, and I lived in the middle of the state and can remember days without electricity and trees falling, and we know now that the hurricane pattern has increased.

Gosh, I mean, we run out of names every year now, and this is, with climate change, the extreme weather conditions that we're facing, are so frightening and seem to increase each year, and so let's talk a little bit about what y'all do on the coastline, because that's kind of our first line of defense down there.

Yeah, well since our early days with The Nature Conservancy of really being based in land and protecting land, we have moved into oceans, and now we are really steeped in oceans.

We're protecting ocean resources.

We're trying to do some water quality things.

We're working in reefs.

We're working in fisheries.

Here in South Carolina, you're right.

As South Carolinians, I think we can all feel the effects in one way or another from the change in our climate.

If you live in the upstate, you might have fires.

If you live in the midlands where I am, you have floods like the 2015 flood that was so devastating, and on the coast you feel it almost on a daily basis.

You're seeing the rising high tides.

You're watching the seas for the storms.

You're really kind of embracing this.

You're also feeling it every time you pay your insurance, monthly insurance costs.

So we started working for nature based climate solutions, which are a variety of different tools that you can use.

I have a colleague that says you can engineer your way out of any problem, but you are going to continue to pay for it.

But if you can put nature to work to be more resilient and to help you bounce back from natural climate changes, you're gonna be well versed to be able to withstand and rebound.

<Amanda> We have sometimes thought that we could build sea walls and extra drainage systems, and although those are still in use and necessary in places, I think now y'all are going right to the edge of the interface between the ocean and the hard land and concentrating on projects there with shore scaping in some cases, so let's describe that in some success cases in what you're seeing when you do that.

<Lowndes> Yes, we are working right there on the coastline, mostly in the marsh areas.

South Carolina actually has 20% of all of the salt marshes on the east coast of the United States.

<Amanda> And the salt marshes themselves are like nurseries for so much of what happens overall in the ocean in general, if I'm not mistaken.

<Lowndes> Yeah, they really are.

Salt marshes are where the fresh water comes in from our rivers and our streams.

The ocean is kind of coming in, and it's where this very wonderful habitat exists, that a lot of stuff is going on, but if the climate is not right there, and you start having more salinity going up into our rivers or more fresh water coming into our oceans, that habitat can just get really unbalanced and be destroyed, and so we need to put nature back to work in a lot of those places, and what we have seen is eroding shorelines.

We're seeing the rising sea levels that are taking away the land that is right there on the ocean, and so we have started working.

We work around the United States on this, and so we borrow our science from our colleagues in Louisiana and in Virginia and all around.

We have started putting into work, living shorelines, which will put different types of substance and materials based on the environment where we're going to be installing this living shoreline, and we tested this, so we've done several pilot projects.

We've done about 10 in the last 12 years working in partnership with state agencies to develop these pilot projects to see what different materials will work best in these different environments, and so we use different things: oyster castles, which are fragments of oyster shells developed with maybe a little bit of other types of materials that are clustered together.

We do bagged oyster shells.

We do some living materials, plants that we kind of replant, and the effects that have happened are numerous, so what these living shorelines do, is they will start to have regrowth of seagrass behind these things that start restoring that coastline, start building back that land that has been eroded.

They are also creating oysters.

They're growing oysters on these living shorelines.

They are cutting down on the intensity of the waves that are coming in or boat traffic when they're creating these waves, and they're creating a wonderful habitat for other fish, so the fishermen that are in these salt marshes, you will see them all huddled around these little living shorelines, because the other critters in the ocean are just attacking them.

<Amanda> And we've been fortunate enough with Making It Grow to work with Kim Counts Morganello with school children, where they've gone back, and we used to call it Spartina and now it's Sporobolus or something like that is the genius of the grass that is the stabilizing one, lots and lots of species, where they went out and in one place planted these grasses, and then we also went down where DNR was doing a program, because we've all been told how important it is when we have an oyster roast, to recycle the oyster shells, because oysters in their larval form, are free swimming, and they have to have a solid substrate upon which to attach, and amazingly the mother oyster shell, those clusters of oyster shells that we sometimes fuss at when we find ourselves with our tennis shoes trying to maneuver our way over them, that's the perfect substrate for that, and so that's one of the things that y'all put out as well.

And we know that within Charleston, I think, and I was looking at some of the material that you sent me, I think in about 2015 there may have been 20 high water days that weren't associated with some unusual event, and I think now they have them almost every week, and one thing that does when that happens and you have all that influx of water, it overwhelms your sewer systems in many ways because there's such an influx of water that the sewer system sometimes overruns, so that means that the pollution is spreading inward, and so anything that you can do with these shoreline adaptations that with time, and since y'all are doing this adaptive management and seeing which ones work the best in certain situations, that protects our fresh water situation which is incredibly valuable and important in the health and lives of South Carolinians.

<Lowndes> Yeah, and living shorelines won't necessarily cut down on all flooding.

They might help minimize it.

There's other things that are nature based solutions that might help better for flood damage like in Charleston, and that might be restoring a grasslands area or putting in a floodplain where it used to be, or in another place that it can start to allow for that additional water to go to a place that's more natural, as opposed to coming up through our sewer systems.

These are in kind of blocks.

Like when you look at a living shoreline, you're not gonna see a sea wall.

It's gonna be kind of like these blocks that are gonna help cut up the water flow.

It's not all coming in at once.

It kind of starts to just break it up a little bit.

The other benefit is it's going to grow that grassland behind it, and so that grassland is going to be able to absorb some of that water and some of that velocity, some of that current that's coming in.

<Amanda> And I think there's even carbon sequestration that goes with that as well, is there not?

<Lowndes> There is.

There is harvest sequestration.

We're exploring that.

Our Virginia chapter is really looking at blue carbon storage with oyster and living shorelines.

Also one little oyster cleans 50 gallons of water a day.

It filters that much water.

They're amazing little species that have so many wonderful benefits, including the joy of eating them at a South Carolina oyster roast, as we talked about.

<Amanda> Yes.

Well, I think that y'all are moving inward.

You've got a project planned for Andrews, South Carolina.

When I drive to the beach, I pass through Andrews, and they're even seeing the influence of some of these things.

We're talking about that far in, so talk about how you're even coming farther in than you might expect with some of your projects.

<Lowndes> Yeah, well we started, gosh, I think it's been six years now, working in the north coast, and we started partnering with the counties and cities in Horry and Georgetown Counties, to identify flood prone areas that they were experiencing, and it just happened to be like right before those back to back years of storms.

It allowed us, I think, in those subsequent years when we were looking at this, to really see the impacts of these flooding events and these natural storms that were coming through and to really identify them.

Andrews was identified as it was receiving... every nine months the town was being flooded, and people were having to flee their homes.

They were having their homes, their cars, everything was just being flooded, and the first phase that we did was to really look at the stormwater system and to understand better like where is the flow, how is the storm water going, where is it going, where is it getting held up, and there were a couple of things that were identified.

One was that in stormwater drains in a town like Andrews, you've got people putting trash into that area, so part of it is public education about making sure that you're not obstructing the stormwater in any way with your own stuff, making sure that that part is clean.

The second thing that we did is we identified a couple of areas, and so we are working right now.

We're trying to find the right funding and the right partners.

We are looking in a designated area to create a rain garden in the city of Andrews that will help store that extra storm water when it comes in.

It will be a natural climate solution that the water will go to this area.

In addition to that, there's a community aspect where we are going to be producing rain barrels, decorating them and distributing them to the community, so that community members can collect their own stormwater.

<Amanda> Clemson Extension, Katie Altman, who is in our office, often has rain barrel decorating contests, and we just love to see the ideas that people come up with, so I hope that y'all will have maybe a contest for great decorations on rain barrels.

Adults and children get excited about that.

Another thing, when you talked about keeping the storm drains open, is that we have learned that one of the worst things in the world is one of those awful things that blows all the trash off the yard into the street, because that just clogs up those drains, and so we now encourage people to, rather than collect their grass clippings and put them on the curb, to let them go back on the soil, which improves the soil.

It improves the organic matter of the soil, and when you do that, then the soil can actually hold more water after a rain event, so all those things just work in tandem to try to keep water on the land where when it goes through soil, it's cleaned by the natural bacteria and other organisms that are in, rather than just dumping it into a storm drain, so there's lots of ways that I think we're all finding that, as you say, we're interconnected.

We are all interconnected, and all of our activities seem to have an effect downstream.

What is it they say?

Everyone does live downstream, and so whatever happens in the upstate is gonna affect what happens downstream.

Lowndes, if people would like to know more about the work of The Nature Conservancy, and how they might even participate, what's the best way to get that information?

<Lowndes> They can visit our website at Nature.org/SC and you can get information about South Carolina there, or from there, you can get information on any other state chapter.

We're in all fifty states, and in over 72 countries around the world, so you can see our local to global priorities.

We know that wildfires are another threat that we face, and the west, of course, has seen more of them than we have.

We've had some here, and prescribed burns are so important for restoring the health of forest and creating pollinator habitat and all of that, and I believe you all have begun a great deal of work in that area, so I'm going to ask you to come back and talk to me about what you're doing there, and once again, I think that even has an international component.

I really hope people will enjoy learning about The Nature Conservancy.

There are other land trusts in South Carolina.

All of them are valuable.

There may be one in your community that you feel more involved in, but all of them deserve your consideration and support, and we thank you for the wonderful work you are doing for The Nature Conservancy.

<Lowndes> Well, thank you so much.

It really takes a village for conservation, and we love working with all of our trust partners, all of our state partners, and all of our donors, members, and on behalf of the citizens of South Carolina, so thank you for having us today.

<Amanda> I'm going to speak with some other members of The Nature Conservancy team in South Carolina, because the things that they're involved in really cover a broad spectrum of environmental issues.

and I think we all ought to know more about their work.

I hope that you will join us next week right here, because if it's Tuesday night, we'll be back with more Making It Grow .

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