But Saturday there they were! Tiny, pencil-lead sized miniature asparagus. Of the thirty crowns we planted, at last count there were nine that had emerged. Now the trick is to wait for the others and then very carefully add another two inches of soil to the trench without breaking those delicate shoots.

When we finally get the trench filled and slightly mounded over, I’ll mulch and top dress lightly with compost. The better the top growth, the larger the underground crowns can grow, storing food for next year.

The directions say not to pick the first year after planting. Probably I’ll end up sneaking a few out just to see how marvelous they taste. Then if the new 601 Bridge doesn’t fall in the Congaree and we are still hale and hardy, in 2015 we’ll get to have a least one or two pickings of our own. Until then we’ll have to be content with harvesting smilax which, to tell the truth, is just about as tasty. 

The week before, on Making It Grow!, Tony Melton had told me that farmers had unharvested vegetables going to seed in the fields – the ground was too wet to support a tractor. Many of those plants were Brassicas – members of the mustard family that grow so well in our relatively mild S.C. winters. These plants are considered biennials; they spend one season in a rosette form, growing relatively close to the ground, and then when they have accumulated enough cold hours, they shift into the reproductive phase and “bolt,” sending up a stalk that flowers at the top.

The day we drove by those Florence County fields, the sun was brilliant and the sky a flawless blue field. And several hundred acres of fields were aglow with the most beautiful yellow flowers imaginable, a yellow as clear as that found in the old fashioned daffodils that still grow up on the rural roadsides.

Being a highly educated Clemson Extension Agent, I pronounced that those fields were filled with bolted collard greens and how sad that the farmers had been unable to get them picked and sold at the market. Well, imagine my chagrin as I remarked on my cleverness to Tony Melton a few days later. “Those aren’t collards, Miss Amanda,” he informed me. “That’s canola growing out there.”

Canola is a member of that Brassica group, but grown not for its leaves but for its seed. Originally it was called rape and for centuries has been used world-wide for fuel. The original type found in nature had potentially toxic levels of erucic acid which also made the by-product meal unpalatable to animals.

But plant breeders went to work and in Canada made selections that resulted in an improved species with lower levels of erucic acid and other unpleasant compounds, which they called Canadian oil, low acid, shortened to Canola.

For those of us trying to keep cholesterol in manageable limits, this is prized oil with high levels of “good for you” mono-unsaturated fatty acids. Although its smoke point is closer to olive oil's than those you fry up turkeys in, I use it for anything I’m cooking up without any trouble.

But back to the Museum, or rather the yearly gala it hosts, which attracts close to 400 people, including many who live away but come back for this annual gathering. My sister by choice, Ruthie Lacey, and I volunteered to decorate, and as the theme was originally “Coming Home,” we chose objects that you see as you drive along the roads of the county.

The old varieties of crape myrtle that don’t grow straight and tall, but rather twist and contort with marvelous lines and are prone to lichens, are seen at abandoned home sites and older places still inhabited. We found a stand at Lake Inspiration (a WPA project) and while standing in the back of Ruthie’s truck managed to cut two of the most perfect, for our use, limbs.

This was on Tuesday morning and as we were going to decorate on Thursday, we decided to leave them behind the Museum, where there isn’t even a driveway – a spot so remote and out of the way that we didn’t feel it necessary to alert staff to our stash.

Ha! We arrived on Thursday to a major outdoor staging with inmates painting wrought iron, supervisors giving directions, the AABC moving company building pilings under the 1820 house just moved to the grounds, and a mow-and-blow fellow putting out red mulch. With a sinking heart, we peered around back to see a blank space, and after subsequent questioning, found that those two exquisitely sculptured, sawn by hand, limbs had been sent to the landfill. Wouldn’t you think that if you knew a party was planned and you found material unrelated to anything in the neighborhood, that had been cleanly cut, not felled by a storm, you might wonder how it happened to be in such a protected and private area?

I’ve always thought those mow-and-blow people were way too tidy.

This is a good time for chickens, dogs, and people to investigate what’s hiding under the leaf litter. Last week, we discovered the peony buds emerging. Unfurling bloodroot, Sanguinariacanadensis, is my heart-stopping spring discovery, but at last check, it is bidding its time. But the two beautiful clumps of HepaticaJohn Elsey every so kindly sent home with me from his garden in Greenwood have flowers well worth going down on bended knee to better observe. Next to them, the leaves of Phlox divaricata rescued from a roadside right of way that far too often gets mowed are looking fresh and new as if they have spruced up for the flowers that will soon follow.

Usually, in winter we do have the bedroom windows closed since one of the current members of the cat family sits outside them and complains about having to sleep on the porch. When the children were little we still had winter, and once or twice I remember nailing spare blankets and quilts over the windows when an especially frigid night was forecast. At the old old house, Eliza Frezil’s diapers would freeze in the diaper pail (in the bedroom). You might be mad as the dickens at your husband at supper time, but by the time you had to get between those cold sheets, all was forgiven.

When we moved to the new old house Conrad was a baby. When he was one and half, we had upstairs and downstairs cribs. At that time, the first floor had central heat, and, during one week of bitter cold, I left him downstairs to sleep.

I awoke in the night to smoke and an alarm. Smoke was boiling up from the downstairs.  I flew down the stairs hollering to Edward to get Eliza Frezil as I went after Conrad. There was no fire, only smoke coming from the vents.

 We stood outside, Edward and I barefooted and in what passed for pajamas in those days. I kept trying to see if Conrad made sense in his speech but he was too young to say much beyond “Kitty” or “Tissie.”

Edward dismantled the furnace at the fuse box, the heat exchange had broken, and went through the house opening every single window. I put the children’s car coats on them, the ones with hoods and zippers, and we got back in bed. They seemed very puzzled about the situation – hoods, zipped coats, extra covers on the bed, sleeping with Momma and Papa. I wondered what the neighbors driving by in the morning thought when they saw our house with every single window wide open.   

 You’d think that might be enough to cure me of low-tide excursions, but the very next weekend I found myself at Awendaw and within walking distance of the tidal marsh. At low tide my daughter and I stepped off high ground into that slightly drained creek and began looking for more of those tasty shellfish. Once again, we found ourselves fighting to free our feet from that gook. I finally decided it was easier to crawl on hands and knees and maneuvered quite nicely while collecting four dozen mussels which we had for supper.

 Pluff mud owes its distinctive smell to the presence of anaerobic bacteria. These organisms do not use oxygen when breaking down organic matter into its simpler components. In the maritime marshes which are flooded and then drained with each tidal cycle, there is no oxygen in the soil. A compost heap which gets too wet can also develop that peculiar odor. Some people think it just smells awful but to me it smells like you are getting close to the beach.Spartina grass can grow in that environment, thankfully, and the beards of the mussels are entwined with the grass roots. It is difficult for a raccoon, or a bird, or even a very determined woman to get them loose and into your stomach or basket.

 You can see a picture of Lovable Lill and me and our basket of delicacies at Making It Grow!’s Facebook page. While you’re there, please take a moment to “like” our show. Stay tuned for a story of the cornbread dressing cooked in an athletic sock which later made an unexpected resurrection of sorts due to a Labrador retriever.

So what did we do to pass the hours? Often the year-round residents across the street had a litter of puppies we would cuddle. We walked to the post office to find the box usually empty but it was fun to work the dial.  On warm days Daddy would take us swimming at Ogden’s pond. And we worked puzzles.

Those 800 pieces of multi-colored foliage were the hardest. Mountains covered with the glory of deciduous trees were and remain a favorite theme for puzzle workers. Where is the satisfaction of finishing a puzzle that is based on an everything in the refrigerator pizza? But those glorious mountain scenes, usually with a lake reflecting the colors and making the challenge that much greater -- when the last piece went in you felt like you had conquered Mt. Mitchell.

I haven’t been to the mountains this year but there is tremendous beauty in my part of the world. Hickories are my favorites. We have a hickory right outside our bedroom that drops nuts on the metal roof. It’s a great percussive sound that emphatically announces that summer isover. The fall color of hickories reminds me of almost browned butter. The turkey and blackjack oaks that dominate the sandy ridges in this part of the world have rich and somewhat shiny colors that make up for their stunted size. Sparkleberries add a delicate texture and deep purple to the palate. And for all the grief people give them,there is nothing like a multi-hued, Jacob’s coat-like sweetgum.

Do people still take a drive on Sunday afternoons? Probably not politically correct in these days when we are more energy-conservation minded, but we need to nourish the soul as well as the body. Pack a snack and gather some friends for a drive to the country one day soon and enjoy the beauty that Mother Nature has bestowed on our woodlands.

Beautyberry is found in almost any open woods. It tends to be tall and sprawling with unbranched limbs.
Gardeners plant it in full sun for more fruits and cut it back severely each spring to get shorter, more abundant shoots, with heavier berry production.

Why has there been such a shortage, in my part of the world at least, this year? This plant requires very little moisture once established, and we’ve had a gloriously wet year, so I don’t think we can blame the scarcity of fruit on lack of rain.

All I can think of is that we must have had a freeze right when the flowers were blooming. If I were more scientific I would be able to look back at weather records and confirm my hunch, but I’m not, so I’m sticking with my hypothesis.

Now, there’s also been a shortage of banana spiders and I can’t for the life of my come up with any plausible reason for their notable absence. At Kiawah last weekend (for my brother’s wedding!), I did find Callicarpa berries which somewhat reinforced my“ freeze during flowering” idea as it is warmer in the winter there than up in the midlands. Usually when we visit that Island in the fall, gagumba banana spiders are suspended all above the bike paths. I have had a grand time in the past catching grasshoppers and pulling off their heads and feeding them to the big females. But this year not a single specimen did we see.

The argiope, or writing spiders, conversely, seem to be especially plentiful this year. I have four of them hanging out immediately outside windows at the house and had five or six in the vegetable garden. I carefully walked back to the beginnings of the okra rows to avoid disturbing them as they leave if pestered too much. I have to admit that I did on occasion give in the delightful pleasure of tickling their backs and to make them shake their webs.

The beach at Kiawah was absolutely littered with starfish. I haven’t got a theory about them but my new sister-in-law’s family from near Pittsburg sure had fun collecting them for the trip home. We packed them in triple zip-lock bags as they tend to be pretty ripe during the curing process.

Maybe nature just likes to keep us guessing. With the election so close, there are many subjects that are off limits. So far no one has been offended by discussions on spiders and berries.

Well, I felt somewhat the same way when Making It Grow! Director Sean Flynn and Interim Station Manager Kevin Jordan helped me make a customized ear piece recently. We opened a small box with folding staples protruding from it, which gave it a somewhat sinister appearance, and removed a small container with white powder, a plastic stick, and a bottle of liquid.

We read the directions through and through, then finally poured the liquid into the powder and stirred until we had a doughy, soft, paste which I stuffed into my ear. Sean set his phone for ten minutes. When the buzzer went off, I was supposed to neutralize the pressure by pinching my left nostril while closing my right eye and blowing out of my mouth as I removed the now hardened glob of plastic. After not too much tugging, it did come out.

I wish I hadn’t looked at the mold as it certainly gave me an entirely different perspective on my internal auditory canal construction. As a biology major and one-time anatomy and physiology teacher, the ear canal architecture was perfectly clear in my mind; until I saw what came out of my head!

The device is back and I can’t put it in by myself. There’s no way to tell what is up or what is down. We’re now going to make one for Terasa Young, who does such a terrific job in the chat room. Kevin is trying to figure out how we will distinguish between the two. Huh!  I’m perfectly sure that lovely Terasa has an ear canal perfectly configured to match the one in the textbook which will be instantly distinct from my tortured and twisted mold.  Maybe I should have stuck with the old one-sized fits all model I had been using before. 

Row crops have been bred to be the same height, mature at the same time, and share other specific traits. In the past decade, with the advent of “Round-Up Ready” seeds, the fields were perfect examples of genetically identical monocrops with nary a weed in sight. But not anymore. Tall and skinny amaranth plants stand out like really bad sore thumbs in the less carefully managed fields. Round-Up is  a commercial name for glyphosate, a non-selective herbicide that normally kills any plant on which it is sprayed. Cotton, corn, soybeans, and other plants have been genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate, so farmers could spray over the top of emerged fields, killing weeds but sparing the desired crop.

Palmer amaranth, a.k.a. pigweed, has developed resistance to Round-Up. It is a dioecious plant; male and female flowers appear on separate individuals. Male plants produce copious amounts of pollen, which is carried by wind to female flowers. Lots and lots of pollen, lots of mixed up pollination; all these factors lead to genetic diversity. Certain seeds inherited the genetic mix that gave them resistance to Round-Up (glyphosate) and they were not killed by over-the-top herbicide sprays. Since they were the only players in the game left standing, their offspring didn’t have to compete with other weeds and so came to dominate the seed bank.

For five or six years, the “Round-Up Ready” seeds allowed farmers to use glyphosate as their total weed control program. Now, the management aspect is back. And the most common tool used right now is roughing. Imagine farm workers in a field! It’s a surprising sight to see a gang of six or so workers going through a 200-acre field pulling or hoeing out amaranth and removing those plants from the crop. If just cut off, or even if pulled and left on the ground, it re-sprouts or re-attaches and grows again. Farmers are having to use many different pre- and post-emergent herbicides combined with other management techniques, all of which add to the cost of production, in order to control this noxious weed.