This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. See the full interview below.
Melanie Ruhlman, President of Save Our Saluda
Melanie Ruhlman is a water resources specialist and president of Save Our Saluda. She also serves as watershed manager for Easley Combined Utilities focusing on source water protection in the Upper Saluda Watershed.
Melanie earned her B.S. in Forestry from North Carolina State University in 1990 and her M.S. in Forest Hydrology from the University of Georgia in 1996. She has spent over 25 years working in water resources management for private consulting, industry, and government organizations, and with nonprofit groups in Georgia and South Carolina.
Her areas of expertise include watershed assessment and planning, hydrology, water quality, erosion and sediment control, stormwater management, stream assessment, soils, wetlands, and public outreach and education. She lives on the North Saluda River in Marietta, South Carolina with her husband and two children and enjoys paddling, biking, hiking, and gardening.
Save Our Saluda (SOS) is a nonprofit watershed organization dedicated to protecting and restoring the Upper Saluda Watershed. We promote clean and sustainable river flows, identify threats facing the river and its tributaries, and seek effective solutions in cooperation with partnering organizations and volunteers.
This interview was recorded on November 12, 2020.
Resources:
- Save Our Saluda website: https://www.saveoursaluda.org/
- The SC Adopt-a-Stream Program: https://www.clemson.edu/public/water/watershed/scaas/
- South Carolina Native Plant Society: https://scnps.org/
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Fiona Martin (FM):
Welcome to Melanie Ruhlman, president of Save Our Saluda, which is a nonprofit watershed organization dedicated to protecting and restoring the Upper Saluda Watershed here in South Carolina. Welcome, Melanie. Thank you for being with us today. How are you doing?
Melanie Ruhlman (MR):
Thank you, Fiona. I’m doing well. How are you?
FM:
I’m doing well. I’m excited to speak to you about Save Our Saluda and about rivers and all the knowledge that you have, but to get started, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Save Our Saluda.
MR:
Sure, I’d be glad to. I’m a water resources specialist and a watershed manager with over 25 years of experience in water resources management, working through the private sector, through industry, government, and now in the nonprofit sector. I currently preside over Save Our Saluda, which, as you said, is a nonprofit watershed group here in the upstate of South Carolina that works to restore and protect the Upper Saluda Watershed, and I’m also the watershed manager for Easley Combined Utilities, working to protect source water above Saluda Lake, which is in the uppermost part of our watershed. I became engaged with Save Our Saluda shortly after moving out to the North Saluda River with my family over seven years ago, and I’ve been working with the utility for about four years.
Save Our Saluda, we were formed in 2008 in response to development threats that were threatening our trout waters, in particular a wastewater discharge that was threatening one of our many trout waters in our headwater areas, and since then we’ve become engaged in a number of other issues and initiatives, which I’ll talk about, but our main areas of focus are advocacy, monitoring, education, river cleanups, and projects, most recently projects that is most consuming. Just to talk a little bit about those areas, on the advocacy front, we engage in different issues as they arise, and development issues, pollution threats to the river.
Some five years ago we, with the help of Southern Environmental Law Center, we finalized an agreement with Duke Energy to remove over three million tons of toxic coal ash off of the banks of the Saluda River near Williamston. So, that’s a very significant and ongoing project there that’s having a huge impact on the quality of our river there. We have been involved in monitoring our rivers, and we’re very instrumental in helping to shepherd over… Basically using the model in Georgia of Adopt-A-Stream, which is a citizen-based monitoring program that teaches citizens how to understand monitoring and to become certified. So, we were very engaged in that in our early years, and still encourage folks to become a part of that program.
We do river cleanups with our partners at Foothills Paddling Club, and most recently we’ve been very involved in a number of projects through a broad partnership that we have developed in the last four years to address the significant problem of sediment in our rivers, and particularly Saluda Lake. In addition to that, we engaged with… In addition to that partnership we engage with other of our local partners, state partners and regional like-minded organizations to address issues that affect our waters, the flow and quality of our waters. So, that in a nutshell is kind of what we do, and we educate citizens through events, which have been on the down low this year due to COVID, but we try to make up for that through social media, and like I said, we engage with our local partners on various initiatives. So, that’s a bit about Save Our Saluda.
FM:
That’s a big area to cover, for sure. Go ahead.
MR:
It is a big area. In fact, our watershed is over 1,000 square miles. It begins near the North Carolina/South Carolina border and flows downstream, the Saluda River does, where it meets the Reedy River at Lake Greenwood. It drains land in parts of seven different counties and includes multiple municipalities, including parts of Greenville, which is, I guess, the biggest municipal area. Headwater areas includes the South Saluda River above Table Rock, the Middle Saluda River near Jones Gap, the North Saluda River near Poinsett Reservoir, and we were very fortunate, due to the work of a lot of our partners to have much of our headwater areas in protection that are protected, and this includes the beautiful Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area, so that in turn helps to, in itself, protect our rivers.
Those three rivers, the North, Middle, and South, come together above Saluda Lake, which is situated west of Greenville and become just the Saluda River. From there it flows over the dam at Saluda Lake, and then downstream in a southerly direction over five more dams, hydropower dams, where then it meets the Reedy River at Lake Greenwood. So, you can see our watershed by visiting our website at saveoursaluda.org, and look under our watershed, and you can find an interactive map, and it allows you to kind of surf around and zoom in and zoom out and see what our watershed is and where it is.
FM:
Yeah, I really like the interactive map feature you have on your website, because even though we’re both South Carolinians, I’m way down river from you, so I want to kind of set the stage, because we do have listeners from outside of South Carolina, and also internationally. The Upstate of South Carolina is right in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains right at the Appalachian Mountains, and you guys are right at the bottom of those mountains, and then where I live is what they call the Midlands. We are, God knows, how many dams down river from you guys, and then further down river from me is going out to the coast, out to places like Charleston and Savannah and those places that people have heard of. I find the history of rivers really interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about how the rivers were used before and how they’re used now?
MR:
Well, I think they were used in a lot of the same ways they are today. We rely up here on our rivers for drinking water. Unlike in the coastal area that is able to tap into groundwater fairly easily, we rely on surface waters. So, I guess that is by far the biggest use of our waters up here, is for drinking water. The reservoirs above Table Rock, and North Saluda Reservoir, also known as Poinsett Reservoir, are two of the three primary drinking water sources for the greater Greenville area that serves Greenville and surrounding communities.
And then, further downstream Saluda Lake is the drinking water source for the Easley area. The river further down from that is drinking water for a number of smaller communities, and then, when you get, as is the Reedy, and then when you get to Lake Greenwood, that provides drinking water for Greenwood and for Laurens County. As I mentioned, there are a number of hydropower dams, so hydropower is another use of our rivers. They’re used for industrial uses as well. They fuel our industries. They are used for discharge of our municipal and industrial wastewater, so the assimilative capacity that the rivers are able to provide for treated wastewater discharges is another significant use.
Our rivers are used for irrigation. They irrigate farmlands, golf courses and the like, and they’re used for recreation. Our headwater areas are favorite go-to’s for trout fishermen, and further downstream there’s fishing and boating, and of course they also support aquatic life. In fact, a pretty rich diversity of aquatic life. We have across the state of South Carolina about 150 freshwater fish species, and of those about a third of them, about 50 of them, occur in our very upper headwater Upper Saluda area. So, we’re very proud of that, that we’re able to maintain that nice, healthy, robust fishery up here that’s indicative of good water quality. So, for that and many other reasons, we feel like the Saluda is worth saving. It is our life blood, it’s what fuels these communities, and it is a wonderful resource to have.
FM:
Sure. We kind of hinted at it, but I’d love to explore a little bit further the threats to the Saluda and what prompted the need for having organizations like Save Our Saluda, and there’s also a lot of river keeper organizations down where I live, and then closer to the coast. We mentioned that the water is used for, well, drinking water, but then we also mentioned it’s used for industrial purposes and wastewater discharging. So, can you talk to us about these threats and threats I haven’t mentioned that we might not even know about, and are these threats unique to the Saluda, or are they threats that rivers around the country and the world are experiencing?
MR:
Sure, sure. I think a lot of our threats are not necessarily unique. Just as in other areas of the country, oftentimes in the past our rivers were seen as just discharge waste disposal areas, so before the Clean Water Act came along we did not have treated municipal and industrial discharges. It was just a straight shot of those pollutants that seep into our river system. Now, of course, we have requirements for treating those wastes before they’re discharged, but that does… So, those are called point source discharges when it comes discreetly from a pipe, so while through the Clean Water Act we have eliminated a large degree of those threats, the threats are still out there, and there’s a lot of, well, hopefully not too many, but elicit discharges of pollution is certainly a threat.
But perhaps the biggest threat these days is just simply development. We live in a rapidly growing area, the greater Greenville area. We always make the top of the list of fastest growing areas in the country, and so with that growth brings a lot of challenges for our environmental resources, namely loss of our very valuable tree canopy and riparian protections. As we replace those trees with paved surfaces, then the problem of stormwater runoff becomes very significant and exacerbated, and so with that runoff comes a lot of pollutants from the land, from our cars, from our land use activities. So, those non-discreet sources of pollution we call non-point source pollution.
Also, in the past I would say when we were more of a rural agrarian area, agriculture was certainly a huge factor in the quality of our rivers, and agriculture is rapidly being replaced by development. It is still land use out there that we’re very much tuned into these days and trying to address some of the challenges there with regards to protection of our rivers. But those are certainly, I guess, most of our threats. Increased water demand with that increase growth, so just how to allocate those water resources so that they’re allocated and used in a sustainable manner, and then how to, I guess, manage our wastewater discharges too. All those are significant challenges that our local and state leaders are facing in the face of rapid development.
FM:
So, my connection with South Carolina dates back to… I was born here in 1982, so, moved in and out, and it’s always in my mind been quite a rural state, but it’s really developing quickly, especially where you are upstate Greenville. I’ve seen many petitions going around trying to urge local municipalities to be intentional with the development and avoid sprawl. It sounds like you’re on the frontline of that fight as well for the water considerations, but… Where was I going to go with that? But I think it’s something that people aren’t aware of, is what I was going to say, is we might not be forward-thinking enough, maybe, in certain areas about the impacts of things developing quickly.
So, you did also mention the agricultural practices, and that was one thing that I was directed towards your organization about, was some of the projects you’re doing with farmers, because we don’t think about agricultural runoff, pesticides or whatever, but also the actual soil running into the Saluda. I know you’ve told me a story before about, or I read it on the website, about the sediment coming into the river. Can you tell us what that looks like and why it’s dangerous, why we need to be worried about it, and then the projects that you’re doing to try and mitigate the negative effects of agricultural runoff into the Saluda?
MR:
Sure, sure. Well, when it’s not raining, our rivers are pretty clear. But typically in the Piedmont and, of course, we start in the mountains and drop down in the foothills and Piedmont, and in the Piedmont areas our creeks and streams and rivers after it rains flow mostly brown, orange, and it is because of all of the sediment that is inherently in those, a lot of that is legacy sediment that’s left over from those highly agronomic years back 150 years ago when most everything was cleared and real crop and cotton was king in many areas.
So, that led to a lot of runoff then, and that sediment, a lot of that is still in our streams and rivers and valleys, and being reactivated and redistributed every time it rains, and then superimposed on top of that when we have a developed area that is causing more stormwater runoff with higher volumes, more frequent flooding, then that activates those sediments in the river system even more, and add on top of that erosion sediment control issues related to development. So, all of those things combined… A lot of people will look at a brown river and say, “Oh, where is it coming from? There must be some development upstream.” Well, there might be, and there might not be. It might be because of some of these other confounding factors. It may be a combination of things.
So, trying to sleuth all that out is sometimes challenging, but it’s not too hard if you look at it from a broader watershed and land use perspective, which is what we’ve done with a lot of our watershed planning work. We have been working on developing and have developed watershed plans over the last few years for our very upper part of our Upper Saluda Watershed above Saluda Lake to address this problem with sediment because it is not only a water quality problem for the streams and rivers, it chokes out aquatic life, it carries with it pollutants. A lot of pollutants like to ride on sediment: your metals, your pesticides, your nutrients. But it’s particularly problematic for the reservoirs downstream, drinking water reservoirs like Saluda Lake.
They have been challenged with sediment, particularly in the last decades, and some eight years ago they dredged the upper part of the lake. It’s a 300-acre lake, and they dredged the upper 100 acres and removed 366,000 cubic yards of sediment, dredged it out and put it back on the land at a cost of $7 million. Today, only eight years later, we estimate about 90% of that sediment is back where they dredged, and so that is just not a sustainable model for management of that lake, and so trying to address those sediment sources at the source makes a lot of sense. Right now it is… While we’re looking at development issues and trying to track those the best we can and report those as best we can and work with our local officials on that, we also have been trying to focus on some of our agricultural areas that inherently do result in some sediment runoff to the river, particularly some of the more intensively farmed areas.
Up here it’s our floodplain areas that are farmed. That’s where it’s nice and flat, the soils are rich, and so we’ve been trying to, through our watershed planning and implementation work and grant-funded program and our partnership, have been working with farmers to provide cost share for soil conservation practices. Things like keeping the soil covered in between your cash crops during the fall and winter. In fact, we’re just now skating towards the end of cover crop planting season. It’s been a very busy one. I’m very excited that this year we’re on track to have three times the amount of acreage and cover crop this year through our grant program as we did last year when we started.
So, hopefully we’ll have some 300 acres in cover through our program, so that’s very exciting, and looking to do other things on these farmlands as well, like stabilizing the access roads and providing some other what are called “agricultural best management practices”, edge of field as well as in-field. In doing so, it has been a great learning process for me, certainly, in how farming works, what the challenges are, what the constraints are to doing these things. I mean, our farmers know better than anyone how to manage their land, but oftentimes they may not take these extra steps, simply because they operate on such thin margins, and that is unfortunate. But fortunately, there are programs out there to assist, and DHEC’s Nonpoint Source Program is one of those, and so we saw that as a tremendous opportunity to tap into that.
So, several years ago I started building this partnership to be able to do that and to be able to provide them a very nice incentive to come along and participate. So, that’s been keeping us very busy these last couple, few years, in addition to addressing other issues as they come along. But it’s exciting, I love it. I love being able to work in my own backyard and trying to do things and put things on the ground that are going to make a difference to our rivers, hopefully for generations to come, but I will say that the best part of it is meeting the folks in our watershed that are working on these issues and that have like-minded goals and aspirations, and seeing what we can do together to accomplish our similar objectives and goals. It’s been really great, so I hope we can keep it up here. I hope folks can find us and support us.
FM:
Well, it sounds like you’ve built a great coalition, and what’s super interesting, and it’s quite interesting in popular culture right now is all of a sudden the awareness of what’s called regenerative agriculture and regenerative agriculture practices. I’ve talked about it on the podcast before. We’ve had a couple of farmers on who practice regeneratively, and the work that you’re doing is supporting farmers to start regenerative agricultural practices like cover cropping, which is exciting, and things like no-till, and basically soil protection, because all that soil is getting washed away as we’re experiencing a tropical storm moving through our area. I imagine that the Saluda is quite high right now, yes?
MR:
It is. If I were to turn my camera just a little bit you can see it right out my window, but yes. These storms and flooding events are becoming more frequent and more severe, so it is really for multiple reasons that these regenerative ag practices are in the best interest of not only the river, but the land that the farmers hope a lot of them keep and keep farming, or to keep in place and so our land doesn’t wash away and doesn’t become a liability to somebody else downstream. We need to build resilience, and so that starts not necessarily by… Well, it starts at the end of the pipe, but it also starts at the source of a lot of these problems or a lot of these practices. So, yes, that is the name of the game these days, is trying to build that resilience as we move into more unstable environmental conditions with global warming and all that.
FM:
Yeah. I mean, part of resilience is biodiversity, and part of creating biodiversity is doing things like cover crops, right, and not these huge fields of corn, just corn, or just soy. I could be wrong, correct me if I’m wrong, that just due to the landscape in the Upstate that you might not have the millions of acres of corn that we see in other parts of the country even down where I live, but it’s exciting to hear that you’re covering the soil. I go ride my bike quite a lot up in your area, and the last time I was up there with a few girlfriends, I saw some freshly tilled fields and I was like, it makes me shudder, and here I am riding my bike, talking about regenerative agriculture. It was a little bit sad. They were just like, “What are you talking about?” But let’s briefly talk about the benefits of cover cropping and no-till to the land and to the river, and then whatever else around it.
MR:
Sure, sure. Well, cover crops are beneficial for a number of reasons. Keeping that living root in the soil and keeping it covered will help prevent soil loss and help prevent erosion, number one, and then the cover crops, once you get into a cover crop system and stay with it, they can’t expect the world to turn around in one year, but once they stay with it they can see some significant benefits to soil health, increasing the soil carbon, increasing the biota in the soil that make the soil healthy and help give us better, healthier crops, as well as more resilient crops more resilient to a lot of diseases.
And they’ve also been able to show here in South Carolina with some trials that these cover crop systems can, in addition to these other benefits, provide a financial benefit for the farmers by decreasing their input, their needed inputs like lime or fertilizer. So, that can then lead to, of course, increasing the bottom line, which everyone wants to see. So, yes, but there are challenges to it, too. A lot of our farmers up here, they don’t get their crops often too so late, so trying to just manage the timing of things and trying to get everything done in time so that your crop can get up and going before the frost sets in.
That’s a challenge. Another challenge is simply having the right equipment and the right know-how, and so our grant has been able to purchase some equipment that we’re donating to our local soil and water conservation district to make available to our local farmers. So, we hope that’s going to help some. But yeah, those are some of the things that we’ve been working on to help keep soil out of our rivers and keep our water quality protected.
FM:
Yeah. What are the top cover crops that you’re getting the farmers to plant?
MR:
Cereal rye is a strong one, a popular one. Crimson clover. Some farmers are trying tillage radish, and tillage radish puts out a deep tap root that can help break up… A lot of times our soils and our floodplains are very… They’ve been worked a lot, and so they’re very compacted. So, once they get compacted, then they can’t infiltrate the rainwater as well, and so that just compounds itself. The runoff will increase and compact the soil, so that tillage radish can help break up that subsoil and improve your soil structure. Winter wheat is another popular one. Those are the ones that we’ve been putting in.
But there’s lots of others, and I encourage folks to just… Farmers, if you’re listening, maybe you don’t want to take the leap and do your entire fields this time, but maybe just try a section this year, or a couple rows, and just see how it goes. That’s what a lot of this is, is just trial and error and seeing what works best, and if something works, maybe you’ll try it again next year. If it didn’t quite work, we might try something a little different next year. You’ve got-
FM:
It’s definitely exciting to hear these programs are out there, because as you mentioned, you can’t expect change in one season. I mean, farming especially is a multi-year, multi-generational type of business, and a lot of the farmers are running on incredibly tight margins, and a lot of that is because, like you said, the inputs that they have to put in to be able to grow a crop and then sell it, and the inputs are the seed, the equipment, the herbicides, pesticides, the fertilizer, et cetera, et cetera.
But I just saw on social media this week from Farmer’s Footprint, which is a nonprofit promoting regenerative agriculture to farmers, about a cotton farmer in Arkansas who started exactly as you said. He inherited his family farm and was on the verge of bankruptcy and didn’t know what else to do, and started with one little section of their land, using a cover crop, and the next season just expanded, expanded, and it saved his farm. But to know that there are organizations like yours out there helping move that process along is encouraging, for sure.
MR:
Another thing we’re trying to promote, as I mentioned, is riparian protection, and that is keeping a woody root, woody vegetation on your waterways. That even includes the little, tiny, small, maybe intermittent waterways, but particularly the larger creeks and rivers, because these big storms… Oftentimes farmers will farm all the way up to the edge and leaving no trees or shrubs, and so when we get these big storm events, there’s nothing holding the bank in place. So, they get really wiped out. They physically lose land, and they oftentimes… We had a really big, I think a historic flood last February and April, were both historic precipitation and flooding events here.
A lot of areas experienced significant stream bank loss, and so we’re getting a lot of calls for assistance with that, and we do have some projects lined up for that, but I will say it’s extremely, extremely complicated and expensive to go back and get your stream banks put back in place. You may not put them back in place exactly like they were, but I will say an ounce of prevention and protection there is worth a ton of restoration. The same can be said whether it’s in a rural setting, agricultural setting, or an urban setting. Oftentimes people like to clear out all the vegetation so they can see the pretty water, so they can see that flowing stream or river or pond, and while I understand that mindset, it is not as protective as leaving some vegetation there to help hold everything in place, help provide some shading to the water, which is particularly beneficial in our trout areas, and to provide, of course, habitat for riparian ecosystems.
There’s lots of reasons to leave riparian areas intact, but mainly and most significantly is to help protect our stream banks and keep them from washing away. So, riparian protection is something we’re really trying to push, both through voluntary efforts, as well as through local ordinance, and it would be great if we had a state buffer law, but we simply don’t. Other states do, and some local jurisdictions have riparian buffer protections. Parts of our watershed do, and some don’t. So, that’s something we try to educate folks about, is the importance of protecting these riparian corridors.
FM:
Yeah, and you mentioned the ecosystem around the rivers. I’m thinking of a previous guest we had, Chris Jones, who’s a regenerative dairy farmer in the UK, but he’s also very involved in trying to bring beavers back to the UK. Is there any sort of beaver activity going on in the Saluda?
MR:
We may not want to talk about beaver activity. It’s a love-hate relationship. Yes, certainly beaver are very beneficial for many reasons. In areas where we’re trying to get riparian trees established, they provide a challenge. They like to eat our trees, so we have to protect our trees and try to stay ahead of them and all of that. So, I don’t know of any efforts where people are actively trying to bring the beaver back. I’ll just leave it up to the individual landowners to decide if they’re good or bad for their area. So, it’s an interesting dichotomy of issues there.
FM:
Yeah. Yeah, I used to, a while ago, work for an environmental mitigation company, and I think they were anti-beaver, so I can understand that. It’s interesting how it’s happening in the UK, because they completely wiped out their beavers. By 1500 there were no beavers, and so now they’re experiencing some of the effects of climate change of being flooding, and so bringing the beavers back, they’re creating the wetlands so that it doesn’t go all the way downstream and flood out the town, but there’s a huge amount of education going into that because beavers can be destructive in some ways by bringing down trees. But I think they’re pretty cool. I don’t get to see beavers up close. I’d like to, though. What can we do as individuals to be better stewards of our rivers and to help organizations like yours, Save Our Saluda?
MR:
Well, I would say first to try to become educated and informed on whatever issues related to the rivers, whether it’s river flow or water quality, that interest you. If you’re in our area, find us and support us, please. If you’re elsewhere watching this, there are lots of river organizations out there. There might be one in your area. There’s a lot of river keeper organizations out there doing wonderful work. There are other organizations that are doing work that’s equally as important and that may be just as impactful to rivers, things like your keep whatever beautiful or clean.
Trash is another thing we didn’t talk about that comes with people. People bring their trash, and wherever we have people it seems like we have a tremendous amount of trash on our roadsides that makes its way to our rivers. So, getting engaged with local organizations that do trash pickups, trash cleanups. You don’t even have to be involved in the organization. You can just go out and pick up some trash on your own, particularly around a bridge or along your favorite creek, or maybe you have a park next to a waterway that you enjoy going to. If you go out for a hike, take a bag with you and just pick up trash on the way out. Learning how to monitor our rivers. Maybe you’re interested in water quality monitoring. If you’re in South Carolina you can tune into the Adopt-A-Stream program through Clemson University and learn how to monitor your rivers.
If you have a stream or a river or a pond in your backyard and maybe it’s all cleared out, consider planting some native vegetation along the edges and learn what native vegetation grows best in your area. I’d like to see everybody get excited about native vegetation and the benefits of that in their backyard. I think there’s a tremendous benefit there. We can’t regulate everyone, and folks need to take it upon themselves to do what’s best in their little piece of the world, whether that’s planting native vegetation, or maybe shrinking the area that they mow and leaving some of it natural.
Those are some of the sorts of things that folks can do. Become engaged in local issues. Find these groups, find out what they’re doing, and when there’s a call to action for a particular development ordinance or something like that, become engaged. Maybe you have aspirations to be a leader. We need good political leaders at our local and state levels that are willing to listen to these issues and act on them. So, there’s a number of things that folks can do to help protect the environment around them, including our streams and rivers.
FM:
Yeah, let’s get excited about natives, because there’s not many people who know about this, and I didn’t know about this until I started looking into it, because I kept reading about planting natives, so then I was like, okay, I’m trying to build soil. We have a little bit of an erosion problem in our backyard, and so I’m going to be a regenerative gardener and build soil, and doing… I found horse manure for free, and then we have plenty leaves, and stacking it up, and then it was time to plant something. What’s interesting about where we live, because we live in a colonized land, is a lot of the plants that we think are native are not native, like all of the crape myrtles and the honeysuckle and the mimosa trees, and just tons and tons and tons.
I started reading to try and first learn what was around me, and so many of them come from Europe, all these weeds, which I don’t like the word weeds. Nothing’s a weed. If I can do something with it, we’re cool. But it’s because the colonists brought all this stuff over with them, and on the other side we lost a lot of native plants, which is sad, but also reduced our biodiversity and the native animals that lived here. So, how do we go about finding out what’s native and planting it?
MR:
And you have a Native Plant Society in your area. South Carolina has a Native Plant Society. You can tap into them. There’s tons of resources online. Just start Googling native plants. Let’s see, the USDA, I use their plants database weekly. It’s like the Bible of plants, if you really want to get into the science of it, but there’s a lot of resources online and information out there, and groups that are specifically oriented to native plants, so just wade into it and start asking questions. Find your local folks that are experts, and get engaged. There’s a lot of online things with little apps where you can find out what a plant is. Your local extension folks are a good resource as well. But it is exciting. I’ve always like gardening, but it’s really only been in the last, I don’t know, 10 years or so that I’ve really tuned into the benefits of native, and I’ve become kind of an anti… If it’s not native, I don’t want it, but I’m trying to mellow a little bit, because sometimes you’ve got to fight your battles.
FM:
I have that battle daily with my husband, so it’s an internal house battle where I’m like, “Before we plant this tree, is it native?” And he’s like, “Oh my god.”
MR:
But that is a challenge to our riparian restoration projects. We do try to put in native trees and shrubs, but oftentimes before we do that we have to clear out all of the exotic invasives first, particularly kudzu. That one is a battle worth fighting, because it will strangle your trees and shrubs. Wisteria is another horrible one. I could go on, but yeah. We love our natives, and they go hand-in-hand with our watershed and restoration projects.
FM:
I love natives. I told you before I am dying to get a pawpaw or two on our property.
MR:
Excellent. Yes, we love the pawpaws. I’ve planted them. I try to plant them wherever I can. We have them at a number of our sites, and my husband actually goes out and he hand-pollinates our pawpaw trees in our yard, and then we keep our fingers crossed that the raccoons and squirrels and possums don’t get them before we do, because once they figure out they’re there, they make a beeline. They’re a great riparian tree. They’re actually one of my very favorite, because the beaver don’t like them. None of the sites that I manage, knock on wood, have had any beaver damage to any of our pawpaws. So, they’re a wonderful native riparian tree that is not as common maybe as it once was, and a lot of people don’t know about it.
FM:
Yeah. That’s what I was going to say. Definitely Google pawpaw. I didn’t hear about it until I started trying to figure out what was native, and there’s some big pawpaw champions in the US, and it produces, from what I’ve seen. I’ve never eaten the fruit or seen it in person, but lovely little oblong fruit that are kind of like a… I hear it’s like a mix between a mango and a banana. Is that the right way to describe it?
MR:
Yes, it is. It’s very custard-y. It’s delicious. We like it over vanilla ice cream.
FM:
Oh. Nice. I’m like probably what, five years out from having a fruit come off a tree like that? But I live in hope.
MR:
Another thing that folks can do and that… We not only work to restore, but we work to protect, and so we work with some of our partners and help identify areas and lands that are worthy of protection through permanent land trusts or easements, and so finding… If you have a local land trust in your area, find them, support them, because protecting some of our most sensitive lands is a huge element of long-term watershed protection.
FM:
Yeah. That’s great. How do we find Save Our Saluda online or elsewhere? How do we support you?
MR:
Oh, great. You can find us at saveoursaluda.org. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram. You can email me at info@saveoursaluda.org, and yes, thank you for that shoutout and for this interview and for having me. This has been really wonderful. I appreciate the opportunity.
FM:
Yeah. I’m excited to have been connected with you. Are there any big events or projects coming up in the next little while that you want to highlight for us?
MR:
Well, we have been putting the brakes on our volunteer events, just because of COVID, but we do have some projects coming up in the winter months, some tree-planting projects, and so you can watch our website. We have a tab for volunteer events, and we’re going to be doing a… We will be doing a call-out for volunteers, and we’ll do safe, socially distanced, protective volunteer. We will limit it, and it will be outside, so we’ll do it safely, but that is coming up. Our fundraiser this year is we’re just going to be looking to Giving Tuesday, which is December 1st, so please, if you’re compelled, you can give at any time, but we’re doing a nice drive for December 1st through their Giving Tuesday. So, we try to fundraise for our organization.
FM:
Excellent.
MR:
So, if you can offer any support that you might be able to give there.
FM:
Yeah, and we’ll definitely link to everything in the show notes and have it on our social media, so keep an eye out for that. Any closing thoughts, Melanie, before we wrap this up?
MR:
Just take this opportunity while things are maybe a little slower and a little closer to home to look around you and explore the environment around you, and try to notice things and figure out what little thing you can do to make a difference and to help protect the world around us so that we can have a nice, clean, sustainable future for future generations.
FM:
Definitely, and as you mentioned, an ounce of prevention is much better than trying to fix it on the backend, and a huge part, as you mentioned and other guests have mentioned, is looking around, seeing what’s around you, appreciating what’s around you, and I think as things are slower, just as you mentioned, it’s a great time to do that. So, I appreciate you echoing that message. It’s an important one. Get out there, read. What’s that tree in your yard? Look it up. Figure it out. There’s tons of apps, and you might end up down a rabbit hole of planting pawpaws a year and a half later when you figure out that all the trees in your yard are invasive species.
MR:
Or maybe you’ll take it upon yourself to get rid of all of that English ivy that’s been growing up your trees. You never know what it’ll do.
FM:
Exactly. Well, Melanie, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for being with us. We will, like I said, link to saveoursaluda.org and give a shoutout on Giving Tuesday to help raise some funds. You’re doing great work with farmers, with trying to make sure development is intentional, or at least cognizant of what’s going on, and saving our waterways just for people, for animals, for the planet, and we briefly mentioned with climate change there are more events, flooding events, rain events that are… All of this is connected and is going to affect us, so it’s best if we can try and get in front of it as much as we can. So, I appreciate all the work that you’re doing.
MR:
Sure. And thank you for your podcast and for your interest in these issues. It’s really great to see folks like you helping to connect us.
FM:
Yeah. Well, thank you, Melanie. Have a great rest of your day, and we’ll be in touch.
MR:
Thank you, Fiona. You too.