Red Gold

With warming temperatures, one of Johns Island's most famous foods will begin appearing at farm stands all over the Lowcountry soon. Planting has already begun for the first tomato harvests in June, including popular heirloom varieties like Purple Cherokees and Brandywines, those huge, oddly shaped ones, which have been grown here for at least fifty years. Johns Island tomatoes are famously delicious, but what makes our tomatoes so much more delectable than the bland supermarket ones from who knows where?

One theory is the trace amounts of salt in the local water used for irrigation, which acts as a mild stressor for the plant and provokes a protective response that leads to higher than usual levels of compounds like lycopene, vitamins C and E, and certain flavonoids - all of which not only protect the fruit but make it more nutritious and flavorful. The sandy, porous Lowcountry soil plays a big part, too, helping to saturate the plant bed without trapping water too close to the roots.

Whatever the reason, our Johns Island tomatoes (and Wadmalaw Island's, too) account for the largest share of produce sales during the summer. Limehouse Produce, for example, once estimated that it sold 1.8 million pounds of local tomatoes to restaurant kitchens and produce markets in one year alone.

Although tomatoes, native to South America, were first reported under cultivation in the Carolinas in the early 17th century, they weren’t always popular with European settlers, who noted the tomato's lineage in the nightshade family and regarded them as poisonous. It wasn't until the Civil War that tomatoes proved to be an easily grown, preserved and transported food for troops in the field, starting the tomato's climb to the top of the summer menu. There's even a song about them, "Homegrown Tomatoes", which begins "Plant 'em in the spring/eat 'em in the summer/All winter without em's a culinary bummer."

Summer's Sting

Now that it's starting to feel like summer and we're spending more time at the beach, we're likely to see more of the cannonball jellyfish (stomolophus meleagris) washed up and stranded at the tideline. They're the most common jellyfish on our stretch of coastline, but fortunately also the least venomous; even so, it's best not to handle them, especially by the truncated tentacles below the bell, as they can still deliver a very mild sting.

Cannonballs appear offshore and in the mouths of estuaries starting in late spring and continuing into summer, abundant enough at times that commercial trawl fishermen consider them a nuisance for clogging and damaging nets. But some cultures, especially in Asia and the Pacific Rim, consider them a great delicacy served pickled or dried.

Among the most mysterious and beautiful of marine creatures, jellyfish of course aren't fish at all, but belong to a group of marine animals that includes corals and sea anemones. Their bells can be as small as an inch or so in diameter or more than a foot across. All jellyfish species are carnivorous and feed using their tentacles to carry prey - small organisms like plankton and krill, minnows, and even other jellyfish - to their mouths within the bell. They're in turn preyed upon by fish, turtles and other, larger jelly fish.

A Man O'War with its distinctive "sail"

The most recognizable jellyfish to most people is the Portuguese Man O'War (Physalia physalis), highly venomous but only rarely seen in our waters, occasionally drifting inshore. Unlike other jellyfish, the Man O'War is actually a colony of many separate organisms. Tentacles may extend underwater up to sixty feet and inflict a very painful shock to muscles and joints that can require medical attention.

The Lions Mane, or "winter jelly"

You're more likely to see, besides the cannonball, the Lions Mane (Cyanea capillata), although this variety usually only appears in colder weather, thus its alternate name of "winter jelly." Its tentacles can cause a mild burning sensation which usually dissipates in a few minutes.

Also common during warmer months is the Southern Moon Jelly (Aurelia marginalis), with its

Southern Moon Jelly

transparent saucer-shaped bell and distinctive "horseshoe" shapes. Contact can produce a mild but temporary burning sensation.

Most important for treating jelly fish stings is removing any tentacles that remain attached to the skin. After that, recommended treatments, all with varied success, include sugar, vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. (Note that a common folk remedy, urine, can actually increase the intensity of the pain.) It's best to give these ethereal animals a wide berth. Learn more about them here.

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Naming Names

What's in a name? A bit of Seabrook Island and Lowcountry history, that's what, enshrined in several of the street and place names we pass by every day. The picture above, for example, from about 1900, is of the Andell family whose Andell Bluff farm once included all of Seabrook Island. The name survives in the island's Andell Way and, of course, the Andell Inn at Freshfields. (That's patriarch William Andell, on the porch at upper right.)

The Andell home, c. 1890.

The Andells acquired their farm from the Gregg family in the 1880's and built a farmhouse on the banks of Bohicket Creek. It was one of the oldest homes still standing on Johns Island after it was restored by Andell granddaughter Betty Stringfellow, who lived there until her death in 2017 and who was a driving force in the 1980s behind the creation of SINHG. (The house, which stood just off today's Parkway near the traffic circle, was torn down a few years after Betty passed away.) During the more than fifty years the Andells owned the island, they farmed Sea Island cotton, raised hogs and chickens, and turned their dairy cows out on what is now Jenkins Point. The purchase of the island from the Andells by Julius Morawetz in 1938 marked the turning point from the island's agrarian past to its resort community future.

The Haulover Cut, looking northeast from Seabrook Island

The Andell house overlooked what was once the Haulover Cut, the inspiration Seabrook's cross-island roadway The Haulover. Long before the Andell's time, Bohicket Creek, connecting the Bohicket River to the Kiawah River and over which Parkway traffic now passes just before the traffic circle, presented an obstacle to river traffic traveling between the two waterways as the creek narrowed and grew shallow enough for river craft to run aground. Boats carrying produce or other cargo had to be unloaded at the site, so that both boat and cargo could be hauled over to the other side and deeper water to continue the journey. The first expansion of the Cut was undertaken by British troops in 1715. A bridge was in place by the time of a Civil War skirmish at the site between Union and Confederate troops in 1864; and by 1900, William Andell had devised a swiveling wooden bridge to allow river traffic easy passage.

Sea Island cotton, William Seabrook's contribution to island agriculture

And then, of course, there's the very name Seabrook. That would be for William Seabrook, the wealthy plantation owner on Edisto Island who bought what was then called Simmons Island from Ebenezer Simmons in 1816. Seabrook was the first to successfully grow Sea Island cotton on his new island before selling it in 1863 to William Gregg for $150,000 in Confederate money. The Greggs, as noted, sold the island twenty years later to the Andells, whose name remains securely tied, with William Seabrook's, to island history.