Mortgage Broker in Johns Island, SC

Do you (or your family) love to staycation or vacation on John’s Island? With its breathtaking marsh + riverfront, we don’t blame you. But, we do have some news you probably want to know about.

Kiawah River’s residential Bungalows are now available for short-term rental.

The latest addition to Kiawah River’s diverse residential options of waterfront, wooded, and village homes + homesites, the 11 fully furnished, one-bedroom detached cabins average ~800 sqft and offer the perfect opportunity for a getaway stay (or to try before you buy). Nestled along a quiet creek off the Kiawah River, the Bungalows were designed by Julia Starr Sanford of Starr Sanford Design whose architectural vision influenced Alys Beach in the Florida Panhandle (and communities like Mahogany Bay Village in Belize + Las Catalinas in Puerto Rico).

“Set along the Kiawah River, the Bungalows serve as an ideal home base for weekend getaways and authentic Lowcountry adventures on the water,” said Chris Drury, Broker-in-Charge at Kiawah River. “The turn-key homes ensure a carefree escape to the secluded sea islands, where the short drive to downtown Charleston can feel like a world away.”

Inspired by traditional Lowcountry seaside dwellings, Sanford’s architectural details maximize outdoor living along Kiawah River’s 20 miles of waterfront thanks to:

With interior furnishings by Amanda Lindroth, the homes embrace the cozy cabin scale with natural materials, textured finishes and timeless furniture.

The Bungalows are considered a waterman’s paradise, offering water access with several launch points for fishing + exploring the Kiawah River and inland waterways.

Bonus: Renters get to enjoy the world class amenities (cough, cough, the Spring House) including miles of waterfront trails and The Goatery, which will soon be opening a dairy.

Want to see more? Book your stay + take a photo tour below.

Take a photo tour

Beyond the Bungalow rentals, Kiawah River offers a diverse variety of homes — from completely custom home designs to turnkey floor plans — starting at $900,000 and homesites starting at $200,000.

Bonus: The community has been carefully planned to embrace outdoor living, with only half of the property’s 2,000 acres developed, and the remaining 1,000 acres to remain open as green space for the community.*

Poll

What is your favorite Kiawah River amenity?

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - A shiny new basketball gym, an indoor-outdoor building construction classroom, a commercial kitchen and an entire wing reserved for health education are just some of the features of the two new buildings at James Island Charter High School. The $25 million development is the last major project in the Charleston County School District’s Phase Four Capital Programs plan approved and paid for by a referendum in 2016.

The new buildings consist of a Career Technology Education center and a new competitive gym. Inside the CTE building, students will find classes aimed at allowing them to achieve a Completers Status by developing hands-on skills. The Completers Status opens the door for students to get a leg up in college or to simply enter the workforce straight out of high school. Principal Timothy Thorn says it’s all about giving students options and opportunities.

“The thing behind Career Technology Education is that you can get a completers status and go into the workforce and earn a living wage,” Thorn said. “You don’t need to go to college to make a lot of money or to do well early on. You can always increase your credentials over time as well. You can go into the workforce, begin to provide for yourself, have some success and then maybe find the path you want to go down. Either way, it provides a vehicle for kids to earn skills and credentials to help them be successful in life.”

Students can study culinary arts in a commercial kitchen or building construction in an indoor-outdoor facility filled with the same machines found on an actual worksite. Of course, there are state-of-the-art computer labs for classes aimed at teaching students coding, programming and engineering as well.

Perhaps most impressive are the rooms dedicated to health sciences. Before entering classrooms, students walk past a nurse station designed to simulate the triage area of a hospital. Across the hall, half a dozen medical beds line a wall in a room that mirrors what you’d expect to see at any medical school. It’s the same equipment used by medical students, down to the patient dummies. Here students learn the basics of care and medical administration.

“We’re ecstatic. The facilities are gorgeous and state of the art,” Thorn said. “It’s very exciting and I can’t wait to get the kids in there.”

Next door, the gym has more than enough capacity to hold the entire student body and has everything you’d expect to see in a high school gym. The gym is branded head to toe in school colors and even the new weight room houses dumbbells with the image of the school’s mascot – a trojan warrior – painted on the sides. While the building is designed for athletics, it also doubles as a classroom.

“Every space has its purpose and supports our academic mission and hopefully helps kids find their paths going forward,” Thorn said.

Students studying sports medicine, for example, have classrooms adjacent to the gym, while even the student store located next to the trophy case has an educational opportunity for business students.

“The school store for example. It’s about learning how to do inventory, run a store, the debits and the credits and taking care of the cashier and patrons and serving the public, so learning all those aspects of life skills and employment skills are critical,” Thorn said.

Students will be able to start using building buildings when they return to school in August.

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Apiculture, or beekeeping, plays an important role in the Lowcountry’s rich agricultural industry for its help in natural growth and production for local farms. Bees are easier to transport than other pollinators, such as butterflies or moths, allowing beekeepers to move hives and colonies to areas in need of pollination. “Honey bees are the most important of the pollinators because they are very efficient pollinators and they’re also manageable,” said Ben Powell, program coordinator for Clemson Coastal Research and Education Center’s apiculture and pollinator program.

Rebecca Bills of R and R Acres, an apiary and homestead in Berkeley County, uses the ease of transporting bees to support not only her farm, but other farms in the area as well. “Having the bees definitely helps,” she said. “We’ve put some of our bees at some local farms in the area … just so that they could have better crops this year.”

John Berdux, co-founder of James Island-based honey company Apis Mercantile, added, “The pollination that they naturally do is responsible for a lot of the food that we ultimately end up consuming.”

Before starting Apis Mercantile, Berdux and founding partner Liam Becker kept bees in their backyard in college before graduating from the College of Charleston in 2014. Now, they work with local and regional beekeepers to help the local bee population and agricultural economy.

“If we’re going to be selling honey, we got to do right by the bees,” Berdux said.

Honey bees and local apiaries play an important role in regional agriculture and economy, he added. “Working with local producers and providers, not only are we reducing food miles but we’re also keeping money in the local economy, which we think is important.”

Powell agrees: “The most important thing is, by supporting local beekeepers by buying their products, you’re supporting local agriculture and ag-enterprises. We have a number of beekeepers in South Carolina that produce honey locally that is as good or better than any honey you can get anywhere else.”

At the Charleston Community Bee Gardens, located near the Clemson Coastal Research and Education Center on Savannah Highway, Powell said, “The center is focused on fruit and vegetable crop production and research, as well as home gardening.” The community bee garden was eventually added to not only research the effect of bee colonies in local agriculture, but a place for people who can’t keep bees at home due to a Homeowner’s Association or live downtown.

Local beekeeper and bar manager at 39 Rue de Jean Michael Moore keeps hives around the city in various locations as part of a project with bar manager Elias Wolfe of Mount Pleasant’s Red Drum. The pair maintains apiaries on the rooftop of local businesses and at commercial locations, “that are kind of out of the way from everybody,” Moore said. The goal, he added, is to increase the pollination on the peninsula and Charleston area.

And for restaurants, like Harold’s Cabin, with a rooftop beehive from Moore and Wolfe, they receive a free amount of honey, with options to buy more honey at a wholesale price. Harold’s Cabin has housed several bee colonies to help pollinate the vegetables in the rooftop garden.

“We need more bees in our world,” said Harold’s Cabin co-owner John Schumacher, “especially in urban areas. [Michael] has had five or six bee-hives spread around town and we were big proponents of local produce. We’ve always had rooftop gardens and it was just a natural fit. Whatever the bees produce, you know, there’s nothing like having something that’s produced on your own property that you’re able to use and utilize. It’s just a win-win scenario for everyone involved here.”

While bees help pollinate other crops and foods, they produce a food product themselves: honey, which has many culinary uses including as a sweetener in coffee or tea, an ingredient in baked goods or as condiments on sweet and savory dishes.

Honey is produced from the nectar foraging bees consumed (or collected) from pollinating flowers. Inside the stomach, a salivary enzyme breaks down the natural sugars of the nectar. Once the bee returns to the hive, the nectar is then regurgitated and digested by another bee to undergo another enzymatic breakdown. The process of regurgitation and ingestion is repeated several times before being stored in honey comb and covered in beeswax, later to be used for food in the winter.

“Honey is a complex array of sugars,” Powell said. “It’s a better sweetener than just regular old table sugar, which is really just one kind of sugar. I put it in my coffee every morning.”

According to Berdux and Becker, honey is also very much like wine. A honey’s color and flavor depends on the time of year, geography and type of nectar-producing flower, said Becker.

Berdux added, “There’s a term in the wine industry ‘terroir,’ that refers to the soil. The minerality of the soil really does have an impact on the flavor of the grapes, and that’s why you know, regions in which wine is grown, you can get really different flavors from those different places. And that’s certainly true with honey in that regard.”

Orange blossom honey, for example, has an orange hue with a citrus and acidic flavor on the backend, while the Van Morrison-favored Tupelo honey has an amber color with a buttery and floral flavor.

Wildflower honey, the most common honey, possesses different flavors, textures, scents and colors, depending on the region. Wildflower honey is classified as a polyfloral honey, meaning the nectar used to make the honey come from a variety of sources.

Apis sells tupelo, wildflower and orange blossom honey varietals in addition to flavor-infused honeys like hot, fermented garlic or bourbon barrel-aged.

Downtown restaurant and bar Harold’s Cabin mixes honey from its own rooftop beehive in cocktails and baked goods.

North of Charleston at R and R Acres, Bills uses the honey and honey by-products from her hives. Bills offers honeys infused with lavender, cinnamon and cocoa, creamed honeys, scorpion pepper-infused hot honey and more from the bees on the property.

Honey provides a myriad of health benefits. According to Powell, honey is a “very healthy product. It is produced naturally without any significant damage to the landscape.”

When honey comes into contact with moisture, Powell said, it forms a thin layer of hydrogen peroxide that can be used to treat wounds and creates a sterile environment. That reaction also soothes sore throats, heals diabetic wounds, improves digestive issues and reduces seasonal allergies. The idea, Berdux said, is that you’re consuming the natural pollen that’s affecting your allergies.

Bills said, “When my kids and I go out in the field, and we’re doing stuff and we get stung, or get a small cut, we just put honey on it. Like I’m not going inside just to take care of this. We know better. It’s fine.”

Honey is used to treat sea turtle wounds at the South Carolina Aquarium and some hospitals carry “medihoney,” a sterile honey used to create a “natural healing environment” because of that natural chemical reaction, according to Bills.

Bills, Becker, Berdux and Moore all agreed on one thing — beekeeping is about trial and error, so don’t be discouraged if you’re looking to pick up beekeeping as a hobby.

“We’ve had failures, we’ve had success with high yields and low yields. It just depends on the seasons and the weather,” Moore said. “But it’s still just very comforting.”

There are also many resources to get you started, including the Charleston Area Beekeeping Association (CABA). CABA is a local community that brings together novice and veteran beekeepers. The association provides resources and connects beekeepers in the region to learn and share information.

Bills herself also offers apiary education at R and R Acres. “You need to be patient and just look at them to see if you can figure out what they’re trying to do,” Bills said. “The joke I tell people often is, ‘it’s 100,000 women in one box. You’re not going to tell them what to do.’”

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There is something special about Charleston; imagine strolling along the beautiful cobblestone alleys or strolling the gas lamp-lit streets, or even touring the quaint mansions. Whether one is looking for a family vacation or a small romantic break, Charleston is a favorite vacation destination among avid travelers looking to experience the southern charm. Love birds can imagine boating its sublime rivers and waterways. While history and culture buffs can think of visiting its museums or art galleries. And food lovers can count on its restaurants that offer traditional local dishes in an innovative way.

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It goes without saying that autumn makes for a perfect time to explore this charming city, where seasoned travelers will get to see its landscapes come alive with a kaleidoscope of color. This is the time to sip a pumpkin latte and see bald cypress and maple trees turn red or orange. Apart from these pleasant discoveries, learn more about why Charleston is the perfect autumn city to travel to in the fall.

Why Travel To Charleston In The Fall?

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While most of the US states are already experiencing their fall season in mid-September, Charleston, on the other hand, has its fall a little late. Around the end of October and early November, Charleston’s temperature drops from 50 to 70 Fahrenheit. It’s the best time to see the changing foliage and enjoy the crisp fall air. And it is also a perfect time to visit several of its attractions and restaurants if one wants to skip the crowds, high humidity, and price.

Known for being an epicenter for historic buildings and graveyards, Charleston is an ideal holiday spot to enjoy the spooky season. From its century-old plantations to its landscaped gardens, there are so many attractions to visit during the fall.

Best Place To See The Foliage In Charleston

Visitors usually call Charleston the evergreen city since many of the trees remain mostly green. One might occasionally see some brown or yellow leaves while walking on the street. Just like Maine’s gorgeous Acadia National Park, Charleston has its fall in October, unlike Vermont or Massachusetts, where visitors normally see the riotous colors of autumn by mid-September. But there are some specific attractions where visitors will be able to feast their eyes on the vibrant fall leaves.

Often dubbed as America’s oldest garden, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens is the most recommended place to visit during fall in Charleston. The historic estate is beautifully tucked into the Ashley River, where many will get to marvel at the beautiful, well-manicured gardens filled with pansies, azaleas, snapdragons, and Sasanqua camellias. The attraction was once used as a rice plantation, whereby African slaves were brought here to work. Then later in the 19th century, the estate opened its doors to the public. Currently, the attraction is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Visitors who wish to learn more about this historic estate will be able to book guided tours, which normally include a visit to the plantation house, then there is the slavery to freedom tour, and the self-guided tour at the Audubon Swamp Garden. The whole tour of the estate can take around four to five hours.

Charleston Fall Festivals And Tours

Fall is usually a much-anticipated season in Charleston. It is when visitors and locals alike have the chance to enjoy the rampant fall decor across the city with some spooky touches such as pumpkins, spider webs, and skeletons. And during this time, there are many fall festivals and tours to look forward to.

For a family-friendly event, consider attending the largest fall festivals in the city at Boone Hall Pumpkin Patch, where many can celebrate the autumn tradition on the farm. There are plenty of fun things such as rock climbing, complimentary balloon art, a Halloween tractor tour, an 8-acre of corn maze, pony rides, exhibitions, and more

Celebrate the harvest festival at the sublime Mullet Hall Equestrian Center on Johns Island, bestowed by a magnificent landscape. Here, visitors will be able to bask in the wonderful views of the unspoiled meadows, equestrian barns, farm fields, and pine trees. The annual harvest festival occurs in November with lots of fun. Expect to listen to live bluegrass music, eat delicious food like the local barbecue, and of course, see lots of pumpkin decorations.

Wine lovers will also be able to attend the Charleston Fall Wine Festival in October at Charleston Harbor Cruise Terminal. This adult-only event will have a plethora of delicious wine, beer samples, and live music.

This Labor Day weekend is full of exciting concerts, dances and the outdoors. Check out the Lowcountry Jazz Festival, shag on Edisto, and enjoy concerts at Johns Island County Park and at The Joe to say goodbye to summer.

Toast Under the Oaks

Celebrate the end of summer under the oaks at Johns Island County Park. Enjoy live music and food trucks on Sept. 1 and 15 from 5-7 p.m. This week’s performer is Charleston local Grace Trice, and food is provided by Kees Kitchen and Mac Daddy. No outside food and drinks are allowed, but leashed dogs are; guests are encouraged to bring chairs and tables. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door.

To purchase tickets online, go to bit.ly/3wERBrU.

Lowcountry Jazz Festival

Come out to the Charleston Gaillard Center and listen to stellar jazz performances while helping raise money for a good cause. From Sept. 2-4, proceeds from the Jazz Festival will go to Closing the Gap in Health Care Inc. and the Thaddeus John Bell, M.D. Endowment Fund for students pursuing a career in health science. The festival starts with a white party on Sept. 2 at the Gaillard’s Center Grand Ballroom followed by two days of smooth jazz on Sept. 3-4. Performers include Robert Glasper, Norman Brown and Marcus Miller, among others.

Tickets for the festival start at $68 plus fees, and white party tickets must be purchased separately. To purchase tickets for the event, go to bit.ly/3Tuoodd.

Shag Festival

Shag the day away at the Edisto Beach Shag Festival. From Sept. 2-4 listen to some of the top beach bands, watch the best shaggers in the Southeast show off their skills, shop arts and craft vendors, get a shag lesson and more at Bay Creek Park on Edisto. Daily entrance costs $15, or you can get a weekend pass for $40.

To view the events happening each day as well as the hours, go to bit.ly/3AWzOzd. To purchase tickets online, visit bit.ly/3PYXyqr.

Labor Day concert

The city of Charleston is making up for it’s canceled Fourth of July celebration with a special free-to-attend Labor Day concert featuring the Charleston Symphony at Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park. Gates open at 6 p.m. Sept. 5, and the symphony starts at 8 p.m. Stick around after the music for food and a free fireworks show.

While the event is free, advanced reservations are needed. You can book them at bit.ly/3TpvijP.

Tuffy the Tiger

If you’re looking for a free family event, head over to the Flowertown Players the first Saturday of each month through February for Tuffy the Tiger. The live action puppet-based performances encourage positive life lessons through the use of the orange Tuffy the Tiger.

The performances are 30 minutes; afterward, children can make their own puppets and have a chance to meet Tuffy. Showtime is at 11 a.m. and reservations can be made at flowertownplayers.org/services-4.