June 13, 2013
Island Moon
Island Living
Five Creative Ways to Use Containers in Your Landscape by Melinda Myers Container gardens have long been used to add a spot of color by a front entrance or expand planting space in city lots, balconies and decks. Don’t let past experience and tradition limit your vision. Try one or more of these attractive, fun and functional ways to include containers in your landscape, large or small.
harvesting herbs as easy as reaching out the window or backdoor. Plus, guests will have fun harvesting their own fresh mint for mojitos or greens for their salads. Define outdoor living spaces within your landscape. Use containers as walls and dividers to separate entertaining and play areas from quiet reflective spaces. And consider using pots with built in casters or set them on moveable saucers to make moving these pots easier. This way you can expand and shrink individual spaces as needed simply by moving the pots.
Create a privacy screen or mask a bad view. Use an arbor or other support for hanging baskets and then place a few containers below for an attractive screen. Or create a garden of containers to provide seasonal interest using a variety of plants. Use trees, shrubs, and ornamental grasses for height. Save money by purchasing smaller plants. Elevate these on overturned pots for added height and impact. Mask the mechanics by wrapping the pots in burlap. Then add a few colorful self-watering pots in the foreground for added color and beauty. Fill these with annuals or perennials for additional seasonal interest.
Create your own vacation paradise. Use planters filled with cannas, bananas, palms and New Zealand flax for a more tropical flare. Add some wicker furniture to complete the scene. Or fill vertical gardens, an old child’s wagon, metal colander or wooden and concrete planters with cacti and succulents. Add some old branches and large stones. You’ll feel as though you’ve hiked into the desert.
Bring the garden right to your back door for ease of harvest and added entertainment. A self-watering patio planter, windowbox, or rail planter reduces maintenance and makes
All you need is a bit of space and creativity to find fun new ways to put containers to work for you in the garden this season.
Yard of the Month The Island Gardeners awarded yard of the month for June to Cynthia and Roy Riewe at 15330 Gypsy. They have a knack for placement of plants according to height and color which is very pleasing to the eye. Many of their plants provide happy memories of relatives who donated to their collection. Please do yourself a favor and drive by this beautiful landscape which is truly an explosion of color! This yard was recommended by a neighbor. Do you have a neighbor deserving of this award? Please call Island Gardener Dianne Gimpel @ 949-7684
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The Best Plate Lunch in Texas
Editor’s note: This story is included in a book published by the Port Aransas Preservation and Historical Association called “Hard Heads and Half Gales – Tales from Tarpon, Texas” by Jim Wiggins. It is available at the Port Aransas Museum. By Jim Wiggins,
Add vertical interest to any garden or garden space. Select a large attractive container filled with tall plants like papyrus and canna. Or elevate a small pot on steppers or an overturned pot for added height. Create height with smaller pots and plants by strategically stacking and planting them into a creative planting. Try setting any of these planters right in the garden to create a dramatic focal point.
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You wouldn’t call Roy Turnbull loveable, if for no other reason than the fact that he was big enough to make you choose your words more carefully. When I first knew him he owned and operated the Island Food Store at Port Aransas, and he ran it in the same cavalier fashion that a nobleman might run his fiefdom in medieval England. While the quality of his groceries was high, so were his prices, and I suspected that he priced his goods just below the figure which would encourage a shopper to take the ferry and make the fifteen mile round trip to Aransas Pass and back with cheaper goods. But then, he only had three months in which to make a living, that being the tourist season there. He had a gruff manner, rarely smiled and was a terror to hippie types. This included a rather large percentage of the young people on the Island because Port Aransas just seems to bring out the worst grooming in some of the best people in the world who vacationed there. The uniform of the day varied from gross to raunchy, nearly always clean but almost never neat nor orderly. The sign across the door of the café which he ran in conjunction with the grocery story was crystal clear in its meaning. If somewhat garbled in its construction. In large capital letters it stated: WET SUITS – HAIR NOT COMBED – NO SHIRTS – NO SERVICE. Roy was close by to enforce the rule. Once inside, however, you got the beast plate lunch in Texas for $1.25. his café food was outstanding and he had a bakery which supplied both the café and the store with marvelous bread and pastry. I still place his pecan coffee cake at the top of every bakery item I have ever sampled. He had never had a complete monopoly, although for a while in the sixties he had it pretty much to himself. I held him in high regard from the first night we met, when I bought hot dogs and marshmallows for a beach cookout and ended up with his lending me a grill, a pan, and a long fork. Later when we were building our house on the street behind his store we tied in to his electric outlets for our power tools, used his water and his bathrooms, while he handled our personal calls on the business telephone. It came as no surprise to me to learn much later that he was always the one who came to the financial rescue of most any worthy local project. “Well, how much do you need this time?” he was likely to say in a manner designed to terrify the timid. When the figure
was named, he met it. But such surreptitious philanthropies went unnoticed by most of the people at the port as Roy continued to cash checks, charge food, and close on Tuesday. Then came Hurricane Celia. I had seen Roy weather a previous storm in a very novel way. Having been through Carla, when Beulah threatened, Roy boarded up his store, put a sign on the door saying he would be closed until after the hurricane, then stationed himself on the front steps of his store with a bottle and waited to defy the big blow. That one may have been afraid to face him head on. It blew out most of its fury with monumental rains in the Rio Grande Valley. Not a scant two years later, the threat was back and this one was real. Hurricane Celia moved directly across Port Aransas, smashing everything in its path. It was the most destructive, the most powerful, and the most expensive storm in the history of our area. The city, the port area, residential section, boats, and boat docks, were virtually destroyed. To my knowledge, there was not a structure in the city which escaped damage. Roy’s Island Food Store and the Café were a shambles. There was no electricity, so large quantities of frozen foods were in danger of spoiling. Water had to be boiled. Roof repairs had to be made quickly, front steps replaced, porch repaired, and people had to be fed. Roy begged, pleaded, cajoled and maybe threatened the Army, which was on hand to prevent chaos, until they gave him the generator which allowed his store to get power. Roy affected the necessary repairs and went to work cooking up food for the workers, Corps of Engineers people, Army folk and absentee property owners who flocked to the Island. The storm hit on August 3rd. On August 5th I surveyed the damage to my property, and on August 9th I returned with a truck and supplies. I also brought water, fresh food and paper plates, but I needn’t have bothered Roy Turnbull’s people, working day and night under the benevolent scowl of the big bear himself, were turning out the best plate lunch in Texas for thirty-five cents. He fed the town ‘till it got back on its feet.