The City of Edinburg and Craft Cultural are teaming up and excited to announce Edinburg’s first Spoken Word Poetry Festival, Untamed Tongues: Poets Sin Fronteras. This poetry festival celebrates the Mexican American culture on the South Texas borderlands. The culture explores the past, present, and future through the art of storytelling.
McAllen’s Fiesta De Palmas, taking place on October 22-24, is proud to announce the largest environmental educational festival called Eco-Rio happening inside the McAllen Convention Center during the cultural festival. Eco-Rio is designed to help build student STEAM skills (Science-Technology-Engineering-Art-Math) and environmental leadership. Eco-Rio is open on Saturday and Sunday from 12 noon to 7 p.m. Stay late for the Laser Spectacular and Firework Fiesta at 8 p.m. nightly and music, food, and tons of entertainment at Fiesta De Palmas.
Welcome back Winter Texans. The Deep South Texas Master Gardeners will be holding its fall plants sale on October 23 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. The event will take place at the educational garden located at 509 E. Earling Rd. in San Juan.
There will be a large variety of landscaping and house plants, cactus, succulents, Texas superstars, and native plants for sale. There will also be fruit trees such as fig, pink and white guava, and of course, banana as well as some native trees. There will be decorative trees including Jacaranda, Flamboyant, Kapok and Moringa available.
The 15th Annual Empty Bowls Luncheon and Silent Auction will take place from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on October 26, at Bert Ogden Arena in Edinburg.
This year’s Empty Bowls Luncheon and Silent Auction will benefit the Food Bank RGV’s 1,000,000-holiday meal campaign, which will ensure that RGV families have healthy and complete meals on the table this season. Food Bank RGV’s signature fundraising event features food from over 30 local restaurants, music, silent auctions, and raffles. Restaurants wishing to participate in and support Empty Bowls may still sign-up.
Quinta Mazatlán will celebrate Texas Native Plant Week on Thursday, October 21st, from 5 p.m.-7 p.m. Join us for an opportunity to learn, appreciate, and cultivate native plants with a Presentation by John Brush and Plant Sale by Mike Heep.
In 2009 Texas Legislature officially designated the third week of October as Texas Native Plant Week in efforts to conserve and recognize the importance of native plants and their role in the environment. A native plant is one that has “developed over a period of time (hundreds or thousands of years) in a particular region or ecosystem.” Native plants have adapted to survive their environment and developed mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships with the local wildlife. Native plants have the potential to offer ecological services that benefit humans, animals, and even the landscape itself. Native plants attract a diversity of wildlife, support a healthy and more sustainable ecosystem, require less water, reduce strain on local water supply, add aesthetic beauty, and give character and a sense of place to a region. The more we know and understand our native plants the better we can help our environment.
It didn’t take long for Larry Riesselman and I to strike up a conversation. After all, we were on a golf course and, as everyone knows, other than swinging, and looking for your ball, the time is spent telling tales and reminiscing about days gone by.
I happened to run into Larry, his wife Pat and Steve Glass on Palm View Golf Course in McAllen. Larry has been golfing since he was in his 20s and, well, since he’s a Winter Texan (who lives here 6.5 months a year now while back in Minnesota for 5.5 months), that means he’s done a lot of swinging (he has two holes-in-one!), a lot of looking for golf balls and a ton of conversing on the courses.
Welcome home! We have missed you. Let us hope and pray that the Canadian-US border will be open when our Canadian friends are ready to journey to Sunny South Texas. And has it ever been sunny this summer. Temperatures during the summer months never rose above the hundred mark most of the time staying in the low to mid ninety range. We have not had much rain but when it did rain it seemed to come all at the wrong time for our farmers - raining when it was time to harvest the grain and dumping just enough to interfere with cotton picking - even damaging the cotton bolls that were ready to be picked.