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A garden of golf clubs in Palm Harbor

Ron Wicks of Palm Harbor has lived around golf for many years, giving lessons and building custom clubs for pro players. He’s retired now, but he still makes a few extra dollars by selling clubs on the lawn in front of his house on Nebraska Avenue.

Tags: Add new tag, golf, Palm Harbor

Old Town Cafe in Old Palm Harbor

Old Town Cafe in Old Palm Harbor

We’ve written a fair amount about Old Palm Harbor, the historical section of Palm Harbor in the Florida Avenue area of town, near Alternate 19. It was the site of the recent Palm Harbor Citrus Festival, and it hosts a number of street fairs and art shows throughout the year.

One place we like there is the Old Town Cafe, which is at 1019 Florida Ave. This is a very casual and laid-back place that invites lingering over a cup of coffee or a beer, maybe some gelato or a light lunch.

Owner Dan Kauffman has put together a very nice ambiance at Old Town Cafe, with an outside deck and an inviting interior. They serve Baby’s Coffee from Key West, and while the are open until 9 p.m. ( 4 p.m. on weekends), the food is more breakfast and lunch — paninis, bagels and croissants for breakfast, sandwiches, salads, paninis and Cuban sandwiches for lunch and dinner.

Dan at Old Town Cafe

If you care about the environment, Old Town Cafe lets you know theycare, too — cups, straws and bags are made of corn, to-go boxes are made of sugar cane.

This is the kind of place where you take your morning newspaper and then linger over a good cup of coffee and a light meal. Take your time and enjoy — no one will rush you here.

Tags: old town cafe, Palm Harbor

Mystic Fish in Palm Harbor wins award

Mystic Fish

One of our favorite local restaurants, Mystic Fish on Tampa Road in Palm Harbor, has won Best Overall and Best Use of Ingredient at the All Childrens Iron Chef Challenge at the Renaissance Hotel Tampa. It’s the second year in a row that Mystic Fish has won that honor. The winning dish was Steamed Maine Lobster with Spicy Slaw and orange -Apricot Curry Sauce and Togorashi Shrimp with Orange Marmalade brushed Bacon and Blood Orange Sabayon.

To learn more, go to their website — www.3bestchefs.com/mystic. To see our review of Mystic Fish, look over to the right of this page and click on “restaurant reviews” under “Local Resources.”

Tags: Add new tag, Palm Harbor, restaurants

Showing the Palm Harbor Library colors

Palm Harbor library

Here in Palm Harbor, we are pretty proud of our library.
Palm Harbor is in an unincorporated part of Pinellas County. That means there are no local funds available for such things as libraries. But we make due with funding from the county, and we find other sources of funding when we need them.
Case in point; a few years ago there was a lot of support for upgrades and modernizations for the library.  So library supporters got together and found more than a million dollars for a library upgrade project — $500,000 from the state, $247,500 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, $500,000 in local matching funds and $100,000 that was raised by the Friends of the Library.
The result was an upgraded parking lot, a new community room and new restrooms, as well as a much-improved teen room. There is also several new study rooms and a new conference room.
While other libraries in the county (and elsewhere) are cutting back and trying to figure out how to keep the doors open, the Palm Harbor Library is going strong.
Several library workers and supporters were on hand at the Palm Harbor Citrus Festival this weekend just to “show the colors” and make sure people in the community remember that their library is an important community resource.

Tags: citrus festival, library, Palm Harbor

Palm Harbor Citrus Festival

We just got back from spending a little time at the Palm Harbor Citrus Festival, the latest effort to pump up the Old Palm Harbor downtown section, located right off Alt. 19.

This is the first year of the Citrus Festival, which celebrates Palm Harbor’s history as a major citrus growing region.  Actually, that history doesen’t really hark back that far — Palm Harbor was still hosting large tracts of citrus growing land right up through the 1970s and 1980s. Earlier than that, citrus fruit is what built and sustained  this northern part of Pinellas County.

We got to the Festival a bit early on Saturday morning, so there weren’t too many people milling around. But exhibitors were setting up their booths, and carnival workers  were just showing up to get their rides going. There were a number of food booths, including one interesting-looking barbecue outfit that just might draw me back there at mid-day for lunch.

The Downtown Palm Harbor merchants really do a good job of trying to pump up their region. They do a great and very well-know arts show arounf the holiday season, and the annual Taste of Palm Harbor event is very popular. They even sponsor an annual motorcycle event.

You can see more pictures of the Citrus Festival at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bethfrederick/sets/72157617209915435/

Tags: citrus festival, downtown, Palm Harbor

Palm Harbor won’t incorporate

We’ve written here about the effort by some in Palm Harbor to incorporate their town.  But now it looks like that won’t happen, at least this year.

Some people are surprised to learn that Palm Harbor remains an unincorporated township.  There are now around 60,000 residents in Palm Harbor, big enough for most towns to have been incorporated long ago.  But Palm Harbor has been growing like crazy for the past 20 years or so — before that it was mostly a series of orange groves.

A group called the Palm Harbor Coalition has been pushing incorporation, something that has to be approved by the state Legislature.  Two bills were working their way through the Legislature this year, but leaders of the Palm Harbor Coalition said there were some problems with wording in the bills, so they decieded to pulll them from consideration this year with hopes of ironing out the problems and re-introducing bills in Tallahasssee next year.

The Palm Harbor Coalition says that Palm Harbor can be incorporated without any increase in taxes.  Opponents say they don’t agree with that asssessment.

Tags: government, Palm Harbor

Jacarandas add color to Pinellas County

If you’re not from around these parts but you come to visit in the spring, you may be surprised at the bright blue trees that can be found all over Pinellas County.

Jacaranda tree

The bright purplish-blue flowers give an almost electric coloration to the trees, and when the leaves drop (after about eight weeks) they create a royal-blue carpet on the green grass. Just gorgeous.

These are jacaranda trees, and they add a beautiful splash of color that announces the coming of spring.

Florida has lost of non-indiginous plants (and animals, too) that the state would like to get rid of, but the jacarandas are more welcome, even though they are not native to Florida.

There are more than 50 types of jacarandas, but most of the ones you see in Florida come from the Amazon river valley area of South America.

Tags: North Pinellas County, Palm Harbor

One of the oldest cemeteries in Pinellas County

Kids can be pretty hard to figure.

Take my granddaughter, Caitlyn.  She is eight years old and in the second grade. Now, you’d think a young girl like that would have plenty of fears — the dark, or things that go bump in the night.

Caitlyn reads the inscription on a gravestone

So where do you think she’s been pestering us to take her?  To a cemetery.

We haven’t really been able to figure out where this cemetery thing came from, but she’s really fascinated. So this past weekend her grandfather decided to take her on a field trip.

Since I had written recently about Curlew Methodist Church, that’s where they went — Curlew Methodist has one of the oldest graveyards around here, and there are quite a few gravestones that date back to the 1880s.

Caitlyn loved it.  She enjoyed reading all the inscriptions, and she liked learning about the people who were buried there.  She decided that the Jones family must have been pretty big around here, because so many of them had headstones in the cemetery. And she liked reciting some of the short poems she found on some of the stones.

She wasn’t scared at all.

“The ghosts are only around at night, anyway,” she said.

Caitlyn said she was going to tell all about her cemetery adventure at the next Show and Tell at her school.

Tags: Add new tag, cemeteries, churches, history, north pinellas, Palm Harbor

Palm Harbor may incorporate

If you don’t live in Palm Harbor (or at least in North Pinellas County), you may not know this, but Palm Harbor is not an incorporated town, even though it is pretty much built out and is home to around 60,000 people.

All of its services – police, fire, public works and so forth – are provided by the county. It has always been that way.

Palm Harbor has a small historic district

But maybe not for too much longer.  

Bills have been filed in the state legislature that would allow Palm Harbor residents to vote on whether they want their community to become an actual town. If that ever happens, Palm Harbor will become Pinellas County’s 25 incorporated community.

As you might imagine, some residents think incorporation would be a fine idea. Others, of course, feel otherwise. At least some of those who like the idea are represented by the Palm Harbor Coalition. Some people who don’t think it’s a great idea are represented by the Crystal Beach Community Association.

Supporters generally feel that a new town government would be more responsive to the people who live here. Many opponents say they think taxes will go up if Palm Harbor incorporates.

Whether you like the idea or hate it, the people of Palm Harbor will ultimately make the decision. The measure will go on the 2010 ballot if the legislature passes the enabling legislation. And before the legislature can do that, it has to conduct a feasibility study to see if it makes sense fiscally to make Palm Harbor a real, official town or city.

Tags: city, incorporate, Palm Harbor, pinellas county, town

St. Paddy’s Day in Palm Harbor

One thing you have to say about Downtown Palm Harbor — for a small downtown area, it seems as though there’s always something going on there.

I went there early in the morning on Saturday to just get a few photos to go with the previous post. When I got there, Florida Avenue was roped off. Hmmmm, I thought — what could this be?

Turns out it was sort of a mini-celebration. Peggy O’Neill’s, the Irish pub, was about to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

St. Patrick's Day vendor

The interesting thing about Downtown Palm Harbor is they are always doing something fun that draws people to the area. This weekend its St. Patrick’s Day. Next weekend there is an arts and crafts display. After Thanksgiving there is a really big art program, and on another weekend there is a big motorcycle event.

There aren’t a lot of merchants in Downtown Palm Harbor, but they go the extra mile to make their neighborhood fun.

Tags: Add new tag, Palm Harbor, St. Patrick's Day