Garden Competition – Best Large, Small and Wildlife Friendly Categories

We at Letterkenny Tidy Towns are running a garden competition from 20th of July to 31st August with three categories.

Because the Cleaner Community Campaign had to be cancelled this year due to Covid 19 restrictions Letterkenny Tidy Towns are delighted to run a garden competition for the Best Large Garden, Best Small Garden and Best Wildlife Friendly Garden categories. Each category is dedicated to previous Tidy Town members.  See below for details of the categories.

The competition will run from 20th July to 31st of August where the entries will be judged and each category winner will receive a trophy and an Alcorns Gift Voucher. Please note that we can only accept entries from Letterkenny and the surrounding townlands.

If you would like to showcase your garden this summer and be in with a chance of winning one of these great prizes, please send a maximum of 5 photos per garden category via email including your name and contact number to lktidy@gmail.com or via post to
The Secretary,
Letterkenny Tidy Towns,
Magees Pharmacy,
Letterkenny
Co Donegal.

Closing date for entries is August 31st.

The Large Garden competition is known as the Sean Higgins Memorial Award. Adjudication will cover planting, colour including shrubs, grassy areas and flower borders encouraging wild life.

Your garden doesn’t need to be as large or as elaborate as this one at Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam! It just needs to be an average or larger sized Letterkenny garden to qualify.

The Small Garden competition is known as the Charles and Rose Devlin Memorial Award. Adjudication will cover planting, colour including shrubs, grassy areas, and flower borders encouraging wild life.


The Wildlife-friendly Garden competition is known as the May McClintock Memorial Award, sponsored by An Taisce. For examples of what we might be looking for in this category, see the biodiversity section of our website.

This category is all about encouraging natural growth to help out the pollinators and give wildlife a home.

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Keep It Local, Keep It Beautiful Competition Winners – Best Clean Up Category

We asked members of the public to send us photos of an area they had helped to keep beautiful.

It was a very close-run thing, but we picked Lewis as the winner of this category, for his efforts with his daughter to clean up a stretch of beach at Crohy Head near Dungloe. The reason we picked this particular photograph was because it shows a young volunteer getting stuck in to what is clearly a very demanding task.

Lewis’ other pictures show a job well done.

Congratulations and well done to the other entrants.

Elaine did a clean up of a beach on Arranmore, removing 15 bags of rubbish and filling half a trailer. She believes some of that litter had been there for years, particularly the plastic, and now brings down a bag every time she visits so that it never gets that bad again.

Debdeep regularly walks through LYIT campus, and will often pick up any cans, bottles and cups that have been discarded, as ‘a gesture of respect that I can give back to mother nature, my university, and maybe to the incredible city of Letterkenny’.

Aoife and her friend regularly pick up litter on their walking route in the woodlands between Gortnacorrib and Kirkstown, clearing up discarded takeaway wrappers, drink cans and whatever else people have discarded.

Muckish from Kirkstown

Karen spent two hours cleaning up her neighbourhood, then went for a well deserved swim.

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The Flowering Of Church Lane – by Donnan Harvey

 

The mission statement of Letterkenny Cathedral Quarter is to regenerate the historic Church Lane street and surrounding areas to create a vibrant Historic Cultural Quarter in the heart of Letterkenny. Our Cathedral Quarter committee is only small in number and we would not have been able to achieve our goals without the support and assistance of other groups in the town.

Letterkenny Tidy Towns have played a substantial role in assisting us to make the Church Lane street as attractive as possible. One way we have done this is through installing flower boxes all along with Lane and this is an excellent example of how different Community groups can work together on the one project. The Tidy Towns have sponsored the flowers while Letterkenny’s Men Shed made the wooden boxes, which we put the flowers into.

No. 2 Church Lane

It is a really big day when the flowers land in the Cathedral Quarter and it is a true sign that summer is with us. The flowers are expertly prepared in the greenhouses of Alcorns Garden Centre and were really blooming when they arrived with us. It takes us a few days to put all the flowers out on the Lane, first putting the boxes on the window sills at ground level and on the second day, we erected the boxes on the first floor level.

Helpers
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As part of the historic towns Initiative, hooks were installed on the window ravels and so when the flower boxes were installed, we tied wire across them so they were secured. With each year, the flower arrangement gets brighter and bigger and Charlie Grant from Tidy Towns has been absolutely brilliant in arranging this transition. Charlie has planned that we will grow wild flowers on the coping of the stone walls that surrounds Grieve fields so the Church Lane will continue to be very colourful over the next few years.

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To ensure the flowers remain vibrant all summer long, they must be continuously watered and here again, tidy towns have really helped out the Cathedral Quarter so this can be done. A watering machine was purchased so I didn’t have to go up a ladder to water the flowers that were up on a height. Similarly, they installed a Water Harvesting System at the back of No.3 Church Lane so the rainwater is collected and is used for watering the flowers.

It was really unfortunate that the National Tidy Competition is not happening this summer because no doubt the judges would be very impressed by the flower arrangement and all the work done under the Historic Towns Initiative. What is more impressive that the flowers themselves is the co-operation between Cathedral Quarter and the Tidy Towns in making this happen. It illustrates what happen when two organisations come together work on a project and the leadership shown by Letterkenny Tidy Towns is an example to all other Tidy Towns organisations across the country.

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Tidying Our Own Neighbourhood

My wife Morag and I moved to Letterkenny in spring of 2019, and love living in Lisnennan, on the edge of Letterkenny. As the winter began to fade away and the undergrowth pared itself back, we began to notice that our road was getting increasingly littered. In part, this was new litter being dropped, whether out of car windows, blown from bins on windy days or maybe just blown from elsewhere in town. It was particularly bad around the bottom end of the Lisnennan hill, around the Educate Together School and up the steep part of the hill. Therefore, we decided to do something about it. With the help of Gerard Mc Cormick of Tidy Towns, and also with the support of the council’s litter warden, we received our litter picking kits, namely gloves, bags, and a few of these nifty litter grabbers.

Litter on the verge and hanging from the fence beforehand.
Lisnennan After
Spick and span afterwards.

By the time we had worked our way home, we had collected 13 bags. The council litter warden turned up the next morning to remove the bags.

Lisnenan Bags

We put the word out on our local residents’ WhatsApp group, letting them know what we were planning, and several of them agreed to help out. This was pre social distancing, but even now, it could still be done as a community effort if everyone keeps apart and picks their own patch to concentrate on. Anyway, one morning in early March we were ready to go. In typical Donegal style, the weather was sunny, rainy and windy, cold and warm, often all 5 at the same time. We decided to start from the bottom of the hill and work our way up. Because it had not been done for a while, there was a lot to pick up, but we worked our way up the hill, getting lots of friendly waves from motorists along the way, and one new friend who turned up with bags and a picker of his own and joined in.

Because there had been quite a lot of litter, we hadn’t completed the job on the first day, so we went back a week later to complete the area around the Educate Together School. We gathered another 5 bags, which the litter warden kindly took away for us.

In the 2 months since then we have monitored the area, and have done 3 more litter picks. However, thanks to the initial clean-up, a litter pick now doesn’t take much longer than it would take to do a normal walk up and down the hill, and we would only need to take 1 or 2 bags. It’s heartening to see that the area, while certainly not spotless, is not getting anything like as untidy as it was initially, and it gives us great satisfaction to know that we’re doing our bit to keep the area beautiful.

So what changes have we noticed over the last 2 months? Well at the start of March, the main litter items were cans (particularly Red Bull), takeaway containers, water bottles and coffee cups. Now that we’re into lockdown, there are still plenty of cans but the coffee cups and water bottles have been replaced by disposable gloves and disinfectant wipes!  However, the main thing is there is a lot less litter there now, and long may it remain so.

To find out how you can help to keep your area tidy, see Do your own litter patrol

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Pollinator Planting

It is the intention of the Tidy Towns team to integrate pollinator plants such as Blazing Glory into hanging basket and Salvia in container plant boxes in and around the Market Square, this will be of great interest to our bee population.

Consultation on future of Market Square in Letterkenny this week ...

Wild Flower Meadow

Also, plans are underfoot for a wild flower meadow in Sentry Hill.  This will be developed in partnership with the Tidy Towns CES Scheme and Donegal Co. Council over a 3-5 year period.

Also, Letterkenny parks section is looking at a similar wild flower project for the Ballymacool Park to begin in the Autumn of this year in the upper area of the park. The Tidy Towns team representatives are to meet with the gardening staff of Oakfield Park to learn from their experience of the trials and errors involved when establishing the wild flower meadow in their parkland gardens.

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