We at Letterkenny Tidy Towns ran the 35th Annual Cleaner Community Garden Competition from 4th of July to 31st August 2021 with three categories.
We were delighted to run this 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 ran from 4th July to 31st of August2021. The entries will now 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.)
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.
Last year’s ‘Large Garden’ winner from Anne and Charlie.
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.
Last year’s ‘Small Garden’ winner from Breege.
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.
Last year’s ‘Wildlife Friendly Garden’ winner from Bronwyn. This category is all about encouraging natural growth to help out the pollinators and give wildlife a home.
The following article appeared in the Letterkenny Leader on June 3rd.
It’s great to see the Leader back after these months of lockdown, and here’s hoping that the gradual opening up of society continues onwards and upwards without any major setbacks! Not surprisingly, the lockdown has impacted Tidy Towns in a number of ways, but we have still been active as much as possible. So what have we been up to?
Perhaps the most visible activity is the litter picks. We haven’t been able to meet up, but Neil, our coordinator, has done a sterling job of keeping all our volunteers (who now number more than 50!) equipped to go out in their own family groups / bubbles and clear litter from their local areas. Looking around the town, there’s a real visible improvement, with special kudos going to John Wilkie who almost single-handedly cleaned up the dual carriageway. Quite the mammoth task, and it’s looking so much better! In the coming months, we hope to be able to get back to the Sunday morning meet-ups in the Market Square, and will also be encouraging community groups to “Adopt a road”. That is, a residents’ association would organise a litter pick of their own area with equipment provided by the council, along with assistance to remove bin bags afterwards. Get in touch with us if you would like to know more about this, at lktidy@gmail.com.
Our new volunteers from Writer’s Square set out on a litter pick.
In addition, there have been a number of local projects, mostly co-ordinated by Tidy Towns stalwart Charlie Grant. For example, there was a clean-up of an overgrown area on Long Lane, and there were also clean-ups at the Famine garden and by the Mart. One project which gained a lot of attention was at Roger’s Burn, which is a very fondly remembered site by many people from their Letterkenny childhoods. Here, our volunteers repaired a wooden handrail to make the site more easily accessible. Having visited there myself for the first time recently, I can say it’s a beautiful spot and anything which makes it easier to visit is to be welcomed.
Janus and Neily work on the handrail at Roger’s Burn.
Charlie has also been working with Transition Year students at Errigal college to set up a polytunnel, for use as a resource for both students and the community. In addition, he worked with the TY students to provide flower boxes for the Cathedral Quarter.
In the coming months we will be focussing on sustainability, with emphasis on biodiversity. There are numerous biodiversity sites around the town (Roger’s Burn being a prime example), and we will be working to keep these in good condition and provide information on how people can keep their own areas biodiverse. Other areas of focus will be on cutting down household waste, and in particular food waste, in which areas we will be providing information in the coming months.
Finally for this month, our “Flight of the bee” Mural trail continues to develop. After delays due to Covid restrictions, Karl Porter has been back in action in recent weeks, with the mural at the Jim McCormick Memorial Garden taking shape. The idea of the mural trail is to create a walking route which highlights the importance of bees in the preservation of ecological balance and biodiversity in nature. It is hoped that an app will be created to highlight the trail and to link in with other local attractions such as the Cathedral Quarter and the other murals around the town, thus providing another good reason for people to come and visit our town.
The new mural at the Jim McCormick Memorial Garden.
The following article appeared in the ‘Tidy Times’ column of the Letterkenny Leader at the start of August.
Hello and welcome to the new regular feature, which I will be writing on behalf of Letterkenny Tidy Towns. Each month I’ll cover some of the things which the Tidy Towns volunteers do, and how you can help out.
This month I will try to answer the question “What exactly do Letterkenny Tidy Towns do?” You may be surprised at the breadth of our initiatives – it’s not just about litter – and I will go into more detail on some of these in future editions of the Letterkenny Leader.
The Letterkenny Tidy Towns team is a group of volunteers whose goal is to greatly improve our sense of community, quality of people’s lives and our local environment.
We believe environmental improvement is a vital part of economic generation. We work hard to make Letterkenny look great – a place where people want to live and visit. So how do we go about it?
Firstly, we represent Letterkenny in the national Tidy Towns Competition. This is not happening this year, but the efforts involved in preparing the town for the competition are all about improving the local environment, and will thus continue.
In a normal year, there would be regular Sunday litter picks, including the ‘adopt a road’ scheme. These are on hold for now, but people all over the town are taking it upon themselves to clean up their own areas, and we help to facilitate this by providing litter grabbers, High Vis jackets, gloves, bags and so on, as well as getting involved ourselves, of course. The Council, with help from Glenard Plant, do a great job of keeping the town clean but they can’t be everywhere, so every piece of litter lifted by a member of the public helps to keep our town beautiful.
{NOTE – since the article went to press, we did get the Sunday litter picks going again, and were delighted by the number of new volunteers who came along (a 7-fold increase of participants compared to this time last year! Thanks so much to all of you). The litter picks are now wound down for the winter and for the level 5 lockdown, however several of us will continue to do individual litter picks, and bags, gloves etc can be provided to anyone else who wishes to clean their local area.}
A fine turn out for a recent Sunday litter pick
The Tidy Towns Committee helps to co-ordinate the work done by the Community Employment Scheme, typically involving weeding, hedge trimming, planting flowerbeds and placing flower boxes.
The Tidy Towns committee is working to encourage biodiversity. See next month’s article for more on this!
The Tidy Towns committee liaises with residents associations, community groups such as Letterkenny Cathedral Quarter, local businesses and the council to highlight the work that needs to be done and to determine the best way to do it. A part of this is the annual Cleaner Community Campaign, where Tidy Towns works with residents associations to facilitate local clean-ups, and local environmental initiatives.
Flower boxes are placed around the town by Tidy Towns
As you will have gathered from the above, some of our ‘normal’ work has been put on hold due to the strange times we’re living in, but we are still very much involved in smaller scale projects, and in encouraging members of the public to get going with their own projects. As an added incentive, we are currently running a garden competition with three categories – small garden, large garden and wildlife encouraging garden. For more details, see our website or our Facebook page.
There are several other ongoing projects, such as cleaning up the Sentry Hill area and looking into improving the murals in Lower Main Street, along with informal litter picks being done by individuals.
For the last few weeks, our Sunday litter picks have been back up and running. It’s difficult to predict what will happen in future as we go through the various levels of Covid 19 restrictions, but as long as we are able to do so, we will carry on meeting up at 10.30am at Market Square each week. The number of volunteers tends to range between 4 and 10. Neil, the coordinator, then designates areas for people to take care of, and typically it will be 2 people working a particular area, with 1 on each side of the road. So even in the strictest of lockdown conditions, we hope to be able to keep going, but we shall have to see what the future brings!
Neil organises the volunteers
But enough of this Covid talk, what do the Sunday volunteers get out of it? Annalisa joined us shortly after the Sunday picks restarted, and has become a regular, focusing mostly on Ballyraine and Kiltoy. “I first joined the Letterkenny Tidy Town’s Sunday Litter Pick about six weeks ago after I spotted one of their volunteers out one day and it made me think, what can I do to help? I enjoy walking about the town but it’s always disappointing at times to see so much litter.” Annalisa mentioned a certain energy drink which shall remain nameless, and how she wished it would give the drinkers the energy to find a bin. Couldn’t have put it better myself!
“So, for the hour of your time when you join the Sunday litter picks, you get a great feeling of accomplishment knowing you’re helping the environment and contributing to the community we are fortunate enough to be a part of. I would recommend anyone thinking about becoming a volunteer to just do it! Everyone is lovely, there’s no pressure, and if it’s one hour a year or one hour a week you’re able to give, every little bit helps.”
A typical scene which greets the volunteers. This lot was picked on a short stretch of Lisnennan Hill.
Neil, the coordinator, has been delighted with the growing attendance over the last few weeks, and has been busy planning areas to be covered. In short, there are more areas needing to be cleaned than we currently have volunteers, but we do the best we can with the people available to us, and in the longer term we hope to get estate residents to adopt their own neighbourhoods. Meantime, the areas being covered include Ballyraine, Kiltoy, Lisnennan, Mountain Top, Gortlee, Glencar, Old Town and of course the town centre. Most of these areas are places which the council’s contractors, Glenard Plant, can’t get to very often due to time/resource cconstraints. I hope you have noticed improvements in at least some of these areas, and if you’re looking at an area and thinking ‘hmm that could do with a bit of clean’, then please do get involved. All are welcome!
We also realise that there may be people who would very much like to get involved, but for whom Sunday morning just doesn’t work – maybe you have other commitments or maybe you’d just rather be relaxing on a Sunday morning! We totally understand, and several of our committee members are in total agreement with you. If that sounds like you, but you would still like to get involved, then we can offer help with bags, gloves, high vis jackets and litter grabbers. Either call in on Neil at the Market Square on a Sunday morning, get your stuff and be on your way, or you can get in touch with Gerard McCormick at Magees Pharmacy. Full details are on our website – https://www.letterkennytidytowns.com/volunteer, or message us on our Facebook page.
The above article appeared in the Letterkenny Leader on Oct 1st 2020.
Our 2020 Tidy Towns Garden Competition had a very high standard of entry, and it was a very tough decision to pick winners for the three categories. But decisions had to be made nonetheless, and I hope you will agree that all 3 were very worthy winners! Thanks again to all who entered, you are all doing the town, and yourselves, proud.
The May McClintock Wildlife Friendly Category
This went to Bronwyn of Foxhills. The judge was glowing in his praise of Bronwyn’s garden, pointing out how much thought had gone into the design, and into encouraging a variety of wildlife for all seasons.
The Sean Higgins Memorial Award for Large Garden
This goes to Anne and Charlie, for their beautifully kept garden.
The Charles and Rose Devlin Memorial Award for Small Garden.
The prize goes to Breege at Wolfe Tone Place. This garden attracted a lot of praise from Facebook followers and committee members and is a very worthy winner.
Here is a sample of the entries we’ve had in our garden competition. We’ve been overwhelmed with the quality of the entries, and it’s going to be really tough making a decision!
Large Garden – Sean Higgins Memorial Award
Wildlife Friendly Garden – May McClintock Memorial Award
Small Garden – Charles and Rose Devlin Memorial Award
We are running a campaign called ‘Keep it local. Keep it beautiful’, in which we encourage people to pick up a few items of litter while out enjoying your local area. Whether you pick up a couple of cans or do a full scale neighbourhood litter pick, it all makes a big difference. Just be sure to keep to social distancing guidelines (see below for further details).
As an added incentive, we are offering two 100 EURO ShopLK vouchers (sponsored by Magees Pharmacy).
The first category is ‘Best Clean Up’, which will include photographs of areas which have been improved thanks to your litter picking efforts. If you can include ‘Before’ and ‘After’ photos, that would be ideal, but don’t worry if you don’t have a ‘Before’ picture, just tell us about your clean up and you’ll be entered in this category. See below for an example, surely you can do better than this!
The second category is for the photo which best showcases the beauty of your local area. Could be a view, could be animals (domestic, farm or wildlife), could be the people you love, could be a building or a piece of outdoor artwork – the choice is yours!
Please note that if you already entered before the introduction of separate categories, there is no need to enter again, as your photos are already entered in the appropriate category.
Once you have taken your photo(s), just post it on our Facebook page or email to lktidy@gmail.com and include a short description of the photo(s), your name and contact phone number in the email. If you prefer to post your photo(s) then please send to Gerard McCormick, Magees Pharmacy, 27 Upper Main Street, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, F92 E30F also providing a short description of each photo, your name and contact phone number. The competition closes at 12 midnight on July 5th.
Keeping your area beautiful!
If you would like to make a contribution to keeping your area beautiful, you can get grabbers, bags and gloves by contacting Gerard or Eileen in Magees Pharmacy on (074) 9121409. Or you can just pick up a few items as you spot them and place them in your own bin. Please be sure to follow the government guidelines below.
Government Guidelines
As of phase 2 of the Government’s roadmap to easing the COVID-19 restrictions, the official advice from the National Spring Clean campaign is as follows:-
• Only small groups to take part (up to 15 people, provided all activity is outdoors)
• Strict 2m social distance maintained
• Stay within your allowable distance
• Hand sanitising essential before and after the clean-up
• Use your own gloves, and don’t share your litter picker if you’re using one
• Make sure gloves/ litter pickers are clean before/ after clean up
• Do not collect any discarded PPE or tissue paper
This is a campaign where the national Tidy Towns organisation works together with communities to facilitate community clean-ups and local environmental initiatives.
We are delighted to announce the 2019 winners as follows
SHOP FRONT : MOURNE ANTIQUES, Frances Spears
RETAIL AREA : LETTERKENNY SHOPPING CENTRE, Brian Mc Cracken
PUBLIC HOUSE : MC CAFFERTY’S BAR, LOWER MAIN STREET, Brendan Maxwell, 77 Glenoughty Close.
HOTEL/GUESTHOUSE : BALLYRAINE GUEST HOUSE, Hugh & Mary Smith
REASTURANT/ COFEE SHOP : PAT’S On The Square, MARKET SQUARE, Pat & Mary Bradley
BUILT ENVIRONMENT AWARD: BANK OF IRELAND, Ms Imelda Boyle
PUBLIC BUILDING AWARD: PUBLIC SERVICES CENTRE, Liam Ward
3 BEST KEPT AREAS : THE GRANGE 47-83 – Oran Doherty No.65, TARA COURT – Annemarie Russell No. 59,
WOLFE TONE PLACE – Maggie Marley No. 29
BEST KEPT ENTRANCE : GLENCAR PARK – John Blake No 14
BEST FLOWER DISPLAY : ST COLMCILLE’S HOSTEL – Ciaran Mc Guire
SCHOOLS COMPETITION: ILLISTRIN NATIONAL SCHOOL, Plot for Pollinators, SCOIL MHUIRE GAN SMÁL
BALLYRAINE NATIONAL SCHOOL
LARGE GARDEN: PATRICK FRIEL, LONG LANE, GLENCAR IRISH, Sean Higgins Memorial Award
SMALL GARDEN : JAMES JOHNSTON, 11 KNOCKAMONA PARK, Charlie & Rose Devlin Award
