Gardening Advice & Tips for Irish Gardeners

Before we begin I would like to extend a big well done to every participant up and down the country who volunteer their time to add an extra bit of cleanliness and beauty to our streets, villages, towns and cities. Without the great organisation and the year on year competition that makes up the tidy town awards we would all be worse off and would be left without a medium through which to focus our good community spirit and want to make a difference to the place we live.

Each town across the country faces their own challenges and in the years past some of your towns have struggled to keep their best side pointing awards with the number of shop front closures and goast estates. So it is with that difficult situation that people around the country have been rallying around and doing their bit to clean up their town. The results are now in and the it looks like the hard work has paid off for many a village around the land. Well done to Moynalty, they are this year’s winners and will take home the handsome reward of 10,000 euros all of which will no doubt be pumped back into their towns local amenities and landscape. Moynalty gained 6 points this year which is a mean feat for a town that was already so highly ranked. They have improved in many areas most notably in litter picking and cleanliness- which has for many towns been the mayor downfall.

Moynalty run 3 ‘spring clean ups’ each year which helps to get the town out in force to tidy up streets, lanes and other areas. They also run 2 litter picking schedules every day across the town, and this can really get across the message to local that dirt and rubbish is not sometime that we should associate with our public spaces and pathways and streets. So well done Moynalthy who certainly understand that a good maintenance policy and well organised street cleaning can go a long way to improving the quality of a town, never mind the continued love and care put into their hanging baskets and window boxes, and the planting of over 2000 trees, amazing.

Congratulations should also go to my local town of Portarlington who are on the rise again this year - rising 6 points to 252, and here’s hoping for more of the same hard work and hard earned points this time next year. For those of you who want to give a bit back to your community maybe you could consider adding some hanging baskets or window boxes to the front of your house and remember to keep them well watered and fed throughout the year. The important thing to remember with any tidy town project is – if you can’t maintain it, don’t start it. There is nothing worse than a hard weeks work going to ruin over the course of a summer because weeding, watering, pruning and feeding has not been considered or undertaken.

So, well done to everyone who took part for 2013 and making the place in which we live that bit better.