Blog Archives

Winter Planting 2015

Wexford in Bloom and Wexford Tidy Towns have been out planting for the Winter and Spring. The winter planting is immediately obvious around town with heathers, ivies, pansies, polyanthuses and daisies flourishing in the Bullring, at the Railway station, the Crescent, on Abbey Street from the Arts Centre to Selskar Abbey and at Wygram. Expect to see lots of yellows, purples, deep reds and pinks interspersed with the rich winter green foliage.

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Lying quietly underneath the winter flowering plants are daffodil and tulip bulbs waiting for the soil temperature to rise and thence to push themselves up into the world in February and March. Hundreds of bulbs have gone in around the town and hopefully most will appear and give us a real blast of colour this coming Spring.

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Wexford Tidy Towns is always looking for people to help with planting and pruning and weeding so if you would be interested send us an email to say you are and we will call on you when the time is right. Use any of the following details to get in touch with us we would love to hear from you in relation to anything we do.

info@wexfordtidytowns.com
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Posted in Biodiversity, Events, Tidy Towns Competition, Tidy Towns News

Battery and Phone Recycling Day 14/11/15

Tidy Towns will be holding an old battery and mobile phone recycling day in Tesco Wexford on Saturday 14th November. We will be there from 10am to 4pm, so please check your drawers, mantelpieces, shelves, cupboards and boxes for all your old batteries and mobile phones. Support your Tidy Towns by bringing them along to Tesco on the day and recycle those unwanted batteries and phones responsibly.

Also at our stand we will be giving out free cigarette butt pouches and signing people up to our Green Dog Walker programme. We can answer any questions you may have about Tidy Towns and fill you on our activities. Please share this information with your family and friends so we can have a big response to this collection.

If anyone could spare 90 minutes on the day to help us out we would really appreciate it as we will need 4 people every 90 minutes. We will be there with our stand, chairs and tables. Please email info@tidytowns.com or contact us on Facebook for more information or to volunteer to help us out on the day.

Posted in Cleanups, Events, Tidy Towns Competition, Tidy Towns News

Wexford Tidy Towns October 2015

After a very successful end to September being awarded the Bronze Award and The Gum Litter Award again and the Diversity Award in the Tidy Towns competition, we were back hard at work keeping the streets and areas of Wexford clean and tidy during October. Fifteen volunteers met on Saturday October 3rd to tackle Fettis Lane removing a large amount of cigarette butts from the area. Please remember to bin your butts or get one of our free cigarette pouches.

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On October 10th we met in the Bullring to undertake our winter planting around the town. Thank you to all the volunteers who turned up. Wexford in Bloom did a wonderful job during the Summer months with the hanging baskets and window box and large planter displays. Our volunteers planted out our winter plants that will add beauty to our town during the months ahead.

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Wexford Town came alive with the Opera and Fringe Festival during October. Thanks to Brian and Barry for inviting the Wexford Tidy Towns Group to the Spiegletent for a night of live music during the festival. Some our members were about on Fireworks night helping keep the area clean. Thank you to every member of the community and visitors who used the litter bins provided and disposed of their rubbish responsibly. We hope everyone had a fun festival this year.

Our last Action Day of the month had us out on the Rosslare Road on the 31st of October planting daffodil bulbs in preparation for Spring. Thank you to all our volunteers on the day and we look forward to seeing the flowers sprouting in the Spring. Thank you to Roisin for making us tea/coffee at the Maudlintown community house, very much appreciated. Please come along and join us at some of our future activities in November.

Posted in Cleanups, Tidy Towns Competition, Tidy Towns News

Tidy Towns Awards 2015

Wexford Tidy Towns attended the annual Tidy Towns Awards, on Monday 28th September 2015, for the final results of this year’s competition. Martin Kelleher, Managing Director of SuperValu, the competition’s main sponsor for 24 years, was there to present prizes. This year had the highest number of entries to date with 862 towns and villages entering the competition.

We were really happy with our achievement in 2015 Tidy Towns Awards receiving both the Bronze Award and the National Gum Litter Award again. Wexford Tidy Towns were also the first winners of the SuperValu National Diversity Award. The SuperValu Diversity Award is new to the competition this year. This award recognised our groups efforts to include all the community on an inter-generational and inter-cultural basis, on both the committee and the work our volunteers do. We showed we have a shared goal of bettering the community by working together and involving all members of the community, which is what the spirit of the competition is all about.

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Overall it was a very rewarding day and was great to see our hard work being recognised on a national level. We would like to thank everyone involved, all our volunteers and members of our committee, because if we all didn’t work together we would never have achieved this fantastic result. Well done to everyone who has contributed in any way over the last year. We look forward to maintaining and improving our current standard in the Tidy Town awards and will see what next year brings! Come along and join us at any of our regular clean-ups and Action Days.

See the 2015 report here: 2015 Wexford Report

Posted in Cleanups, Tidy Towns Competition, Tidy Towns News

WTT August/September 2015

Thank you to all the members of the Wexford community, business owners, residents and visitors alike who have done a great job trying to keep outside their own homes, shops and premises litter free. Wexford Tidy Towns will be attending the Tidy Towns results in Dublin on Monday the 28th September so we look forward to seeing what the final results are then. Best of luck to everyone involved in Tidy Towns.

Thank you also to everyone who joined us in August and September for our weekly cleans on Wednesday evenings or one of our Action Days on Saturdays. We met for our Action Days in August on the 8th to tackle the South of the Main Street and Peter’s Square and on the 22nd to paint, litter pick and weed along the Quay. We also had some visitors to our town, a group of young Canadian Christians, in August who teamed up with members of Wexford Tidy Towns and achieved some fantastic work during their visit to the town. They were responsible for the newly painted rails in Redmond Square and at Common Quay. Thank you for all your help. it was lovely getting to meet you. We were very happy with all the work that they did while visiting Wexford.
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In September we continued with our weekly cleanups on Wednesdays and Action Days on Saturdays. We met at Peter’s Square on the 12th and on the 19th a group got involved in a beach clean on Kaat Strand. Here are some of our volunteers on the day cleaning up our coastline.
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If anyone would like to join us for one of our activities we regularly update our website, Facebook and twitter with details of our next meetup or send us a message on Facebook and we will add you to our contact list. We need all types of people to join us, there is something for everyone so we hope to see you at a cleanup soon.

Posted in Cleanups, Tidy Towns Competition, Tidy Towns News

Future-Proof Wexford 08/09/2015

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Posted in Biodiversity, Events, Tidy Towns Competition, Tidy Towns News

Wexford Tidy Towns July 2015

Thank you to all our hard working volunteers who took part in our micro cleans and action days in July, some more great work was done to enhance the appearance of our town. Our first action day of the month was on the 4th July which saw us meet down on the Quays to clean the area around the rocks where there were lots of discarded cans, bottles, coffee mugs, sandwich wrappings and more. Please remember if you are enjoying your lunch etc. sitting on the walls on the Quays to dispose of your rubbish properly and not just throw it down in on the rocks (they are not a bin!) it is harmful to the environment and is also very difficult to reach in between the rocks. All our volunteers on the day did tremendous work though to remove a lot of this rubbish.
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Our next big action day was on the 18th July where we met at the Nicky Rackard statute and tackled the alley leading from the bottom of Skeffington Street into McCauleys’ car park. We painted, litter picked, removed graffiti and generally improved the area. It was in a bad way and got some great attention from our wonderful volunteers. Thank you to everyone who gave Skeffington Street an amazing facelift, the place looks fantastic.
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Well done to all our Wednesday volunteers too who come along every week to take part in micro enhancements in our town centre from litter picks (which include lots of cigarette butts!), painting and small maintenance projects. They are only one hour long and you can meet us at the bullring at 6pm on Wednesdays. We are always delighted when anyone joins us for a cleanup and if you can bring a friend with you even better.

We also handed out lots of cigarette butt storage cases this month to members of the public and local businesses during our activities to encourage people to stop littering their butts. Even if there is no bin nearby these cases can be used to store your butts safely in your pocket until you find one. Cigarette butts are one of our main pieces of litters we find during our clean-ups and cause huge problems for the environment as well as been unsightly. We can easily pick up 1000s of these during each cleanup. In the photo below taken by Denis Collins our chairman who counted 538 cigarette butts that he picked up just in the Bullring one night and there were others picking up equal amounts too. Please help us by stop throwing your butts on the ground if you smoke and instead dispose of them responsibly. We spend a lot of time picking up butts that could be better used on other projects.
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A big thanks also to all our residents who continue to keep their own area clean. There have been great projects going on from installing new flower beds, frequent cleanings and painting community areas. Well done to all the residents for their great efforts you are a credit to your community. Please keep up the great work, by everyone keeping you own place clean and being responsible when you are around the town together we can keep Wexford clean and beautiful, more information on the next action Saturday in August will follow shortly.

Posted in Cleanups, Events, Tidy Towns Competition, Tidy Towns News