Before You Grow: 5 Reasons to Go Peat-Free in Your Garden

It's Earth Day, and in the spirit of stewardship I'm thinking about good soil. Gardeners all over the Northern Hemisphere are preparing for another season of growing, often beginning with readying the ground and germinating seeds. Every gardener knows that peat is a magical growing medium, creating ideal conditions in which plants thrive. But choosing this ancient dirt could do unforeseen damage to the Earth, while an otherwise environmentally engaged gardener's plot thrives. The question has been, are the alternatives worth using? I think the answer is yes. Here I lay out 5 reasons home gardeners should go peat-free from now on.

1. Peat cannot be restored at the rate that we are using it. Peat is essentially a really old and rich compost, developed over 360 million years. If we left it alone, it would become coal in another geologic stretch of time. But in our lifetimes, this dense, layered stratification is growing only at the rate of a millimeter per year, while we are extracting (according to the BBC) around 22 centimeters per year.

2. Gardeners didn't always use peat in their soil, they built their own soil with compost. Peat came into use in the 1950s, but gardens still managed to be fruitful and beautiful before then. How did they do it? By starting a compost pile -- which is not only a great way to recycle your kitchen scraps, but also makes great worm food, and by proxy, great soil. Adding this nutrient-rich material to your dirt, along with mineral fillers like coir, perlite, green sand and black rock phosphate, will make for a good growing medium.

3. The environmental consequences of using peat are steep. Not only is shipping peat from bogs thousands of miles away unsustainable, but scientists have found evidence that peat bogs play an important role as a carbon sink. When we remove the peat and dry it, it releases many tons of methane (a gas 21 times worse than carbon) into our atmosphere. Peat bogs make up 2% of the earth's landmass, and are home to many species that don't live anywhere else. In using peat, gardeners are inadvertently contributing to the destruction of rare birds' and other creatures' habitats.

4. Peat-free alternatives work just as well, if not better. Kew Gardens, arguably one of the loveliest gardens in the world (with one of the most diverse groupings of plants), uses no peat on site for starting or adding later nutrients to plants. Some alternatives you can use in addition to compost include coconut coir and wood chip, both castaways of the fruit or logging industry that would otherwise go to waste. While these things also have to be shipped, they are very light weight (coir comes in dense and light bricks that you pull apart). Another popular seed starting tool, "peat pots" can be replaced by the local, sustainable answer: cow pots (biodegradable pots made in Connecticut by a small dairy farmer from manure).

5. Its the right thing to do. The United Kingdom has recognized the importance of protecting peatlands by setting the goal of reducing the use of peat in the UK by 90% by 2010. They are still struggling to meet their goal, mostly because consumers don't understand the issue; bags of soil are not properly labeled in the UK or the United States, and so gardeners and growers still have yet to jump on board and work with alternatives. Proper labeling and education on these issues is key to changing our habits in our home gardens. But 66% of the peat extracted is used by amateur gardeners, so there is a huge opportunity to change the industry through the choices we make in our gardens.

Originally published on Civil Eats

Comments

[BrianD11]

CowPots are a good mention also. I've used them before with good results, but get them in the ground early in the spring time to really see the benefits by summer.

Here's some other info on them:
http://www.cow-pots.com

[FrankenPC]

Did not know peat was an exhaustible resource. Thanks for the info!

[rucognizant]

oops hollyHocks

[research]

What about the green house gas output of peat bogs?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6124

Perhaps we should be using up the peat.

[Bobrobert]

Give me the peat... it makes life fun.

:-)

[Simone]

Compost and peat are not interchangeable. You can pile compost or composted manure on your garden every year and it only makes the soil better. Where I garden peat is used to acidify the leans-to-alkaline soil when planting azaleas or rhodies. There is no other purpose for it.

The better message is to grow plants that thrive in the soil you've got. For the most of us using peat (or lime) is wasteful and unnecessary to successful gardening.

[research]

Wouldn't evergreen needles also acidify the soil?

[rucognizant]

Wouldn't evergreen needles also acidify the soil?
Yes and so would oak leaves! I lived in the Pine Barrens............my soil was acid, off the scale
with the original sand and about 45 oak & pine trees on the 1/4 acre lot.
Road widening in Marlton, changed that! I grabbed buckets of the marl ( green sand with marine fossiles, ) they had dug up, and cut it into the sand like making pie crust. That soil was dynamite!
http://homeharvest.com/orgfertespoma.htm
Not all of their products are organic..but a lot are and the ones I have used have worked WELL for me. ( In 2003, I got through that unbearable summer of "mission accomplished" with a victory garden, mostly flowers, victory of spirit!, using their products.) I had 6' cherry tomatos, and 11' hollybocks!
They DO sell peat ( Jersey is one big peat bog) but they also have coir!

[rucognizant]

Not if you want tomatoes, peppers & eggplant, and have alkaline soil. You can't eat iris.