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

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).

We’ll bring the news to you.

Get the weekly Civil Eats newsletter, delivered to your inbox.

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.

Today’s food system is complex.

Invest in nonprofit journalism that tells the whole story.

Paula Crossfield is a founder and the Editor-at-large of Civil Eats. She is also a co-founder of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Her reporting has been featured in The Nation, Gastronomica, Index Magazine, The New York Times and more, and she has been a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio. An avid cook and gardener, she currently lives in Oakland. Read more >

Like the story?
Join the conversation.

  1. Amen! If you have a piece of property, there is ABSOLUTELY no need for Peat. An effective alternative, assuming that you have growing things, is a simple bagging mower (or better a rake but some small use of energy can be more efficient). Collect mowed up grass (not sprayed!), leaves, fall flower and veggie garden residue, shredded newspaper (no recycle value now anyhow), cleaned out kitty litter, kitchen wastes before cooking (eat up what you cook and don't cook more than you can eat) and compost it in simple wire hoop compost piles. Voilla. It is easy. And PLEASE, don't plastic or paper bag your yard waste for the trash man ... what a double waste of energy.

More from

Agroecology

Featured

Popular

All Eyes on California as Fast-Food Worker Rights Land on the 2024 Ballot

Fast-food workers and activists protest McDonald's labor practices outside a McDonald's restaurant on March 18, 2014 in Oakland, California. (Photo credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Alaska’s Climate-Driven Fisheries Collapse Is Devastating Indigenous Communities

An Alaskan king crab trap and fishing vessel.

Farmers March for Urgent Climate Action in DC

The Rally for Resilience marches to the U.S. Capitol building. Signs at the front read

How the Long Shadow of Racism at USDA Impacts Black Farmers in Arkansas—and Beyond

Arkansas farmer Clem Edmonds sits on his riding mower in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. (Photo by Wesley Brown)